In 2004 or so, Peter Marvit and I tried to find stereotaxic coordinates for the inferior colliculus of the ferret. We found an abstract in some conference proceeding from the 80's to the effect that someone had tried (I have to find that abstract again, I think it came from Agricola). So we tried to contact the authors and found one, Professor Paul Andrews from St Geroge's Hopital Medical School. He wrote something to the effect that they had tried to make a ferret brain atlas but had never finished or publised the atlas. A few weeks later, we received what appears to be the draft of an atlas for the ferret brainstem. Since we were interested in the midbrain, we put the atlas to the side.
When I moved my lab to College Park, MD, I found the atlas again, noticed the hand-written annotations and whiteout and all (could this have been the main draft?) and decided that it would be a shame to keep this atlas away in a box, so I decided to scan it, clean up a little bit, and put the drawings and the pictures in register.
Here's the introductory text, OCR'ed.
A guide to the ferret brainstem
Jan Hawthorn
This guide is intended to help with the localization and identification of anatomical structures in the ferret brainstem. It is not intended as an accurate guide for computing stereotaxic co-ordinates. The size of ferret brains are not directly related to body weight (as occurs with other species) and as yet there is no simple method for determining co-ordinates in a ferret of a given size. However using several areas as "landmarks" much information may be gained.
The brain used in this guide was taken from a 1.05 kg male albino ferret and had been fixed in formol saline for six months. The brainstem was separated from the mid-brain and placed horizontally on a flat surface. The block was cut at right angles to the horizontal plane to produce a face for mounting on the microtome chuck. Thus all sections are 90 degs to the horizontal plane. The sections were cut at 60 um on a freezing microtome and every alternate section was mounted. Therefore it is possible to calculate the distance of any section along the brainstem using the obex as a reference point. The sections were stained using thionin and mounted using D.P.X.
Sections were placed on a microfiche viewer for drawing. The magnification is x 22.5. The drawings were labelled using stereotaxic atlases for rat and cat for comparison. I am indebted to Dr. C.C. Chumbley (Department of Anatomy, St. George’s Hospital Medical School) whose knowledge of neuroanatomy was invaluable in this part of the task.
The sections were photographed using a Zeiss Orthophot onto 3 1/2 x 4 3/4 Ilford FP4 film. They were printed on Kodak polycontrast paper using appropriate filters.
J.H.
September 1985
First a table of the brain weight as a function of the body weight. And a cross section of a ferret skull .
Finally a scan of the atlas. Pictures 17 and 30 seems to be missing, photograph 41 was present twice and drawing 43 too. The "in register" was done by me in Canvas X, after some stretching and rotating and in some cases tilting of the drawing.
Abbreviations