There’s no better way to kick things off after a holiday than with a celebration of the Inside Nature’s Giants series, which I had a small part in early on, including these shots I took during the time they spent filming at the RVC >3 years ago (!?!?); most of these animals spent multiple holidays inside The Freezers:
Elephant arriving…
Elephant revealed
Private moment with elephant
Stunning emergence of The Guts
So you are impressed by the guts too, ehh? It was pretty amazing to watch it happen. The tension was intense- the animal had been dead for a while and was rather bloated. So cutting it open was a task gingerly taken…
Bloated elephant
RVC dissector Richard Prior stuck a scalpel in the upper abdomen when the time was right… the piercing whistle and the sulphuric odour silenced the crowd watching… and then quickly out came the guts.
Everyone was pretty amazed by the scale.
The guts just went on and on…
Not a 1-person job by any means.
Spreading them out to see the whole GI tract.
I waited patiently and watched the show filming; what a great, professional crew. Then I got to take the legs away for our research.
But not just elephants, no sirree! The Windfall Films/ING team filmed giraffe, crocodile and big cats episodes (4 total) at the RVC too; a crazy period of a few weeks (including a major blizzard that hit us during the croc filming) in 2009. Some of the stars follow:
Frozen lion waiting for CT scan, shot 1
Frozen lion waiting for CT scan, leg shot
Frozen lion waiting for CT scan, shot 2; eerily contorted pose
Frozen tiger waiting for CT scan, shot 1
Frozen tiger waiting for CT scan, shot 2
Frozen tiger waiting for CT scan, shot 3
…and here is the tiger’s head after scanning
…and I’m rather fond of that tiger’s neck– check out the hyoids (roaring/tongue apparatus in throat; bottom of movie)!
…and here is the adult Nile crocodile’s head after scanning
…and another view of that big Nile croc, just because I like how this reconstruction turned out
…and here’s one of the small (~1m long, 10kg) juvenile Nile crocodiles from the show, with a pilot CT scan showing the skeleton nicely- and possibly a last meal or stomach stone on the left side of the abdomen (bright white blob; I need to check this now that we’ve dissected it)
Foetal giraffe; stillborn; from the show, in process of dissection in our lab to measure its limb anatomy. Trust me, it looked –and smelled– better on the inside than it did from the outside. Eew.
How most of the specimens from the first 4 episodes ended up after all dissection was done (part of my/RVC’s collection of skeletons). Sadly, I did not get great photos of the 3.7m Nile crocodile or the two giraffes before they were reduced to bits, but I do have the skeletons and CT scans.
Giving a tour (including The Freezers) to A Certain Esteemed Visitor.
(Another) Gratuitous shot with one of the sweet old Red Kangaroos at Alma Park Zoo near Brisbane, Australia. Experiments on hopping we did there will be briefly featured in the new Inside Nature’s Giants show on Channel 4, 16 April @2000- details at http://t.co/SkjsMeVC.
What's In John's Freezer? 
Is that you nestled among the gut cushioning?
Haha I thought someone might think that! I’m not sure whether to be regretful or happy that it was not me, but it was Richard Prior, our head postmortem guy and the best man with a knife you may ever see. We can look vaguely similar from a certain angle.
” and the best man with a knife you may ever see.”
That is a slightly worrying turn of phrase..
Anyway it’s a great series,unfortunately not so easy for us non-brits to get our hands on recent episodes. Still, looking forward to that kangaroo episode (especially since I was completely led astray by it’s anatomy when you featured it as a mystery pic :-D).
Haha Richard is a sweetheart, unless you’re a cadaver he is cutting up! He was a butcher before joining our PM staff, I understand, so he is remarkably skilled.
I agree, ING availability is tricky outside the UK unless one goes naughty routes like torrents; however PBS has been picking it up gradually so let’s hope they continue to!
Stunning! I’d love to help out (no charge labor – woo hoo!)…if I didn’t live in the middle of no-where USA.
At least the blog is here so you can enjoy the fruits of the labor from afar!
How do the bones get so amazingly clean? Is it done by insects or worms?
Aha, a great question, and one I’ll deal with in a future post! But boiling and bleaching are involved.
I’ve seen people boil bird skulls and the like in cooking pots, but my mind boggles at the thought of what you’d need to boil a Giraffe leg. So looking forward to that.
This is so amazing!!! Hopefully soon, I’ll be taking a class disecting a gorilla, chimp, and human side-by-side and I thought it would be too gross to do, but after being so stunned by these pictures I’m so excited to see first hand. I’ll definetely be looking for your show next.
Excellent! That is such a great reaction! Exactly what I aim for.
I’m only in ~two of the ING shows; not a regular; but I help behind the scenes a little now and then.
College student procrastinating from work and stumbled across this….This is amazing! Very interesting work, stunning photos!
Thanks Brianna! I aim to please, and inspire awe, and shock/stun, and maybe disgust a little bit, so it’s good to know I’ve hit some of those buttons.
