What's In John's Freezer?

One for the weekend morning crowd here. The early bird gets the… cadaver?

At last I’ve managed to pore thru my photos and find something that works for a Mystery Dissection image, so without further adieu here it is! Answer will come tomorrow (Monday) night.

What is the largest structure evident (i.e. what is the picture mainly featuring) and from what group of organisms (be as specific as you can).

Remember, we have a scoreboard now, and rules for scoring. See here. Regular points for this round– Xmas is over, folks!

To recap, Mark Robinson is in the lead w/14pts, tied w/Filippo, but with Heinrich and RH close behind at 12 pts, followed by the 5-person Gang of Awesomeness at 7 pts.

Stomach-Churning Rating: 7– gooey ripeness.

Difficulty: Hmm, no comment.

Go! May Maytag be with you.

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Welcome to another round of Mystery Dissection; no frills or miracles-required this time; tell me what you can about this specimen.

Difficulty: No-way-you-can-get-this-down-to-genus-level; blurry photo; scale unknown

Stomach-Churning Rating: 5 at worst, especially once you realize it’s in preservative; hence the odd colour.

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The Olympics are over! Hooray for everybody! Here I’m taking a different spin on the blog’s Mystery Dissection series: a mysterious method– what is going on here and why? I know someone will get this, but experts might want to hold back and let non-specialists have their moment in the sun first…

Stomach-churning rating: 6/10. (but probably too late!) Be glad this image does not include an olfactory component.

The scene is from ~2005 and took place in our old lab- note the filthy floor. It rarely got much cleaner than that. Before we moved in, this was an abattoir at some point. We used to have experiments going on in this hangar-like area of our small office building, right next to our office rooms. The smell and noise was… unpleasant. Luckily, now we have a separate office building (renovated from this old structure) and a wholly new, giant gait laboratory full of science toys.

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You know the drill- tell me what you can about this rather messy dissected specimen from The Freezers. What are the structures shown? Identification to genus/species level is probably not possible, but try to pin down the group of organisms it is from as tightly as you can:

Edit: This post had a Stomach-Churning Rating of 5/10. So you were probably safe anyway; if not, share your tale of revulsion in the Comments.

Edit edit: The specimen is revealing more here; this may or may not help:

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Without further ado, what’s up with this specimen from The Freezers? What is it, what animal etc?

(admin note, 28 Oct 2012: Mystery Dissections 2-3 do not exist, mysteriously. At the time, in the jumbled freezers of my mind, they corresponded to Mystery CT Slice(1) and Mystery CT Slice 2. But we can pretend that MD2-3 are just an eternal mystery of this blog, subject of numerous conspiracy theories that you are welcome to expound upon!)

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OK, I had an inspiration for another short image-based blog post. People seemed to enjoy the wallaby mystery photo, so I’ll start a tradition here of mystery images from dissections of “my” specimens. That could even be an easy quasi-weekly thing to do.

What’s this animal? Binomial required. One guess per person please, unless you all get stumped. Bonus myology-nerd points to those who can name all the labelled muscles without checking literature (I’ve used these abbreviations a lot in my papers!).

Too hard I think! Extra hint sneak peek as per comments; same specimen — hmm what’s this, a jaw or something else? Bad image (these things aren’t easy to come by for photo ops), but quite distinctive…

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