Kairo
@Kairo_Anatomika
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I ❤ anatomy, pathology, teratology and I have so many goddamn questions
Joined December 2022
Some new followers came in in the past few days. I have a few thoughts. 1. WELCOME! . 2. I dissect animals for a living. You WILL see photos of animal dissections if you choose to follow me. So. yeah. follow or unfollow accordingly. I dissected this lizard.
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Is anyone else really frustrated by the ineffectiveness of marine scavengers. ? 🧵
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Many years ago, when I was a student, I was helping the lab clean out their freezer when I came upon a bloodsoaked package wrapped in plastic. No one knew where it came from or how long it had been there. 🧵.
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I talk a lot about teratology, the study of deformities. But I mostly talk about deformities in animals. The plants have deformities too. This one’s called fasciation. 🧵
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About 10 years ago I was working for a gaming company doing creature design. After work, I would go home and dissect animals in my garage. I borrowed a tiger carcass from a local taxidermist. I wanted to understand how the jaw muscles worked, so I stop motion animated it.
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So. Mammals normally store fat under the skin in an even layer, but camels evolved to pile fat in one spot, so the rest of their bodies can stay cool in the desert. Why don't other desert animals do this?. Well, they do. but for some reason, we never talk about them.
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This is a skin condition called Figurate Erythema on a Sphynx cat. It’s been seen in 11 Sphynx cats in Eastern Europe. It seems to come and go on its own. Treating it has no consistent effect. In a few cases, it's itchy, but in mostly it doesn’t seem to bother the cat.
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This is the inside of a sea turtle's mouth. This pic shows up on Reddit and Buzzfeed all the time. Everybody talks about how weird and creepy cool it is. but no one ever seems to mention what it's FOR. 🧵
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I learned today that oyster mushrooms from those mushroom growing kits are super aggressive and can infest your house. I wanted to buy one for my dad but I'm glad I didn't. The dangers of mushroom infestation never even crossed my mind. VIA FB: Kimberly Crowninshield
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Did you know that the black and white checker board pattern is a masonic symbol?. I give you these Illuminati Pigeons
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I was riding my motorbike and I thought I saw a dead snake on the side of theroad. I generally don't pass up free stuff. Don't judge we're all human. Anyway, I stopped to collect my snake and it turned out to be a huge blue iridescent earthworm. It was not dead. It was the
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This has been going around and it's an important cautionary tale. Turtle shells need sun light to grow. If they are painted or have stickers stuck on them, the part that is covered wont grow with the rest of the shell, so they end up with deformed shells.
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This is probably THE weirdest snake deformity I've ever seen. This guy is from a breeder in the Netherlands. He was dead inside the egg. It gets me how everything looks perfect. The scales, and even the umbilical cord looks so normal. But. not
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So there's this artist named Xavi Bou that makes these time lapse photos of bird flight. He takes photos of them continuously as they fly so a single bird looks like a trail as it moves across the sky. They're incredible photos, but there's another reason I find them cool 🧵
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Our bones remember the struggles we went through. And we are not voiceless after all.
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Forgotten in the back of a freezer, waiting to be told, was the story of perseverance, struggle, and the desperate will to survive etched into the trajectory of abrasions.
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These guys are called Fat-tailed sheep. They're native to the Middle East and North Africa. Like camels, they too store fat in one place on their body, keeping the rest of their bodies cool.
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So there’s this one tattoo design that’s pretty popular. A wolf face on one side and a skull on the other side. I love this tattoo design because the message behind it is just so unintentionally GREAT. 🧵
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Squirtle's water gun is actually a real feeding behavior that sea turtles have.
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But when you see sheep in religious art, they're never Fat-tail sheep. Instead they're always weak-ass European sheep. Entire wars have been waged over interpretations of the bible. Does no one care about sheep accuracy?. I mean, how could you exclude these guys?
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It’s a condition where plants lose their sense of geometry and get this repeating error that makes them really wide. This happens for a wide variety of reasons, like genetics, hormone imbalances, plant getting injured, infections, etc.
