um, this is the wolf that we got, it was hit by a car.

The reason we moved him underneath the fume hood today

is because he's got a little bit of gas in here.

I got this scalpel and we're gonna try and release the gases today.

And hope that I don't vomit.

Okay.

Oh my god.

Oh, I've never done anything like this before.

(exhales) Here we go.

Okay, it's in the body.

Yeah, you can hear the gases being released.

I can't smell anything yet.

So he's starting to deflate a little bit.

I don't know. Did that do it?

Was that it?

That was a little anticlimactic!

I can't smell anything. I can't -

I could...

I think we're good.

Woo!

We're gonna have to grab the tray.

I gotta grab his head too, though.

You can let the head hang. - I wish I had three arms.

Okay. Here we go.

Ugh. He still smells. - Oh god.

Oh, there we go.

Oh my god!

I don't - I don't wanna do this, you guys!

I think it's worse when you like lift him up.

I think it's, like, in his groin areas where this is bad.

Maybe I should've made another cut down there.

'Cause you can see on here, all of his guts are just like,

gravity is pulling them down there.

Oh, man. Oh.

That's ripe.

That is rich.

Well. (Gags) Oh.

Where should we start?

I mean if you throw up at this point you'll probably throw up in your face mask, but...

Just keep our barf bags handy.

We don't have enough space to store his entire body

in a freezer as a whole unit, so we're gonna

remove his head, we're gonna cut off the limbs, scapula,

humerus down, remove the legs which I think might be the worst bit of it.

So let's start with the head.

And work towards the gross.

Okay, so you have C1 and C2,

they're called the atlas and the axis.

You think about it this way,

is the, um, atlas, you know, supports the world

a.k.a. the head on his shoulders

and the axis is what the world turns on.

So it's an easy way to remember those two.

Atlas, axis, and then you have about 5 other ones,

that connect to the,

uh, thoracic and then the lumbar vertebrae.

So I'm just gonna, kinda guesstimate where that last,

that last cervical is and cut into the muscle.

while we cut his head off.

You can see these different muscle layers in here, too;

there's a layer of muscle, little bit of fat, more muscle down here.

It has this metallic-y shine between the layers.

You could hold his head up, that'd be nice.

Woo! There we go. His throat.

We just cut through the throat.

This is, uh, all cartilage.

And you can see bile.

There's a little bit of bile matter in there.

It's on my finger. And there's blood in here, too.

Probably coming up from his bowels.

Or his stomach from the, you know,

from when he sustained an injury

but it just looks like a pipe, it's like a whistle.

Not that I wanna put my mouth on it and blow across it.

Now I'm just hitting the bone.

I would ideally like to cut between

two of the vertebrae, but it might be kinda hard to find where they start and end.

I can feel the, um,

shoot, what is that called, the dorsal spine

of one of them, that's the top of the vertebrae.

Can you move his head maybe up and down?

The other way, like side to side I guess it would be.

Oh, there we go. Okay.

So when James did that, I could see where, um,

two of the vertebrae were occluding together,

so I can cut around the cartilage.

It's frozen.

Yeah, you heard it.

You can hear, it's like cutting through ice.

Oh, we're getting close.

Oop, whup, there we go.

So, if you look at it from this way,

here is the spinal cord,

here is the top of the cervical vertebrae.

So this is all muscle.

Look at all of the incredible amount of muscle

that is on top of the vertebrae.

And they extend up until about right here,

the rest of this is all just muscle attachment.

Here's the throat.

It's very springy.

Very flexible.

And, uh, it's very durable.

It looks like it had rings on it.

And it does. It has these rings in it

that have more connective tissue between them,

so it can move kind of like an accordion.

Like a spring.

Like an accordion spring or something.

Then it can open like that.

Oh, it's cute. It looks like a bracelet or something.

How much do you think that weighs? Just estimate.

Um, this is probably 12 to 15 pounds.

12 to 15 pounds. - Uh-huh.

With the muscle and everything.

Oh yeah, this is heavy!

Whoo!

This is...

Yeah, I mean, this is, uh,

how heavy is this, this is about...

a six month old

right here, don't you think?

- No kids.

Every time we move him,

ugh,

or shift him,

it seems to like disrupt whatever is making this smell so bad

and it's being released out of that incision we made.

I have a feeling, uh, it's just gonna be all fun and games for the rest of the day.

You ok over there? You're doing good?

