It's hard to believe, but this is actually a real human head that's been "plastinated" and then had most of the skin peeled off to show how the facial muscles attach. (And to also show how easy it is to make a dead body look like Mr. Bill if you've got access to plastination chemicals).
It was very similar to the BodyWorlds show I saw back when I was out in LA: They take human corpses, put them through a process called "plastination" which removes all the water from the cells and replaces it with a clear, resin, and then they can present the bodies in all sorts of crazy ways without worrying about them decomposing. (The only difference was that at the BodyWorlds show, all the specimens were willingly donated by the owners; whereas the show in New York was controversial because it came from China and there were rumblings that all the "specimens" might not have been "willingly donated" by the owners!). Anyway, here's a dude sliced up like a cheap deli salami. (That'll teach you to talk bad about Chairman Mao!)
...but from the front it looked like the little unborn baby version of Venom from Spiderman 3. We ended up spending almost three hours there! The exhibition was so awesome, if you ever get a chance to see it, you should go. It gave us all new insights into the wonder that is the human body.
And here's a human fetus (I think around 5 months?) that's had some sort of treatment done to highlight the bones. So amazing. It was really interesting how from the side it totally looked like a human baby...
Towards the end of the exhibit, they had a whole separate section that was filled with fetuses. (It was kept separate because apparently there are people who can look at bodies of dead adults diced up like carrots but can't, Jesus forbid!, stand to look at lil' innocent "unborn angels" treated the same way.) Anyway, here's the plastinated corpses of two siamese twins that died during birth. Crazytown!
In this exhibit, they did the exact same thing except used a solution that left bone intact to demonstrate all the veins, arteries and capillaries around the skull.
This photo (sort of) shows the human circulatory system floating in way. They take a body, drain all the blood, then they fill up the entire circulatory system with a red-colored plastic resin. After the resin hardens, they put the body into a vat of some sort of acid that dissolves everything except the resin. So after months and months in the acid, all the bone and tissue is dissolved leaving behind a perfect "mold" of the circulatory system. Insanity, right? (By the way, please excuse the shitty photos - photography in the exhibit was verboten so these pics are all the result of me shooting on the sly from my hip sans flash.)
