So, this is what I did in the lab this week. Tuesday I continued with my muscle descriptions. My first draft, as usual, was a little scatter-brained and some of the terminology was not what it should have been. Anatomical terminology, which seemed so straight forward earlier this year in anatomy, has complicated infinitely. This is due mainly to the fact that I am no longer dealing only with humans. In humans, you use the terms posterior/anterior, medial/lateral, and superior/interior. However, in quadrupeds, which I'll point out is essentially most of the other creatures on the planet, you use dorsal/ventral, medial/lateral, and cranial/caudal. Originally, when I wrote my muscle descriptions I used a combination of both, which made everything unclear and un-standardized.
For those of you who don't study biology in your spare time, dorsal and ventral basically mean back and front. In humans, this is very obvious; however, in other species, dorsal is the side of the animal where the backbone lies, and ventral is the side with the ribcage/heart. More like the top and bottom. Medial and lateral are how far away something is from the center of the body. Cranial and caudal refer to distance from the head. Cranial is obviously closer, and caudal is farther away. The terms distal and proximal are also used to describe the distance from the trunk when discussing structures in the limbs. I hope that cleared things up.
So Tuesday, that is what I did. Today, I started to remove muscles. This seems simple, you just cut it off right? Wrong. To remove a muscle, you follow it to both the insertion and origin. Here you must cut the connecting tendons as close to the bone as possible to avoid losing data. After the muscle is removed, you weigh the muscle, record the weight, and then photograph everything again without that muscle. Then you move to the next one. It is a tedious, but necessary process.
AA
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