Chicken Dissection Lab

For this lab, we were given a frozen chicken to take apart and assess, and that we did. Through this lab, we were able to further out understand of how our muscles, bones, and tendons all play a role in movement. Muscles are connected to our bones through our tendons, and contract and extend accordingly to help us move. This can clearly be seen in the chicken's wing and our arm, where the biceps brachii and triceps humeralis work in opposition to flex and extend the arm. On the biceps brachii, we played around with the insertion tendon attached to the humerus and was able to maneuver it to bend the arm when we pressed it, as opposed to the unmoving tendons at the origin. Although the tendons both look shiny and white ant both ends of the muscle, whether they are attached at insertion or not makes a big difference in their ability to move our muscles accordingly. Additionally, we were able to discover that twisting the humerus would also create a waving motion in the chicken wing, revealing further insight into how the bones of the body work.

As for the differences between human and chicken muscles, some major ones included the pectoralis major and minor. The pectoralis majors were the huge breast muscles on the exterior of the chicken that pull the wing ventrally, yet in humans is used in bench pressing, while the pectoralis minor lay inside the breast, and pulls the wing dorsally(which in humans pulls the shoulder down and forward).

Muscles that acted similar to human muscles were the trapezius and the latissimus dorsi, which shrug the shoulders and pulls the shoulder back and extend and pull the arm respectively. 

Other muscles that we were tasked to find are found below:

The iliotibialis extends the thigh and flexes the leg

The deltoid raises the upper arm/wing

The brachioradialis pulls the hand back, and the flexor carpi ulnaris flexes the hand

Blue pin: Sartorius, flexes thigh and allows for crossing of knee
Red pin: Quadriceps femoris, flexes thigh and extends lower leg
Green pin: Semimembranosus, extends the thigh
White pin: Semitendinosus, extends thigh
Yellow pin: Biceps femoris, flexes leg

Blue pin: Gastrocnemius, extends foot and flexes lower leg
Yellow pin: Peroneus longus, extends foot
Black pin: Tibialis anterior, flexes foot