Advances in carcass visualizing! There are a lot of challenges to seeing the internal anatomy of an animal: when they’re alive they don’t want to be handled much and certainly not to have body parts removed of cleared. When they’re dead they’re floppy, and how do you see inside without damaging them?

People have been diaphonizing animals and shining fluorescent light to study anatomy for a while, but I haven’t seen them combined with gelatin for suspending and posing them! 

There are better photos inside the article, but here is my fave: 

(Photograph by Matthew Girard, University of Kansas)

Bentley had a rare condition called situs inversus, which is almost always fatal. The condition places the liver, stomach, and other organs in the abdomen in the wrong place, which can be dangerous when the blood vessels don’t reach the organs properly. However, Walker explains Bentley was lucky because her heart was (literally) in the right place, so her condition was much less dangerous. Medical literature describes two other people with the same condition, with similarly positioned hearts, and they both lived normal lifespans, into their 70’s.