Today we opened up the cat's chest cavity and we removed its heart and sternum. We first ran the scalpel along the sides of the sternum to detach it from the ribs so that we could take it out. We did this so that we could open up the cats chest in order to see the organs inside. This procedure exposed the lungs and heart of the cat. We cut the major veins and arteries that attached the heart of the cat to the inside of its chest. Once the arteries were cut we removed the heart from the body and we removed the pericardium sac from around the heart.
This was an interesting procedure. We learned alot about the body during this. There are many veins inside that are attached to the heart, there are more than I had thought there was. The sternum was also a lot less solid than I had expected it would be. The lungs looked a lot different than I expected them to look, they were very flat.
