45 Autopsy Experts Reveal Their Weirdest And Most Unique Finds: “There Was No Brain”

Had to do one in med school. Drowning victim. Found a catfish in their pocket.

In detective school, we visited the Medical Examiner's Office. One of the decedents in the lab was a middle-aged woman who had been registered as an organ donor. After she died in the hospital, they removed what organs were viable for transplant. Two of these organs were her femurs (removed for marrow for leukemia patients) which had been replaced by 1×3s. I have to say, no matter what I anticipated going in, I did not expect to see lumber inside a dead lady's legs.

An accessory spleen just hanging out attached to the intestines.

Step mom is a funeral director/enbalmer and had a deceased with a 6" tail just below their spinal cord.

A lady had, some 30 years ago, drank draino to unalive herself after her mother died. She lived.
But destroyed her insides. She ended up having her intestines connected to her esophagus as her stomach was removed from too much damage.
What. A. Mess.

Im a funeral directr and was embalming a old woman who was still warm as she had just died like an hour before... i couldn't get any drainage at all l but I had the drain tube in her vein, opened up and the embalming fluid was pushing through it didn't make sense. I started rooting around in her vein and I saw some coagulation in the vein and used forceps to pull out a clot that looked like a tree branch. It was about 7 inches long and had branches from the smaller vessels.

She instantly started bleeding out. She was a great embalming.

Veterinarian

I had a calf that died out in the field at about 14 days after a couple hours of respiratory distress that did not respond to antibiotics. We were expecting it to be pneumonia, which is fairly common in calves.

He had a double outflow right ventricle and just this little flap of nonfunctional left ventricle, so the blood entered the right atrium, went to the RV, out to the lungs, and back to the left atrium, where it entered the RV through a common AV valve. The blood also left the right ventricle through the aorta, so both pulmonary artery and aorta came off the right ventricle. There was significant dilation of the pulmonary artery from pulmonary hypertension and he developed congestive heart failure. Pretty neat, a bit sad, and very unexpected.

Really cool to see a single ventricle heart in a mammal, almost like a lizard, and wild that he made it to 14 days like that.

A horseshoe kidney, both kidneys were fused at the lower ends. Another person had a missing lung lobe, so two lobes on each side, instead of two and three (without having had any surgery).

Horseshoe kidneys ☺️ have seen this twice in my 10 year mortuary career. Huge pericarditis pus build up that was 500ml in volume and bright green. Intestines that had herniated into a man's testicles. Have seen many accessory spleens which are very cute 🥰 I have so many other cool things but these rank up there. Oh just wanted to add that jumping maggots are a thing, fun times!

I don't perform autopsies but I know someone with three kidneys that they have had since birth. Extremely rare.

Edit: I googled it before I posted and google AI says that like 100 people on earth have an extra kidney, but according to this post everyone an their mom has 3/4/5/50 kidneys. I dont know what to believe anymore. Would AI lie to me?!

Once with this strangely pretty cadaver I found a fully calcified gallbladder that looked like a porcelain teacup. Googled it later and it’s apparently super rare and can be linked to cancer. We took turns gently passing it around like some weird Victorian relic.

I'm not dead quite yet, but I have extra bones in my feet! They're called accessory bones, and they're not rare. They aren't usually a problem and are left in place. I found mine because I went to a podiatrist for plantar fasciitis and had x-rays done on my feet.

In Medical School I attended one Autopsie where the Patient had a fistula (connection) between his Aortic artery and his Esophagus. He bled to death that way. Scary to think about that.

At my first and only autopsy, the pathologist scraped some green paste off of the magnum foramen of the skull. I asked what it was, and he said, "A vegetation." I was a h**h school senior at the time, and very very puzzled by that answer.

As an attending radiologist, I see vegetations all the time in vivo now, and I will always think of them as green because of that first autopsy. Except Aspergillis, which is black.

Not my story, but a friend's. She was working on a DOA at a hospital and noticed something lodged in the girl's throat. She slit open the girl's throat to find a baggy full of d***s that the girl had tried to swallow. As soon as she pulled it out, the corpse took a breath and opened her eyes. Cue alarms and doctors and nurses, and apparently the girl made a full recovery.

EDIT: Again, not my story but a friend's. I have no reason to believe she was lying. Adding more detail to this story. I meant DOA as in she was "dead" when she arrived at the hospital. I don't know all the details of how someone gets picked up by ambulance and is pronounced dead. I can not speak to what happened between the time the girl was picked up and the time my friend ended up with the body. I do know I mis-stated the timing of this. She was not performing an autopsy at the time. Which means this probably shouldn't have been put as an answer to this question. I don't know the reason why, but she was picking up the body from the ER to transport to the morgue. It was still in the ER where she noticed the lump and cut open the girl's throat. And for the 3rd time, not my story, so take the truthfulness of it as you will.

Not an autopsy, but with a cadaver I got to work on during a brief stint in nursing school, the poor lady had thick black tar in her lungs from a lifetime of smoking. I was a smoker at the time and it honestly led to me quitting.

During my time as a Veterinary Nurse (I decided I wasn't suited to humans) I got to help with some interesting autopsies in dogs, cats, pocket pets, and even a parrot. I distinctly remember one cat who died as a result of sepsis as her kittens had died and decomposed in her, the smell of her uterus being opened was horrific. Another was a ruptured closed pyometra in a dog, where the infected uterus had burst and filled her abdominal cavity with pus. There were quite a few cancers.

No an autopsy but a human dissection for anatomy class.
We were working on the shoulder area and hit something hard. It wasn’t a bone and made a “clinking” noise.
Turns out our cadaver had a shoulder joint replacement and we were hitting the metal “ball” (for lack of a better term?)

It doesn’t sound like much but it freaked the heck out of a bunch of second year students!!

That was many many years ago and the reason I stopped pursuing medicine!

A massive aortic dissection. The woman's aorta was enormous, wider than a garden hose. EDIT: I meant a fire hose lol.

Back in 1990 was completing a group autopsy in an advanced human anatomy class. 85 year old patient had a tumor in her brain. It was the size of a Golfball on her right lobe. Unknown to her prior to death, her physician. Died in her sleep naturally. The tumor was not malignant but most likely caused some wicked headaches along with other symptoms. The stuff you find. The body is a wonder.

Not human, but I knew a veterinarian whose university cremated all deceased animals on site. A pet owner came a few days after his dog died, asking for his ashes, so someone went out and scooped up some random ashes that were there to give him. The next day the owner called asking if it was the nail in the ashes that had killed his dog - turned out they had scooped up a horseshoe nail in the ashes!