Chicken Dissection Lab

In this lab we dissected a chicken to see all of its muscles and relate it to our own muscles. We examined the chicken's breast, upper back, upper arms, forearms, thigh, and drumstick. We took pictures during the lab and we labeled the muscles we saw:

Muscles, bones, and tendons all play a role in movement. Specifically, this is how we are able to move our forearms. Our muscles do the pulling, so to move our forearms upward, our biceps contract, making our triceps relax. This contraction of the biceps pulls on the tendons connecting bone to muscle. The bone in this case are the radius and ulna (because the joint that is being used is the elbow). 

There are differences between the tendon at the origin and the tendon of the insertion. The tendon of the origin does not move very much; the tendon of the insertion does move. When a muscle contracts the tendon of insertion gets closer towards the tendon of origin. The insertion of the tendon also tends to be more distal, although it doesn't for sure have to be. 

There are also some differences between chicken muscles and human muscles. An obvious difference is the size of chicken muscles are smaller than that of human muscles, except for the breast (the chicken breast seems to be bigger). Chickens also have similar muscles to us; for example, they have biceps and triceps as well. A difference between the two is also that chicken muscles have different names than human muscles, but both the names are describing a similar muscle. For example the Iliotibialis, in birds, is equivalent to the gluteus maximus in humans.