Chicken Dissection

In this lab we took a frozen Safeway chicken and we went ahead and cut it in a way so we could see and find the different muscles, the tendons, and sometimes the bones in the chicken. But of course, before we could do any of that we first had to remove the skin off of the parts of the chicken that we wanted to see the muscles, which in some areas was way easier than others (removing the skin off the torso vs removing the skin off the arms or legs). While we were doing the dissection we labeled some of the muscles that will be shown below. When seeing how it all works, the bones, muscles, and tendons; you can see how the bone is the base structure, but it's also used for movement, the muscle is for helping support the weight that the bones bare and also help the bones move, and the tendons are what keep the muscles and bones connected and provides movement when the muscle pulls on the tendon which moves the bone. In the chickens we were dissecting, there were main differences in how their muscle are compared to ours, for example the two most major differences between us and the chickens are in our pectoralis major and pectoralis minor. Their pectoralis major and minor are huge compared to their relative body size, unlike ours which are rather small compared to the rest of our bodies. This is because of two reasons, first being that chickens need those muscles for flight, and second being we raised those chicken for their white meat, so that's why their pectoralis major and minor are actually bigger than they are supposed to be.