|  | Skinless Not Selfless
Serial No. 1258
2002 | |
In the wryly humorous way this specimen was mounted, the nineteenth century fascination with "monstrosities" is evident. It suggests that the people who preserved this still-born fetus viewed it as non-human or at least less-than-human. They ignored the reality that this developmental disaster was some family’s appalling tragedy.
Many viewers of this anencepahalic (the brain fails to develop at all), grossly deformed full term human fetal skeleton mistake it for a bird, a rodent or a reptile. Though morphologically bizarre, this specimen is almost certainly genetically normal. Its chromosomes are more or less identical to those of other "normal" infants; genetically it is as human as any of us.
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