![]() ![]() I say that this is unsurprising because we use this technique whenever we cook carcasses for consumption. ![]() Unsurprisingly, heating corpses to high temperatures causes skin, flesh and other tissues to come cleanly away from bones. Stig Walsh once introduced me to the wonders of microwaving. The major disadvantage is that most of us can only do boiling indoors: I'm not fond of filling my house with the stench of boiling cadavers, nor are most people I know. I once used it on a frog corpse and all I ended up with was a hot frog corpse. The hedgehog jaws and newt and frog skeletons you see here were all prepared in this manner.īoiling works well, but only when much of the soft tissue has already been removed. It works best on specimens that have relatively little soft tissue attached. However, this can be a very disgusting and pungent technique, you are generally constrained to small dead things, and algae can stain or even ruin the bones entirely. On a few occasions I've soaked carcasses in water: if enough time goes by, all the soft tissues fall away, and clean bones are the result. If you're squeamish: err, hell-o-o, why are you here?įirst of all, let's look at some lesser-known techniques, and at their effectiveness. ![]() Here are my various thoughts and recollections, some of which you might find interesting or useful. Thanks to two of my closest colleagues I've recently been discussing the topic of controlled decomposition quite a lot. 2007), there isn't really anything like a 'how-to guide' should you need to carry it out in a controlled manner. The area is hindered by the fact that, while there is some good literature on the processes of decomposition (Weigelt 1989, Machel 1996, Carter et al. In my efforts to do this, I've tried most techniques I can think of: burial in soil, burial in compost heaps, arthropods, live yoghurt, chemicals, mechanical maceration, sun-drying, softening in water, boiling, microwaving. While dissection and soft-tissue manipulation has its uses, we mostly want to get the corpses we obtain down to their bare bones preferably in the cleanest, quickest, easiest way possible. How can you not be interested in - nay, fascinated by - anatomy, variation and functional morphology, and how are you going to learn about this if not by looking at, and manipulating, dead bodies and their constituent parts? Few of us have ready access to museum collections, and building up a collection of specimens yourself is easy (assuming, that is, that you have at least some interaction with the natural world). In fact I'm of the opinion that if you're interested in animals and are not interested in dead bodies, there's something wrong with you. Like some most virtually all hopefully all people interested in animals, I have a dark, guilty secret: I covet and collect dead bodies. ![]()
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