Chicken Leg Dissection

Procedure:
Put on gloves and collect your tools.
Thoroughly rinse and dry one chicken leg. Place it in the dissecting tray.

Lab Assistant.

Examine the outside skin tissue. This is the epidermis and the dimples are where feathers emerged. Using scissors and forceps.

Cut the skin and peel it away from the muscle.

Notice the clear connective tissue that holds the skin to the muscles. As you peel off the skin, you may need to cut away some of this connective tissue. Work slowly and carefully with scissors and forceps until all skin is removed.

Describe how the connective tissue looks and feels. What type of connective tissue is this? The connective tissue looks shiny and flimsy and is stretchy. It feels very smooth. This is epithelial tissue.

Observe, with your naked eye bundles of muscle tissue surrounding the bones. Separate the bundles of muscles by separating them out with your fingers. Begin by inserting your thumb into the muscle of the lower leg. You will need to push forcefully through the shiny lining (called fascia) over the muscle, but it will give way at the natural separations between the muscle bundles. Continue separating the muscle into bundles by forcing your thumb and fingers through the muscle until you are able to distinguish several separate bundles.

Describe the arrangement of the muscle bundles. The muscle bundles are thick and close together. 

The strong, shiny, white cords, called tendons, hold the muscle to the bones. Some of these tendons will pull away from the bone as you separate the muscle bundles. Use a probe, if needed, to find the tendons of the chicken leg. Using the dissection scissors, cut across the tendons at Line A (Figure 1). Observe the numerous tendons and pull the freed muscles down and away from the bone, as if you were peeling a banana. Careful you don't cut any ligaments that attach bone to bone. Look closely at the ligaments.

Examine the two bones in the lower leg. The large bone (Bone A) is the tibia. The small, toothpick-like bone (Bone B) is the fibula.

 What sort of connective tissue are tendons composed of? Tendons are composed of fibrous connective tissue.

Remove a single muscle by cutting the tendons and peeling the muscle away from the bone.

What sort of muscle tissue is represented? How do you know? This is skeletal muscle because it connects muscle to bone.

Nerves are generally thin, threadlike white strands found between the muscle and the
nearest bone. Look for the nerve in your specimen. Did you find them? I saw some very thin white that might have been nerves but it was kind of hard to tell. 

What is the physical difference in the tendon of the insertion when compared to the origin? The insertion was longer and thinner then the origin.

Remove all remaining muscle to expose the bones of the chicken leg.

What is the soft material inside a bone? The soft material inside a bone is marrow. 

Name three specific types of cells present here. Do not break the bone; it is sharp! Osteocytes, osteoblasts, and osteoclasts.

Name three functions of bone. Three functions of bone are movement, support, and protection.

Cut onto the hinge joint by cutting into the top of the covering of the joint from the femur side. It will become apparent that you must remove the knee cap area to expose the menisci and ligaments within. Pull up on the knee cap area and cut through it with the scissors. You will have cut through the bursa, a sac that acts as a shock absorber for the knee joint. These are found in every joint.

Pull the covering back and look into the inside of the joint. You will see more white bands of ligaments holding the bones together. Observe the shiny, white layer covering the ends of the bones is cartilage. It helps the bones slide smoothly when the leg bends.

Bend the specimen at Joint B (Figure 1) and rotate the femur in all directions. Remove the muscle that covers Joint B by cutting parallel to the femur, upward toward the backbone. Remove pink muscle tissue until you see a shiny white sheet of ligament that covers the joint. Present is an exterior ligament that holds the femur in the hip socket

What type of connective tissue composes the ligaments? Ligaments are composed of dense connective tissue.
Figure 2 is provided in a separate document.
Label Figure 2 with the names of the joints you observed and the motion they make.

On Figure 2, sketch one muscle origin (the name of the bone indicates the insertion) and one muscle insertion you can see in the leg.

Hinge joints allow for movement on one plane. 

Ball-and-socket joints permit even wider ranges of movement. The rounded head of the bone fits into a socket, allowing movement in all planes.