My name's Nick Short. I’m a vet who works at the Royal Veterinary College
and I'm responsible for our electronic media.
This is an interesting photograph which shows the
gravid or pregnant uterus of a cat.
There are four round balls which each contain a cat fetus
and a fifth ball which has actually been opened and dissected.
Outside that ball to the top-right
you'll see a very small fetus
- that is a very early cat fetus, which is
still connected by its umbilical cord to the placenta.
You can see at the bottom of the picture that there is a short section which is the
cervix through which these fetuses will pass,
usually about 61 to 65 days after implantation.
That's the gestation period of a cat.
You can see the two ovaries at the top-left and right and these are connected to the body wall
through a ligament with blood supply.
In a neutering operation, which we call spaying, we remove the whole section -
all the tissues you can see in this photograph -
so we'll ligate, or tie off, the tissue
which connects the ovaries to the body wall, so that blood supply is restricted
and we'll also ligate and cut
the cervix so that there's no leakage from the cervix and this whole section
of the uterine horn and ovaries will be removed.
We don't know where this specimen comes from but clearly it could’ve been collected from
a dead cat which may have been put to sleep,
perhaps because it had some other condition or it could also have been from a surgical procedure,
where the cat was pregnant when the uterus was removed.
This is a beautiful image of a bovine uterus.
You can see in the picture that in the right-hand uterine horn
a window has been cut into the wall of the horn
and through that window we can see a number of round protrusions on the
wall of the uterus - the endometrium - and also in the flap that's been cut away to the
right you can see four of these protrusions.
These are called caruncles and they are actually the structures which
connect to the placenta of the fetus and provide
the interface between the dam’s blood system and the fetus
and provide an opportunity for nutrients to pass from
the dam to the fetus.
The uterus has two horns and you can see on the left-hand side at the very end of the uterine horn
there's a small ovary tucked into the corner.
When we as vets examine a cow to determine whether it is pregnant we will actually feel the whole uterus
through the rectum and we’ll also be able to detect and feel that ovary
to determine whether the cow is pregnant.
With good technique it is possible to detect pregnancy down to six weeks of age.
This is a really unusual photograph of
a red deer uterus, which is a
pregnant uterus where the fetus has actually been removed.
In the wall the uterus we can see a series of round
ball-like structures which are called cotyledons.
On the surface of the structures you can see the red arteries
which have been filled with a red latex to make them clear
and also the blue vessels which are the veins
which drain the blood from these cotyledons.
I think this makes it very clear
that these structures a very vascular and this is important to provide nutrients
to the fetus.
If you look to the right of the uterus, you can see those two vessels
which are cut and you can see the open lumen of those vessels.
These are part of the umbilical cord which connects
of course to the fetus and provides nutrient supply.
Usually with red deer they only have one fetus in the uterus at a time,
which we call a fawn and the gestation period, or the length of the pregnancy,
is about 240 days.
Once the fetus is born it tends to be about 15 kilograms in weight, which is quite a size.
You can see not only the uterus but
at the bottom of the picture you can see the cervix through which the fetus will pass
on its way out into the open.
This is a fascinating picture. It shows the uterus
of a wallaby. Wallabies are marsupials which are unusual
in that they have paired vagina, cervix and uterus
and these can be seen in this structure.
At the bottom of the picture, we see the cervix and to the left the shrunken, shrivelled structure
pointing to the left is actually the bladder
and we can see that coming into the bladder on the right-hand edge
of the bladder is the ureter, which has come down from the kidney.
The middle structure which looks like a double coiled tube is the uterus.
The other thing that's fascinating
about the reproductive structures of the wallaby is that there are three vagina.
There's one on the right and left, which are the lateral vagina
and the central vagina which goes down to the cervix.
The lateral vagina are where the semen enter into the uterus;
the middle vagina is where the fetus is born.
To the top of the picture we can actually see the uterine horns.
These are separate, unique horns and what's fascinating also about the marsupial is that only
one horn is pregnant at one time.
The left horn may be pregnant initially. Once that fetus is born,
the right horn becomes pregnant, and actually if you look up the side of the horn
you can see two small ovaries attached to the horns themselves.
