Felis Catus Or Domestic Cat

🦴 Here you go guys, photos of my skeleton (Cat. Cat's skeleton, not mine, lmao) and a couple of fun facts about the process of skeleton-making and animal anatomy 🦴

I put them under the cut just in case some of yall are sensitive and don't want to see it 👇

Felis catus or domestic cat

He was a male british shorthair, a bit fat but not obese. I don't quite remember if we concluded the cause of death during autopsy but the dissection was informative (I'd post the photos but I'm afraid it would be too much 😬)

So here's a photo of mid-process assembling:

We used wires and instant glue. Gotta be careful with this stuff cuz it sticks to your fingers like crazy (and yes, there's a cow leg lying around in the background).

The one who was assembling was yours truly and I wasted SO MUCH TIME looking at the anatomy textbook to set the pose and limbs properly, but in the end it paid off. Our curator said that it was the most anatomically accurate cat posture out of all cat skeletons our uni museum had (yippee!)

(Also notice how gray the skeleton is compared to the previous photos. That's because when removing meat from the bones, we boil them and they tend to go gray, so in the final stage the skeleton needs to be whitened in hydrogen peroxide)

If you look closely at the skull you might notice that the jaws are not aligned properly — that's because my groupmate glued them the wrong way :p You need to be VERY precise in how you glue stuff, it doesn't separate easy afterwards.

Now see these two small bones right here? They are the collarbones. Fun fact about them is that cats and many other animals either have them reduced in size or don't have them at all! It depends on the species, but the main purpose of their absence is to help animals' front paws move more freely. In case of cats — to be more agile while climbing trees, fitting through small holes or walking on thin surfaces.

So naturally, these tiny bones just... reside in the muscle, not connected to literally anything.

And in this case our skeleton, I dare say, is very special, because, unlike the ones in the museum, it has collarbones in display. While removing the meat we (well, I) decided to not get rid of them and instead come up with a way to somehow include them in the final product. I came up with the idea of gluing them to transparent poles made of UV-curing glue. And as you can see, it worked pretty well 😄

All in all, it was a complicated, long but fun and very interesting process (nothing like my mute swan skeleton). This kitty-cat is gonna live forever in our museum as a display of hard work and dedication 🩷