Cleared and stained animal specimens

Craft & Design Science
Cleared and stained animal specimens
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Depending on your tolerance for preserved corpses, this may strike you as incredibly cool or incredibly creepy. Maybe a little bit of both. Personally, I lean toward the “cool” side. “Clearing and staining” is actually a very old technique in anatomy and biology in which a dead animal is treated with a series of chemicals that simultaneously preserve it, render its soft tissues transparent, and stain its skeletal and nervous systems different colors. The resulting preserved specimens are both scientifically useful and, often, strikingly beautiful. These pictures are from a Japanese gallery; here’s an English-language gallery of mutant frog specimens that are also pretty amazing. [via Core77]

4 thoughts on “Cleared and stained animal specimens

  1. Simon says:

    When I was a kid my dad gave me a rat skeleton in a jar preserved like that. It was pink. I also had a dogs heart in a jar and for a while, out pet dogs testicles. That’s a whole other story though.

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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