Updates

Okay, here are the updates for the week. I've finished both iguanas, photographed them completely, and I'm now on to completing my findings for the project. As I have explained before, this involves drawing comparisons between the iguanas, pigs, and cats. Obviously these are all quadrupeds, and therefore their muscles have a certain amount of similarities, but they are all different animals. Iguanas have a sprawling posture, their legs and arms extending beyond their bodies. Pigs are ungulates; the muscles are focused on keeping their bodies supported and allowing them to move forward and backward, in a single plane. Cats are carnivores, and hence their forelimbs are involved in prey capture and require a more specialized form. 

Hopefully within the next week I will be dissecting and photographing a fetal pig, which will allow me to show direct muscle comparisons between the iguanas and the pig, including a weight difference analysis as well as how their muscles differ with response to locomotion. 

I'm working on the first slides of the slide show right now, detailing the objective (which has changed several times), and the materials and methods. I'm also going through sources looking for information I can use for comparison. This is enormously frustrating because whenever you do a lit search, you seem to never find exactly what you want. I would like to find studies that are similar to what I've done -- a dissection, followed by detailed muscle descriptions, weights, and a locomotion analysis. Unfortunately, I haven't yet stumbled upon the perfect article, so I am just pulling bits and pieces from everything.