Bucket of cow eyes (BoingBoing Flickr Pool)

Yup. It's a bucket full of cow eyes, all right.

Photographed by reader Robert Costin, the photo was taken in a biology classroom at Nevada State College. The cow eyes in question were being passed out to students as dissection subjects. Costin assures me that, creepy as this is, it's nothing compared to what he saw in the cadaver lab.

I'm sure he's right. My high school anatomy class once took a field trip to a cadaver lab at Kansas State University. Cow eyeballs have nothing on Rubbermaid tubs full of preserved human genitalia, still attached to disembodied hips and upper thighs. For some reason, those freaked out 17-year-old me way more than the still mostly-intact dead bodies.

Image used with permission. Check out the BoingBoing Flickr Pool for more weird and wonderful photos.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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Anonymous

may i suggest dr dove’s “unicorn bull” as a chaser for this post?
Antinous / Moderator

We each got a cow eye to dissect in 9th grade. We had to share the fetal pigs in pairs, though.
Doomstalk

Oh wow, right after I ate dinner. I think we’re owed a unicorn chaser.
Anonymous

Mmm mmm good.
MooseDesign

Niiiiice. I had the good fortune to be friends with a young lady working as a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York studying wasp genitals (she now works for a pharmaceutical in NJ on boner meds… related field?). Anywho… she gave me a tour of the lower levels at the museum and it was amazing. Like an X-Files set, it had row after row of shelves full of various size jars full of pieces and parts of humans and various mammalia, including a giant vat with a full preserved ape, a jar with a whale fetus, and a jar with a giraffe fetus (both of which look like miniatures of the adults). Was absolutely amazing. I wasn’t allowed to take photos, but if they sold that as a tour they could make a mint IMO.
- Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  a giant vat with a full preserved ape, a jar with a whale fetus, and a jar with a giraffe fetus
  
  Holy crap. Who do I have to rhetorically query on BoingBoing to get invited down there the next time I’m in New York?
  - tkahvesi
    
    You should also look at Justine Cooper’s amazing photography of AMNH’s vaults:
    http://justinecooper.com/KHG/index.html
    http://seedmagazine.com/Saved_By_Science/sbs_slideshow.html
    - MooseDesign
      
      Those are great! Definitely took me back… The photos of the elephant bones in the “attic” looks much more tidy than I remember it, but the scattering of antlers and mounted heads looked familiar. And the lepidopterology section is massive with rows and rows of wooden drawers with thousands and thousands of butterflys and moths arranged in a sort of Dewey decimal system. Very cool, thanks for the links!
      - tkahvesi
        
        You likely know, but maybe not, that a huge portion of those butterflies were put there by Vladimir Nabokov himself. Of course he was a world-class lepidopterist, and volunteered his time and talents to AMNH when he was in New York.
  - MooseDesign
    
    I’ll email you offline… but there is soooo much more to see there too, if we can get you in. In the “attic” of the museum is a massive section with loads and loads of mounted animal heads, a virtual elephant graveyard (colossal skulls, myriad other bones), and massive stuffed animals of all sorts. My understanding is that they come into the museum’s possession through local widows of m/billionaire big game hunters who don’t want rooms full the things and just donate them to the museum. But they generally are of little scientific value and are put up there and just gather dust… Even if she no longer has the contact to get you in, perhaps you can contact them directly and see if you can arrange a tour. Maybe they would even let you take some pics!
Freak9n9Nerd

Is there a really obscure Diablo reference in this article?
Anonymous

When I was in high school this was my favorite dissection. The back of the eye balls have a magnificent blue in them as you can vaguely see in the photo. Also, the lense is equally interesting. They resemble a small rubber ball, except that they’re oblong in shape, and if one didn’t know that it was an organic object they would never guess. I ended up smuggling mine out of the class and carrying it around all day. I deservedly got a few strange looks when someone would ask what I was playing with, and I’d reply that it was a lense from a cows eyeball.
- Anonymous
  
  This was one of my favorite dissections too! It’s so strange that this has stuck with me, but I sometimes find myself reflecting on one interesting detail: the liquid behind the lens is the consistency of Jell-o as it’s setting up (in contrast to the liquid in front of the lens, which is much more like water).
Miss Jess

Ah yes, all of these comments bring back memories of my cadaver lab visit to the Indiana Univ School of Medicine my senior year of high school. Our whole anatomy class went, it was a big treat. Not such a big treat when we actually got into the lab. But it was pretty fascinating how removed we all felt from the cadavers as “humans” once things were being lifted/poked/removed – it was SCIENCE!
Gregory Goldmacher

When I was in med school, in gross anatomy we had these things called “prosections” in addition to our cadavers. Basically, some things are really hard to dissect well, and easy to screw up. Prosections are parts of bodies dissected to a pre-specified depth by really skilled people (the profs and TAs for the course), so if you screw up your dissection you can go get a prosection to study the anatomy from.