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This is what it looks like IRL. This guy is NOT hurt. He's not even sick. This is normal. He's throwing up sea water that he drank with his food. It just happens to be red because he eats red seaweed and the water is mixed with seaweed puree.
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But this means that orcas can "SEE" all the goodies that are in there, like a kid looking through the window of a candy store. Just staring at all the delicious organs that they worked hard for but will never get to taste. It's so fucking sad. Okay but back to scavengers.
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Pads of fat within the abdomen prevent your organs from herniating when you're lifting heavy objects. This is why you only see fat dudes at strongman competitions, but never Mr. Universe-looking lean body bulider dudes.
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On land when something huge dies, it gets eaten very quickly. Hyenas can strip a dead elephant clean in less than 48 hours. But in the ocean, whale carcasses drift around for months before they eventually sink. It's not that no one wants to eat them….
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I wanted to take a minute to talk about the snake globes currently in the shop. 🧵
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You always see pictures of Jesus holding his lambs or brushing his lambs. I've never once seen any depiction of him, using his carpentry skills to craft little tail carts for his lambs.
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It was a frozen skinned coyote head. Most likely, it was left there by a student that had long since graduated. It was decided that it was going to be thrown away. So I asked if I could have it.
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As they eat, their stomach fills up with food and seawater. When it's totally full, they vomit up all of the water. The spines trap food and keep it from coming out.
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Okay, here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Have you guys ever seen these cloud patterns in Chinese art? . It’s kind of a odd way to stylize clouds isnt it? But this pattern has been around for thousands of years on pottery, textiles, and architecture.
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MERMAIDS. They have hands! And teamwork! And tools!. Alot of mermaid art just shows them looking sexy. But there is this unrealized potential to take on this deeply lucrative role of top scavenger that nobody else in the ocean seems to be able to fill.
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A while ago somebody sent me the Buff kitten video. It was supposedly a kitten with muscular hypertrophy, but it didnt look right to me, so I tracked down the original video.
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Okay. so then. If balloon syndrome is a veterinary condition that uniquely affects hedgehogs. Is Sonic inflation art arguably form of Scientific illustration?
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He’d been at it for a long time. definitely at least a night, maybe even an entire day, or more. He wore deep grooves into his teeth. His mouth was probably badly cut. Had he more time, infection would have set in, marking the bone. He never had that time.
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. It's mostly a physics problem. Land animals have gravity privilege. Any random stray dog can tear into a dead cow, even if the cow is a lot larger.
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Most sheep today have their tails docked, because poop gets caked to their tail wool and attracts flies. Since these old-school desert sheep weren't bred for wool, there was no limit to how big their tails could become. Some had tails so large they needed little tail carts.
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Something went wrong. Maybe it wasn’t very tight or maybe it was looped around his leg instead. Somehow, he was able to get his jaws around the wire. The back-and-forth motion of his head as he struggled to escape wore grooves into his teeth.
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Fat-Tails are the oldest breeds of sheep. Their images are found in the ruins of the oldest civilizations, scratched into clay tablets before the first languages formed. They’re in the old testament of the bible.
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Livestock, Agriculture and Food is an integral part of any culture and we ALL need to be pushing for more realistic sheep in religious art. #FATTAILSFORJESUS
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But when bunch of sharks come up on the floating whale carcass, it's essentially a game of bobbing for pumpkins. it's not really possible to hold on to it or tear it open. All they can do is bite off pieces from the outside.
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As the flesh fell away, an interesting pattern of marks came to light. On either side of his teeth, there are these grooves.
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Every once in awhile someone from the aquarium comes over with a fish mass.
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Regardless of whatever triggers it, it messes with their programming so that the mathematical formulas that govern the way they grow gets disrupted. Now. deformities in animals generally invoke pity. Deformities in plants invoke a sense of childlike joy instead.
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Orcas kill other whales and eat the tongue and the soft flesh of the lower jaw. They're not actually able to open up the body of their own prey to get into the nutritious internal organs, so they leave the rest.
