Many biology courses include a dissection lab. Whether students are dissecting a frog or a cadaver, it is important for them to be comfortable with their surroundings and the dissections. However, many students are uneasy around dissections, which could lead to several issues within a lab. To combat this, we feel it is important that faculty are aware of the various ways of preparing themselves and students to prevent fainting and other dangerous issues in lab. How one prepares for lab can have a huge impact on the students' lab experience. This article presents 10 tips and tricks we have employed to aid students in having a positive cadaver dissection experience, including informing students of the dissection and what will be covered in lab, requiring proper attire, recommending that students eat before lab to prevent nausea, and several other ideas.

This article details a set of team-based assignments in a college-level integrated English and human biology course. In this semester-long assignment sequence, student teams rotate through a series of activities to create open educational resources for a nonmajors, general education human biology class. These student-generated materials facilitate engagement with course content at high cognitive levels in order to “write the book” for the class. Finally, an end-of-semester synthesis project asks students to compile and present their finished work for wider distribution via student-made websites.

A highlight activity of the author's comparative anatomy class, this skeletal typogram activity challenges students to take their understanding of the skeletal system's components beyond mere memorization of bone names and locations. Each student creates a poster of a vertebrate skeleton, using the letters of the bone names to depict the actual bone shape and location. Animals are chosen by the teacher to represent a wide variety of evolutionary adaptations (swimming, flying, grazing, hunting, etc.). Students are then asked to compare the different typograms through analysis of contrasting skeletal evolutionary adaptations. The infographic nature of the project helps students understand the power of visual information, allowing for creative cross-disciplinary work. Through developing and comparing typograms, students deepen their understanding of how skeletal form fits function and the role of adaptation in vertebrate evolution.

Making the study of the human anatomy and physiology authentic and clinically relevant poses many challenges. Described herein is a program that, through the use of medical school cadavers, provides high school students a unique experience to enhance their clinically based study of human anatomy and physiology. The program incorporates many learning modalities as well as problem-based team learning and can be a feasible addition to many high school anatomy programs.

In this paper, we present an augmented reality learning system that uses the input of a depth camera to interactively teach anatomy to high school students. The objective is to exemplify human anatomy by displaying 3D models over the body of a person in real time, using the Microsoft Kinect depth camera. The users can see how bones, muscles, or organs are distributed in their bodies without the use of targets for tracking.

We present a new use for a poorly preserved turtle specimen that teachers can easily use in demonstrating vertebrate anatomy or adaptive herpetology at the high school or college level. We give special attention to illustrating the sigmoid flexure of the neck as certain turtles withdraw their heads. This ability is anatomically and biologically important in that it protects the turtle from predators and is one of the major anatomical radiations that occurred in turtle evolution. The lesson also demonstrates how turtles, whose anatomy is confined within a rigid compartment, have their organs arranged and how adaptive strategies overcome this spatial constraint.

Many anatomy students begin the course with a misconception that human males and females do not have the same number of ribs. At the root of that misconception is Genesis 2:21–22, in which God removes a rib from Adam to make Eve. Removal of a body part is a surgical procedure, and one does not pass on the results of surgery to one’s offspring. The prevalence of this misconception is therefore an opportunity to discuss Lamarckian inheritance in the classroom.

Teaching and learning animal anatomy has a long history in the biology classroom. As in many fields of biology, decades of experience teaching anatomy have led to the unofficial selection of model species. However, in some cases the model may not be the best choice for our students. Our struggle to find an appropriate model for teaching and learning insect anatomy has resulted in experiments with a variety of species. In our experience, none of the available models seems as useful as the Madagascar hissing cockroach. In this article, we advocate the use of this species in laboratory studies of insect anatomy.

The techniques of forensic anthropology and pathology can provide new information to increase student interest in studying the structural details of the human skeleton. We present a simplified methodology for assessing skeletal ethnicity, sex, age, and stature. An inexpensive method has been devised for constructing an osteometric board to allow students to measure long bones accurately. The effects of aging and the influence of lifestyle alterations on skeletal elements are presented along with the prediction of their effects on the living individual. This laboratory is intended to acquaint students with the process of collecting and analyzing data, interpreting scientific results, and assessing the accuracy of their conclusions. Gathering and analyzing their own data sets gives students a better understanding of the scientific method and an increased ability to translate this understanding to other scientific disciplines.