Have you ever encountered a dead animal? I’m guessing the answer is yes… Did you want to touch it or roll it over? Did you wonder what killed it and how long it had been dead? Did it, even for a split second, cross your mind to take it home to have a closer look? As a biologist, I’ve dissected many animals, but none of those formal dissections compare to the handful of times I’ve been lucky enough to find a dead animal in the wild, or the one time I was lucky enough to witness a necropsy of a beached whale. We found a dead squirrel on the road one day, and I thought “This is a great opportunity for my kids – let’s see what we can learn!” It wasn’t too much more work to set up a way to share it more broadly. So… if you like to poke, if you like to be reminded of the fact that we’re all animals, if you just like to see how we’re put together on the inside… you’ve come to the right place.
Recent News
On February 11, 2012, a 3-year-old Puget Sound L pod orca known as Sooke (L-112) was found dead on the shore at Long Beach, WA. While this is a tragic event for Sooke and her pod, it was also an opportunity for us to be reminded of our common mammalian origins and to hopefully shed some light on the reason behind her death. Our thanks to Scott Veirs of Beam Reach, Joe Gaydos of the SeaDoc Society, the Whale Museum, and Friday Harbor Labs for helping to turn this loss into an opportunity to share our love of anatomy and physiology. For more information about L-112 and possible causes of her death, go to this post at the Beam Reach blog.