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The groove here is worn into the pulp cavity of the tooth. Damage like this would have been extraordinarily painful and would have become quickly infected. But there’s no sign of infection here. When you close the mouth, the grooves form a near perfect circle.
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There’s a direction to these abrasions. Whatever he had been chewing on had tension to it. It was wrapped around the teeth. The abrasions are all the same diameter, just a bit thinner than a cell phone charge cord.
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I just wanted to share my animation. I ended up getting evicted for stop motion animating tiger parts in my garage…. but it was worth it. I still have hard drives full of animal carcasses reference animations today. Fun Times.
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Snares are basically zip ties made out of wire. The other end is anchored to a stationary object like a tree. They are designed to loop around the neck and tighten as the animal struggles, strangling it.
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Most underwater animals have ways to deal with the problem of swallowing water while eating. Fish use their gills to filter food from water. Whales use baleen. They don't actually swallow the water. Sea turtles just have a really unique system.
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They're ANTI-BARFING spikes. The thing is, sea turtles actually swallow A LOT of sea water while eating.
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Which gets me to my point. Why IS BIBLICAL ART ALWAYS SO INACCURATE?. Jesus was a Middle Eastern man. Fat-tailed sheep are the predominant sheep breed of the Ancient Middle East, a desert breed shaped by desert people that shared their world.
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It's actually super sad if you think about it. Orcas have ecolocation. The sounds they make, are able to travel through solid objects and bounce back to them, so they can tell what's inside objects.
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But. aside from novelty cacti, fasciation is not that rare, and we’ve all see those really wide strawberries. Or Beefsteak tomatos!
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It's not just scavengers either. This is a problem for ocean predators too. Wolves kill bison, tear it open and eat the most nutritious parts first, the organs. They move on to muscle after organs are gone.
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IT’S TERATOLOGY TUESDAY!!. You guys remember when these fluffy orb keychains were all the rage? . This is actually a real condition. 🧵
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This is an ancient sumerican tablet. The circle with cross means sheep,it's got an added tail. These were THE OG sheep.
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It’s neat to think that there are conditions out there that alter the mathematical layout of your body, causing it to form fractals or repeating segments. I wish it was explored in media more, like in the designs for grass pokemon and such. Fasciated Bulbasaur
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Whale carcasses around drift around for months, without anyone being able to get into them. This whole thing just bothers me, because ocean has powerful carnivores with Teeth! Tentacles! Teamwork! . Yet none of them seems to have solved the large carcass problem.
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These guys were so important to the ancient world that they were the primary sheep type back then. And even today a quarter of the world’s sheep are these guys. There's a bunch of different varieties with different looking tails.
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Anyone that's tried to lose weight knows how difficult it is to lose abdominal fat. Since fat inside the body has protective functions, it's tougher to lose. The inside of the body is also way warmer than the outside, so internal fat has a higher melting point.
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They’re not deformed! They’re fun novelties! .Look it’s in a skull planter!
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Millennias of nutritious organs have remained uneaten and left to rot because no one has the ability to get into them. For some reason, the ocean seems to lack this role of large-carcass-opener-creature which we take for granted on land.
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The interior of a sea turtle's mouth and .esophagus are covered with large backward facing barbs.
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I have a question for you. Look at this animal skeleton. What do you think this animal looks like? . Take a few seconds to envision it. 🧵
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They'd probably have some kind of mutualistic relationship with sharks, in the same with that vultures lead hyenas to carcasses. They can potentially utilize the miles of abandoned fishing netsconstantly drifting around the ocean to anchor large carcasses as they are cut apart
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It's such an odd concept to think about. But to me these trailing after images of the wingbeats of birds is a way to approximate how seals experience the world.
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And. it makes me wonder if this role has ever been filled. Prehistoric seas had a lot of huge animals too. Was there a lot of floating ichthyosaur carcasses back.then?. But you know what could solve this problem?
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Mermaids would be performing a service!. Why stop at sexy sea maidens when you can take on the much sexier role of salvagers of massive floating carcasses?