Woo! Let's do this. This is bone marrow.

I guess, I mean, at this point when it's kinda cold,

it's like a good, like putty-like consistency

it's pretty neat. It's like Play-Doh.

I removed the forward right limb,

including the scapula and the top half of the humerus

this was busted in half, you can see where it was broken there.

This is kinda cool, you can see the mechanics

of how these bones move together,

you have the humerus and the scapula

the cartilage makes it very easy for them to move and flex together.

We're gonna throw this in the bug box

to give them a little bit of something to eat.

Oh. Before I do that, I should show you this, too.

You know, we knew that the humerus was fractured,

I did not know that the scapula has also sustained damage,

so you can see where it's broken right there, and splintered,

I'm able to flex this a little bit.

And a lot of you guys, uh, ask about the bugs and everything

and I just wanted to clarify, we don't put the entire body into the beetles.

There's no way that these tiny little beetles

could feasibly eat all of the muscle tissue before it rots.

So this is about how clean something has to be

before it goes into the beetles.

You wanna remove the majority of all the muscles,

this stuff that is harder to remove around the edges

that's what the beetles will go for.

This is the part I am the very most nervous about,

because it seems to be that the horrible oder

keeps emanating from this region.

Although this is the bright green nasty part,

every time we move the nether regions, we seem to get

a- a revival of the delicious rotten egg

dead bacteria smell that keeps coming off of this guy.

So we're gonna remove this, this back limb right now

and hope that I don't throw up.

I mean I'm gonna do my best to not cut into it unnecessarily, but I'm nervous.

I'm gonna be cutting down here. I'm... oh, god.

We talked about maybe having a safety word

in case we needed to run.

But I think the safety word will be just some of us screaming

and going: "Oh my god, get out of here!"

So we have blood.

That's, okay.

Wow.

Look at that. This is just part of the muscle,

this is all of the muscle that I have cut off of the, uh,

the femur so far. This is one leg.

This is not even all of the muscle, this is like 3/4 of the muscle.

The patella right here, this is your knee cap,

um, it's pretty small,

it's just this bone right here, there's a lot of cartilage that surrounds it.

And this is extremely, um, slick,

it's very lubricated, the cartilage

is that great material between your joints that helps everything move, um, fluidly.

So, the patella sits right in there and this is the distal end of the, uh, femur.

So you can see how it moves in that groove.

It's called the patellar groove.

Its femur is like in the socket right there, too,

and this where the, um, attaches to the...

Is this the pubis or the ilium? - Uh, the ilium

The ilium.

That's a fun sound.

That's a really fun sound.

You hear that? That's the head of the femur coming in and out of the socket joint.

Ooh, got a leg!

Cool.

Look at that.

This is the head of the femur, it is very round shaped.

Compare it to the femur below,

like, we can even line them up.

Look at how much of that is just muscle

surrounding the bone.

That's awesome.

Whoops!

Hey, that's coming off pretty easily.

I cleaned off some of the muscle that was along um,

this part of the tibia and the fibula

so that you could see the fibula.

The lower part of the leg has two separate bones,

which are the tibia and the fibula.

In ungulates like deer, the fibula is either greatly reduced

or it's entirely fused.

Sometimes in, like, a horse, it is both fused and reduced.

But with, um, like a canid, another- I think in other predators, they have them separate

The advantage of that is muscle attachment for, um, endurance.

Cool!

He's bleeding all over the place up here.

Whoa, whoa, whooa! Whoa!

Do you see that? That is a lot of blood.

Something we did shifted all that - He's laying on that incision

Oh, that's right. Oh! Oh, dear lord.

We've lifted him up and it's coming all out of that incision. Ooh.

Wooh.

Uhhh.

I feel like if I just keep talking I'm not breathing, so it's okay,

but every time I stop and take a breath, it's...

still there.

Still there!

Still smellin' it.

Whooooo.

That is fresh.

It is like everything that we were avoiding all day

all of a sudden now it's just coming out.

And I just wanna get this leg off, so maybe I can run outside and get some fresh air.

This smells like, it smells like the easter egg that you hid

somewhere behind a bookshelf in your house when you were a kid

and then Easter was over and people forgot that you didn't pick up one of the eggs,

but instead of just one egg it was like two dozen eggs.

I'm removing the muscle really quickly just for simplicity sake.

He's bleeding all over the place here.

Oh, god.

Ooh my god.