Dissection - not for the squeamish

My dad knows that I'm interested in medicine, especially the anatomy side of things. We recently had a family of mice move into our shed at the bottom of the garden, so he killed one using a mouse trap, and bought me some equipment so that I could do a dissection. This is what I did. I used:

The ratcheting pliers, scalpel, pins and tweasers

• a craft knife (as a scalpel)
• a pair of tweezers
• a pair of ratcheting pliers (the ones I used were cast offs from my grandfathers fishing days)
• a pack of pins
• a pair of scissors
• some cork board
• a kilner jar
• a couple of bottles of rubbing alcohol
• some latex gloves
• some newspaper to keep everything clean

The mouse, cork board, and kilner jar with some of the alcohol in it

So following what I'd seen in this video, I opened up the mouse as best I could. So that I could see it all clearly, I pinned the mouse to the cork board. this means that it will stay open all the time. I found and identified all of the major organs, and I found something from almost all of the major systems in the body. There were a few things which I wasn't so sure about when I saw them (I may have found the mouse equivalent of the thyroid glands, and there was what I thought was a nerve cluster, but I wasn't sure), but I plan to show my biology teachers a photo, and ask them if they can identify them. The only major organ I didn't reach was the brain, which is a shame because I wanted to see if I could get it to have a look at it. Anyway, I really enjoyed it, and it's in my room, on a shelf.

A little explanation of what you can see: there is only a small part of the diaphragm left intact, as a lot had to be cut out so I could open the chest cavity. For the same reason, the left side of the ribcage and sternum are missing. The stomach is swollen and whitish yellow - this is not the normal state, but it's full of the cheese my dad baited the trap with. I was surprised by two things; the size of the heart and the testicles. Each testicle was probably bigger than the brain and heart combined (although I'm making an assumption about the brain. It's difficult to tell without taking a look, but the skull it quite small), and the heart was bigger than I thought it would be. There were two whitish lumps either side of the oesophegus and the trachea - I thought these might be thyroid glands. Anyone who has a better knowledge of anatomy than I do, feel free to correct me.

Annotated and dissected mouse