[…] incredible and gross and sad and I can’t stop staring at that long shiny smooth intestine. [WhatsInJohnsFreezer via […]
See my comment on the original site, http://gizmodo.com/5905617/you-might-not-want-to-look-at-these-explicit-images-of-an-elephants-innards-nsfw/gallery/1
[…] are incredible and gross and sad and I can't stop staring at that long shiny smooth intestine. [WhatsInJohnsFreezer via BoingBoing] […]
I never would have imagined being able to see the dissection in such vivid photos! You have an extrordinary opportunity to contribute to world’s knowledge base regarding the beasts of the Earth that capture our fascination and imagination. Thank you for your work!
Aww thanks, I do this for people like you that truly appreciate it, and for the animals, and for my own enjoyment. Those make it all very worthwhile and very enjoyable. So thanks for the encouragement!
At first I thought this was easy, then that it was impossible for me! I can’t imagine facing something like that alone. Thanx for sharing John, I’m gonna show this to my wife a good time tonight! Ha.. ha..
I hope your wife liked it. Show her the naked ostrich from today’s post if she did, or maybe even if she didn’t! 😉
[…] I’ll start, as my posts often do, with a deceased animal, and in this case it will again be an Asian elephant. Incidentally it is the same animal from the “Inside Nature’s Giants” series (see previous post). […]
[…] OK Londoners, and Olympics visitors, and anatomy (or just science/biology) buffs, and those not lucky enough to see other versions of the animal Body Worlds show. You have a mission. And that mission is to go see “Animal Inside Out”, a special (£9 for adults is well worth it!) exhbit at the Natural History Museum, open until September 16. This blog will self destruct, very messily, by turning itself inside out in 5 seconds… Boom. Hippopotamus attempting to outdo elephant guts. […]
[…] musculoskeletal system; I know you all come here for the guts, right? Goat stomach compartments (the reticulum region), as an exemplar of the famed (but […]
[…] of Inside Nature’s Giants (Jan-Feb 2009) at the RVC. They form a nice accompaniment to my previous post reflecting on my experience with the show, and the timing is great because I’m about to head […]
Intresting but strange studys.
Did you all happen to have weighed the lion and tiger?
By the looks of the tigers fur, seems to be a Siberian.
Yet the lion looks massively larger I am finding out historical weight figures of both cats have been over exaggerated greatly, alot of modern documentaions show the african lion and Amur tiger are at a stand off in terms weight.
Individual weight census are showing that african lions are more consistantly heavier than modern tigers of all sub-speices. I just had to ask if any of you weighed these speicimens using modern weighing scales if at all?
And what was the specific study about?
Reguards.
Hi, this was just for the filming of the documentary Inside Nature’s Giants. There was no scientific study done on the lion/tiger that I can recall, and no weights measured. Sorry!
Hey thats no problem,
I was just conducting some research on comparing lions and tigers in terms mass and weight figures. It is quite hard to find information now days thats deemed creditable with all the yahoo answers, wikipedia, and fan based secondary sites its quite challanging to find hard evidence thats reliable. lol
But I’m in a “Sherlock Holmes mode” so I’ll keep hunting.
Plus, its kinda hard to find anything at all when the computer your using is a 2003 and has limitations in reading more recent softwares….-_-…cant wait to upgrade so I can broaden my search. ;D odd that there was a disecting done, but no basis or a catagorie of study to concur? Hmm, even more strange. lol
But anyways I guess I’m back on the hunt, thanks for the reply…
Piece V
Good luck! I can sympathize with the problems in obtaining accurate masses for even familiar species. The documentary was a typical documentary in that the timescale was too rushed to allow for actual scientific study to be done.
Hey thanks again,
Yeah its a shame there isint more of people doing real scientifical studys with the boot to show factual evidence on live specimens and deceased…I mean Video cams and photos has been around for a while and the best we have to go by are only small site-seeing tourist photos, some zoo, sanctuarys and of course circuses.
Thats where people like me (Enthusiasts) have to make amatuer calculations, though I guess there is a limit to how much one can impliment in a certain study so its still fair game in being accurate becuase alot of Biologist and zoolgist seem to know no more than wiki its self lol and when they do mention something of intrest its never there own study/census, its always older records that seem to be un-reliable.
Even what most consider the best of the best like Nat geo, Animal planet and Discovery chanel seem to be less then the standard now days, for alot of information looks to be more medicore and not of the extreme accuratecy needed…more so just free lancers with low degrees in there fields, you could possibly get better info from the locals if they have the resources to cultivate a answer.
But anyways…thanks again and Good luck to you too in your further work, Pretty awesome stuff.
[…] behind the curtain. There’s still magic to behold there (e.g. working with early episodes of Inside Nature’s Giants), to be sure. However, some of my experiences have led me to become increasingly discontented with […]
[…] As the post’s title alludes, elephant feet (and more proximal parts of the limbs) are no stranger to this blog. If you’ve forgotten or are unfamiliar, here are some of my past proboscidean-posts: on elephant foot pathologies (a close sister post to this one), our “six-toed” elephants paper, how to make a computer simulation of an elephant’s limb (umm, paper yet to come!), how we boil and bleach bones to clean them up, and a few others. Last but not least, there was the post that went viral in the early #JohnsFreezer/WIJF days: dissecting an elephant with the “Inside Nature’s Giants” show. […]