© 2006 William White

Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy, usually known as "comparative" or "CVA", is the study in the physical nature of, and the relationships between, those living things in our part of the evolutionary tree. The ten weeks of CVA lab cover primarily the lamprey, shark, and cat, plus specific organ systems of many other animals (sea squirt, bowfin, hagfish, salamander, alligator, turtle, salamander, sheep, and cow, just to name a few). During the six hours per week spent in the lab, you learn to identify arteries, veins, muscles, bones and their landmarks, nerves, and other features of these animals. You learn their name, function, and equivalent in other species (such as how the shark's quadrate cartilage is the cat's incus bone), and how they all fit together both literally and metaphorically.

In addition to the six hours of scheduled lab time, and four hours of lecture time (covering other material, such as the synapomorphies of the major vertebrate taxa), expect to spend an additional 12 hours in the lab to study, and an additional 8 hours covering lecture material. This brings the total time committment for CVA to 30 hours per week. Yes, that applies to smart people like you.

It is impossible to conduct this class without hands-on experience with real specimens. You cannot replace that with studying from books or models, because what you're really learning is how to see and understand biological systems. Thus, you dissect cats. When you get your cat, it has been injected with dye to color the blood vessels (blue for veins, red for arteries, yellow for hepatic portal vessels), fixed in formaldehyde, skinned except for paws and head, and sealed in plastic.

Like most CVA labs, we worked in pairs. Many of us named our dissection cats early in the quarter. Ours, a female kitten, we named Gizmo. Like most of the specimens, her eyes were at half mast and her tongue stuck out the side of the mouth. That unambiguously comical expression somehow put me at ease. It wasn't until six weeks into the class, in the middle of tracing the path of blood from the heart up to the head, that I really grasped that I was dissecting a cat, and that there was a small but non-zero chance that she had been someone's pet.

Assimilating large amounts of arbitrarily arranged and disconnected information without a structure in place does not come easy to me, so I had to dedicate myself almost entirely to this single class. For ten weeks, Gizmo's death was my life. I became intimately familiar with the elegance and complexity of this beast who once lived, breathed, and purred. If I have one hope from this site, it is to offer a glimpse into those ten weeks.

If I may sneak in another hope, it is for those of you about to take CVA to understand what you are up against, and perhaps gain some useful information. If this is you, feel free to click the "Details" links when you see them. On the other hand, if you just want to look at the pictures, you can walk through the entire site by clicking on the first photograph on each page. The exception is the "Each sack had seven cats" page, where you want to click on the top left panel.

This is a work in progress. Also, I'm starting to get more hits than I expected. If you want, please make a donation (the link to the right). I'd rather not litter the site with ads.