I was really looking forward to this field trip because I thought of scientific illustration as one of my possible career paths. I was really excited to hear Stephen and Luci talk about how they became scientific illustrators and it was really interesting to see the work of all the people who first began to record organisms using illustration! They also talked about using scientific illustrations in forensics which was super interesting because I’ve seen it be mentioned in police shows or crime dramas but I always thought that it was a new method thanks to technology. Now I know that they had illustrators come in to do the reconstruction before technology had advanced to this point.
When we visited the anatomy museum, the first thing that stood out to me was the room with tables. It looked like a regular classroom, but there were many bones in display cases. There were also prints framed on the left wall. This really intrigued me because I’m currently taking printmaking and I was wondering what technique they used to capture the human body’s movement so well. After entering the room with all the bones, I looked at so many different specimens! What really interested me the most were the small bones in the small boxes, I was really amazed at how well some of these bones were preserved despite them being so small! I also saw a taxidermied monkey which was admittedly slightly scary, the eyes were not done so well so I could see the redness underneath. I also saw many teeth, some came out smoothly from the jaw it was connected to! There were also some animals preserved in a type of liquid, it was so interesting how the bones were such a bright color and I could still see the animal around the bones thanks to the body becoming translucent. Overall, I really really enjoyed this field trip and I wish there was some sort of website or database of all the bones Stephen and Luci had collected over the years! I also hope that there is a chance of returning sometime in the future!