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Sheep depicted in religious art is never the right type of sheep that would have been endemic to the ancient Middle East and it's such a GODDAMN SHAME.
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I made this illustration about the progression of Persian cats over time. The last drawing is made as a joke of what they might look like in 20 years. And then looking at example photos I realize it wasn't all that far off. There's some really great sites out there that
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Oyster mushroom growing kits. A truly unique gift that keeps on giving for years to come.
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Mammals store fat in two places. Beneath the skin, and inside the body cavity. While both store energy, these two types of fat are not the same. Fat inside the body protects and cushions organs like bubble wrap.
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A while ago, I saw this on Craigslist. When I was little there was a store at the mall that sold nature stuff. They had one and everytime we went to the mall, I always went over to look at it. I had to have it. After taking it home, I noticed something I didn’t expect 🧵
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This deer with dwarfism was photographed in the Pittsburgh suburb this week. She's small but she's an adult doe. She also has a very noticeable underbite from the side view. This is a genetic or developmental deformity. Neat to see that she made it to adulthood.
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. an endless ocean filled with the trailing after images of motion. from those have long since moved on.
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There's been a lot of responses to the Fat tail sheep post. I want to take the time to add a bit more clarification.
So. Mammals normally store fat under the skin in an even layer, but camels evolved to pile fat in one spot, so the rest of their bodies can stay cool in the desert. Why don't other desert animals do this?. Well, they do. but for some reason, we never talk about them.
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A tray of stillborn snakes getting bottles today. They almost all have skull deformities.
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You want more dissection photos? . Here's snake I dissected. I try to use the setup of the photo to show the course of disease. Hopefully what happened here is obvious. It is. right?
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People seem to have a lot of questions about this:. 1. The tiger was an 11 year old male from a big cat sanctuary. He did not die naturally. He was euthanized due to an extremely advanced autoimmune disorder that destroyed his joints and spine. 2. Museums, nature centers and.
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They really are that blue. Here's one from wikipedia. my cell phone camera did him dirty
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Somewhere out there, is a raccoon skull with one incisor missing that has served as the reference for all these designs. Oh wait. here it is. It’s from Pinterest. Somebody took a raccoon skull and labeled it “Wolf Skull”.
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Twenty years ago, Architect Eric Boelling found this partial skull on a hike on the coast of Vancouver Island. He strapped it to his backpack and took it home, thinking it was a bear. It's not. What is this and what can it tell us? 🧵
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Okay. some additional thoughts about mermaids:. So I have worked on whale breakdown teams before and it is dirty exhausting work. Even a small dolphin takes multiple people working the entire day just to do one. So I would assume that if a team of mermaids were to break.
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@FateBoundKnight You should hold on to it. Could come in handy sometime. 1. Post apocalyptic conditions. 2. If you have a truly terrible landlord and your lease is ending soon.
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Wfhfoster on Instagram:. 3 sick kittens came in this afternoon. One of them has a congenital foot malformation that I find ridiculously adorable. Her name is Tina Two Toes. Still getting to know her, but I can’t get over her dual beans. 🫘🤘
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I don't see people talk about this much, but it's actually super common for animals, especially reptiles to change color after they die. This was one of the snakes I worked on early on. He had this incredible coloration. Delicate pastel blue on white like chinese pottery 🧵
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Amidst the pandemic a group of scientists quietly made a discovery about birds that would fundamentally change our understanding of the world. 🧵
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Whale carcasses are free sources of food and raw materials with zero risk of being injured during hunts, the way predators so often are. Also, I don't know if you know this, but here in the US, whale carcasses disposal is expensive and politically risky for seaside towns.
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In and of itself, this is a fun design, but the combo of outer wolf and inner raccoon makes this design truly brillant. IT'S THE ULTIMATE IMPOSTER SYNDROME TATTOO. Majestic, Confident, Badass Apex Predators on the outside. No obstacle too big, no mountain too high. UNAFRAID.
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Fat underneath the skin is different. It's softer, and has a much lower melting point which makes it ideal for all sorts of dishes. Having all the fat on the tail also made it easier to harvest.
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