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. The muscle on the back of the head (Temporalis) bulges out when the jaw is closed.

But when the is jaw is open, it depresses in like
the surface of a trampoline. But not uniformly, in a Y shaped pattern.

I wanted to take a minute to talk about the snake globes currently in the shop.....🧵 Most of them are made of stillborn rainbow boas.
Before I worked on them, they looked like this.

It’s true that some stillborns are perfectly healthy and unfortunate pregnancy complications occurred, like the mom had an infection or something....

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.

https://twitter.com/Kairo_Anatomika/status/1760529074722689531

Fat tailed sheep is not a single specific breed of sheep. It's a catchall word like "Health care worker".

There's tons and tons of different breeds.

They all store fat in their tails, but fall into two main categories: WIDE tails and LONG tails

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..... 🧵🧵 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.

These are Risso's dolphins.

They are not commonly found in aquariums and are therefore not well known.

But I think they're really cool.....🧵 Their skin has this really interesting quality.

If they get an injury, the skin will eventually heal and smooth out. But it never again develops pigment and remains white for the rest of its life.

Okay look.

We need to talk about the unrealized potential of vampires and vampire-centric stories.... 🧵 Fictional vampires always look like this. They always have large canine teeth like cats or dogs.

But that never made a lot of sense to me, because teeth like this are meant for grabbing on really tightly, or tearing.

Okay, I have a question.

A lot of butterflies are poisonous. But they're only poisonous if you eat them, you can touch them just fine.

When we think of poison, we usually think of DEADLY poisons, but that's not how it works....🧵 Blue jays fed monarch butterflies will vomit and become ill. They won't ever touch one again and will dissuade their family from eating them.

The nature of poison is sacrifice.

You give your life to ensure that your kind lives forever in the minds of your enemies.

Is anyone else really frustrated by the ineffectiveness of marine scavengers....? 🧵 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….

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. Figurate Erythema is a generic description for any kind of red round or arc-shaped mark on the skin.

It’s sort of like “Engine rattle.” There can be a lot of different causes. We don’t know what causes these in cats.

It almost looks mythological in a way.

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. Okay....The earliest Chinese language is called the JiaGu script,
or “Shell and bone” script.

These are symbols carved on tortoise shell and animal bones.
We know about development of the chinese language through these relics.

I also have a folder of weird cases.
This is one of them. This was sent in by an owner in Brazil who reached out to me.

The bloodless snake.....🧵 The owner had a group of baby albino corn snakes from the same litter.

They were all healthy and they all looked like this.

Besides "Obvious Deaths" I also have a folder of "Worst Deaths"
This is one of them.

The owner was a stage performer that included animals in her shows. The snake had somehow gotten out of her enclosure, crawled into a room heater and become trapped while she was away. Then, over the next few hours, it was fully cooked. The entire animal’s body, even the organs ranged from well-done to medium rare.

In some places, meat fell away from the bone like slow-cooked ribs. There were no surface burns, indicating that the heater had not been very hot

Okay look at this!
This stray cat was taken to the vet in Algeria.
She has a really large belly for some reason....🧵 They operated on her, and she turned out to be full of
these bubbles of fluid.

You guys remeber this cartoon?

This is an actual condition called Acardius Acephalus.

It can happen in people and animals....🧵 The name means “Headless and Heartless.” which is an accurate description.

They consist only of the lower half, and have many of the organs,bones and muscles that you would normally find in the lower half.

This is a goat.

I really enjoy doing necropsies because it's very similar to reading comics. I LOVE comics.

You have to look at the information and then figure out the series of events that took place.

Here’s an interesting case I saw a while back: 🧵 This young bearded dragon had difficulty shedding his skin, and was not able to get a bit of skin off that was attached at the end of his tail.

The old skin dried and became tighter as it did, cutting off the circulation to the end of the tail.

The tip of his tail died, and had to be amputated.

The vet did the amputation and sent him home with medication.

The next morning, the owner went on a trip and dropped him off at a pet boarding service. The bearded dragon died that night.

When the owner came back, there was a dispute over what happened.

Did the boarder mistreat the animal? Why did it die under their care and who should take responsibility?

So, there's hundreds of breeds of horse.

Pre-industrial revolution, horses filled the roles of different motor vehicles today.

Flat-Bed Trucks, Motorcycles, Humvees, Tractors, were all once breeds of horse.

That's cool...but lowkey dissappointing?🧵 We took this one animal and bred out different features to serve different hauling & transportation needs.

Horses were domesticated really early and quickly spread to other places, so there wasn’t a huge need to look for alternative solutions.

But people DO ride other animals.

So a while back, I was out with my dad near the palace, when he mentioned offhandedly that the red paint on the city walls can last for generations, because it’s mixed with pig’s blood.

I didn’t believe him, but when I looked it up later, it turned out to be true.....🧵 Blood, when not carrying oxygen around your body, apparently has industrial applications in architecture and masonry.

When mixed into cement and concrete, proteins in the blood form a chemical template that the concrete particles latch on to, making it durable and waterproof.

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.....🧵 Whatever you have in mind.....it’s wrong.

They’re totally round.

IT’S TERATOLOGY TUESDAY!!

You guys remember when these fluffy orb keychains were all the rage?

This is actually a real condition......🧵 Animals, and sometimes people too can be born as....orbs.

Like this nearly full term calf.

It’s a rare condition called Amorphous Globosus

Okay.....but this meme is really not what you might think..... 🧵 If you don't know what that is, it's this particular parasite that lives inside mouths of fish.

It moves in, cuts off the blood-supply to the tongue and then hunkers down where the tongue used to be and just lives there.

Sounds pretty gnarly right?

When I was in high school, I had a classmate who had a fear of balloons.

That's pretty weird, but a lot of common phobias have some logic to them...🧵 Many people are afraid of snakes or small holes because in our ancient past, snakebites were a death sentence and holes found on the skin were often a sign of parasite infections.