Necropsy

Necropsy – another word for autopsy; usually refers to one done on an animal

A few weeks ago my animal loving son got a call from his good friend/mentor that one of her snakes had suddenly passed away.  She was thinking of performing a necropsy on it and wondered if she could bring it to my house after church for Mr. C to join her in the process.  She wasn’t sure why it died and wanted to “delve deeper” to see if she could figure it out.

Of course, being the good Mom I am, I said sure.  For some reason this does not gross me out one bit so I took lots of pictures to document it.  For those that don’t want to look past the next, not so gross picture, I’ll give you the details.

They determined that the snake died from internal bleeding and she was suspicious that the snake was much older than she was told when she purchased it.  Interestingly the heart muscle was still moving so we could watch the heart go up and down {yes, it really was dead}.  We found a huge sack of blood below the heart and the sack the heart was in was full of blood also.  There were other discoveries too, but I never heard what that was determined to be.

After his mentor left {she had another event to get to} Mr. C searched for the other organs and just “looked” around.  Then clean up.  Now for the pictures, if you’d like to see.  The first three are pretty “clean”.  Next two not so much.

At first the thought it was a problem with it’s skin… which I am suddenly drawing a huge blank on what that was called.

The vertebrae {where the spinal cord would run}.

Some of the organs Mr. C identified after she left.  The blue little thing is the pancreas and in the other hand is the liver.  He also saw the small intestine but I won’t bore you with more pictures…