Photos by students in COMM 1318 Photography. Featured photo by Garrett Nowlin.
It looked like Halloween arrived early last week at the zoology lab on the Levelland campus.
While a toad and salamander watched from the side of the room, 10 tables were scattered with bones of all kinds.
Some were obviously broken. Others appeared ghostly due to transparency.
Dr. Harriet L. Strickland, SPC associate professor of biology, is the one who created this lab. She says she wanted students to look at bones in a different way.
“This lab was designed to offer a review of the skeletal system,” she says, “using X-rays which is a little bit different than just looking at skeleton models.”
Of course, there was a skeleton model standing in front of the first set of tables too. Students, working in pairs, moved from table to table filling in worksheets.
At the front of the room students had to use X-rays to reconstruct a full-body skeleton. Strickland says it’s sometimes easy to confuse a leg bone with an arm bone.
“There were also tables showing the comparison of animal X-rays and humans,” Strickland says. Some of the animals on display included a hawk, snake, chameleon, and turtle.
When comparing these animals to humans, Strickland says she thinks students will mostly see similarities between them.
“The bones in the wing of a bird, for instance, are the very same bones as the arm of a human,” she says, “but the proportions are different. Birds have a humerus, radius, and ulna, that make up a wing. Humans have those same bones in the arm but in different proportions.”
Another set of tables in the lab featured X-rays showing broken bones and how they were repaired with surgery. Metal screws, plates, and/or rods jump out from the X-rays showing how breaks were repaired.
Student Madisyn Tidwell says, “I’ve learned that I do not want to break any bones.”
Tidwell says she knows something about X-rays because she works in a vet clinic. But she says it’s “cool” to see different types of breaks and how they are fixed.
Student Del Smith agrees.
“I think a lot people don’t get to see X-rays,” he says. “So that’s kind of cool. See what doctors get to see basically.”
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