These prosections (hands, heads, pelvises, etc.) were all stored floating in tanks full of such body parts. These were quite a sight, if you weren’t used to such a thing, and of course we called these tanks “Jeffrey Dahmer’s lunchbox”.
jffriesen

Years ago I worked in a slaughterhouse. There were many bizarre sights, but the weirdest of all was on a small conveyor chain just after the cows were stunned and bled. As the cow is bleeding, its blood is collected in a stainless steel bucket. The head is then skinned, severed from the body and hung on a conveyor hook, followed on the next hook by its blood. So you get skinned head and a bucket of steaming blood… a skinned head and a bucket of steaming blood. And sometimes the cheek muscles are twitching and the eyes are rolling. It was surreal!
- travtastic
  
  I’m not sure I would use surreal to describe that.
- facetedjewel
  
  ‘So you get skinned head and a bucket of steaming blood… a skinned head and a bucket of steaming blood. And sometimes the cheek muscles are twitching and the eyes are rolling. It was surreal!’
  
  Well, thank you, jffriesen. I’m going to go nightie-night now. Please, could someone beam those unicorns directly into my dreams, and throw in a few panda babies maybe?
  
  Christ, what a . . . had to repeat that twice, huh?
Mister44

I sketched cadavers a couple times at KSU. We look like turkey with our skin off.
Anonymous

Exploratorium in SF has teenage girls performing minor dissections of cow eyeballs most weekends.
sirIris

Kind Miss, please provide proper unicorn chaser. Thank you.
Anonymous

We used to buy enucluated cow eyes by the bucketsful back when we were learning to do LASIK.
Anonymous

When I attended the U of Iowa, a couple of knuckleheads decided the gross anatomy lab would be a great starting point for some kind of gross prank. They were caught leaving the lab with a human lower leg.

Turns out, this qualifies as felony grave-robbing. Never really heard from those guys again.
apoxia

When my class cut up cows eyes when we were 12, we had to bring our own knives from home and were expressly forbidden from bringing gloves to wear. Also, out school bathrooms didn’t have soap, and it’s not easy to clean your hands with cold water, no soap and no scrubbing brush to get the vitreous fluid out from under your fingernails. That really pissed me off.
mlw99

While doing a cadaver dissection at KU back in the early 80′s, the platform upon which the cadaver rested (and which was raised and lowered from the vat of preservation fluid by a crank) got stuck. I made the mistake of hitting the crank with the palm of my hand and the platform splashed back into the vat of dead skin broth. Unfortunately, the holes in the platform which allowed the fluid to drain propelled a stream (geyser actually) of human minestrone directly into my mouth. I can still taste the stuff.
Anonymous

Once it is seen, it cannot be unseen.
http://imgur.com/Mcdqu
ejkdreamer

Twenty years ago, in college, my wife (then girlfriend) was taking a gross anatomy class, and I went on a double-date to see her cadaver lab. She showed me the body that she had been dissecting – and elderly woman as I recall – and a number of neatly bagged and labeled organs. The real body parts looked remarkably fake compared to what I was used to seeing in the movies. I remember thinking, as she removed the heart from it’s baggie and proudly displayed it to me, that the aorta looked just like the heater hose in my Chrysler.
Anonymous

Instead of serving my time in the German military, I did compulsory community service in one of Germanies largest hospitals. One of my jobs was to move body parts from the operating rooms to the pathology. I had to wheel a stainless steel tea trolley through a maze of corridors, loaded with transparent plastic jars full of neatly labelled organs, tumors and tissue. I had to use a special key for the elevators to prevent anyone else to ride with me …
I still shudder when I think of the moment I realized what the “testes” sloshing in a jar actually were.
Anonymous

No wonder the quality of Hot-dogs plummeted, if they use the eyes for educational purposes now!
Evil Paul

“Rubbermaid tubs full of preserved human genitalia, still attached to disembodied hips and upper thighs” is going to be the name of my new metal band.
Kingazaz

Human genitalia still attached to hips & upper thighs?

My eyes went as wide as a cow’s on that one.
Jack

Ugggh. You know this is the first time in months I made SOUP to eat at home and now this?

I need a unicorn chaser with extra kittens. Thanks!