he most interesting thing that happened during the dissection was examining the heart and lungs of the rabbit. We had some difficulty cutting open the chest cavity of the rabbit without damaging the heart and lungs of the rabbit. We started cutting open the rabbit too low at the liver instead of the just below the ribs. This caused us to have to cut through the ribs to expose the heart and lungs. I thought that it was interesting how small they were in the large rabbit. It was also interesting that the heat and lungs were small, because rabbits hop very quickly and are quite fast.
The most difficult part of the dissection was determining the best way to make incisions and cuts on the rabbit. When tanning the rabbit we did not want to cut into the muscle of the rabbit which was why it was so difficult. We also had some difficulty cutting open into the chest cavity of the rabbit without damaging the heart and lungs. Identifying the body parts and organs was also difficult, especially for people who have no prior experience. Beyond that, clean-up was difficult due to all the hair getting everywhere.
The most surprising part of the dissection was how easy it is to remove the skin of the rabbit. With the fetal pigs, my group had some difficulty getting into the pig. We had no such difficulty getting into the rabbit. The connective tissue was very easy to remove and only when there was some fat between the skin and the muscle was it somewhat difficult.
We are looking forward to dissecting out the rabbits heart and closer examining it. This will be very interesting because we were unable to do this when dissecting the fetal pigs. We have previously learned how the heart works and how blood flows through the heart, so it will be very interesting to see what the heart look like in person.
Here are some photos of our rabbit dissection:
We also talked with Dr. Dienst about his experiences as a medical doctor. It was interesting to learn about how much medicine has advanced in the past few years. According to Dr. Dienst, ~70% of the current medical procedures were not being performed when he was first a doctor. In order to keep up with new medicine, he said that he reads six or seven articles per day.