Another interesting feature of the marsupial’s reproductive system
is that the fetus is actually born at a very early stage of development -
about 27 days of gestation.
So at this stage it is still very immature and incredibly it crawls out
through the reproductive system and then exits the vagina
and climbs up the fur of the mother
and gets into the pouch of the mother where it attaches to the teat
and then develops further in the pouch.
This amazing photograph captures the fetus
of a foal, within or just extracted from the uterus of a mare.
The fetus has been extracted from the uterus and is still encased by the amniotic and chorionic membranes,
so it's quite an amazing dissection - a very, very difficult dissection to do.
This would be more than two foot (60cm) in length,
so it's quite a big structure.
You can see on the right side of the fetus
two of the hooves sticking out and you can see already how they’re formed
in a shape very similar to the adults in a very miniature version.
To the left of the feet we can see a thick cord,
which is the umbilical cord and is crucial
for the blood supply to the fetus, bringing nutrients
and draining waste materials from the foal.
If you look in the uterus itself, the wall of the uterus, you can see
the blood vessels running along the surface of the endometrium, or the wall of the uterus,
and you can also see the rich blood supply in the lining of the uterus,
which is crucial to providing the nutrients for the fetus as well.
The image itself was taken of a specimen at the Royal Veterinary College,
collected from a New Forest pony many, many years ago.
We don't know exactly the circumstances
but we suspect that the New Forest ponies, which are regularly culled,
one of these was probably sent to the Royal Veterinary College for dissection.
As this fetus is only about five months of age,
the mare, which was carrying the fetus,
would not have shown any signs of pregnancy and for this reason, if nothing else,
it wouldn't have been an issue when the animal was culled.
This disturbing photograph shows a specimen that we have at the Royal Veterinary College
of two conjoined piglets, deformities clearly,
which are near-term as you can see from the level of development of the hair
and features of the face and the tail of the piglets.
As vets we're well aware that these conjoined fetuses
can cause many problems
because the size and the bulk of the joined fetuses
means that they can’t pass naturally through the vagina
and so we get what we call dystocia, or difficult birth,
and for this reason usually the only way to remove
these fetuses is through a caesarean.
In these cases, the piglets are not viable and they are usually dead on birth,
but one has to remove them because otherwise the sow would have a mummified fetus.
In this case we can see that the piglets are conjoined
both at the face and also the body level.
This particular condition is called cephalophagus.
This is a small rhesus monkey.
We can detect the ear, the feet, the hands and the skull,
and interestingly enough, which is perhaps not immediately apparent,
from the bottom right-hand corner going up the top-left behind the ear
is the long tail wound around the head.
Under the right armpit we can see the umbilical cord,
which attaches to the discoid placenta
which is just behind the fetus at the back.
This fetus would still be in utero, it had not been born as yet,
and we can see that it's encased in the chorion and amnion membranes
which are very fine membranes, within which are
the fluids which surround the fetus.
To dissect a fetus like this would involve a lot work, because clearly those membranes are very fine
and quite easily broken. But this is a perfect specimen
- absolutely amazing the way it's been captured
My name is Michael Frank, I'm a professional photographer.
Coming from advertising, I got into it
like taking an advertising shot, so it's on black background,
and also because you can't
actually take the specimen out of the jars, so you have to work around the pot,
so everything around is black.
I set up the lights in order not to have
reflections and also to emphasise the
the roundness of the specimen.
This evolved over time because at the beginning it was just shots
of the pots for the website and then I actually realized that
they looked actually like art pieces and that's where the idea came
of removing the pot in post-production,
so basically in Photoshop by cutting it out and cleaning,
because a lot of these pots are quite old and you have a lot of scratches on them and so on
- it’s quite a long process.
As the winner of the Wellcome Image Awards 2015,
it was a great privilege and also a great surprise for me to win this award
- not being an academic and not having anything to do with veterinary science
or other things.
My favourite image out of this series is actually the one that won the overall prize
- the equine fetus
- which is also, strangely enough, the first image of the whole series we did,
so the whole collection started from this image,
so it was kind of great.