From Inside Lions and Leviathans, Anatomist Builds a Following

Joy Reidenberg’s trip from Dublin to New York in January 2009 was without a doubt the most embarrassing flight of her life.

Her skin gave off a foul stench, like a refrigerator that has gone days without power. She told the flight attendants she was sick, and they discreetly moved her to a seat by the lavatory. They told the other passengers that they were having a little trouble with the bathrooms.

In fact, Dr. Reidenberg was perfectly healthy. “The truth was too hard to explain,” she said: “ ‘Don’t mind me, I was inside a whale yesterday.’ ”

Three days earlier, Dr. Reidenberg (pronounced RY-den-berg) had been sitting in her laboratory at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan. Her lab is full of whale flippers and frozen camel heads and the other things that a comparative anatomist keeps around the workplace. The phone rang.

A British television production company was on the line, wondering if she could fly to Ireland that night. They were about to start filming a series about the world’s biggest animals and, by sheer coincidence, a 65-ton fin whale had washed up on the south coast of Ireland. They wanted to film her dissecting it the next day.

Even before that call, Dr. Reidenberg was a well-respected researcher who was not afraid of getting dirty to learn something about how animals work. She has performed well over 400 dissections on stranded whales. (Each one came about through a similar last-minute call. “You can’t preplan a whale,” she said. “You’ve got to be ready as soon as they strand.”)

But her role in the televised whale dissection turned her to into a creature far more exotic than any of the animals she dissects: a celebrity anatomist.

She became a central figure in the series, “Inside Nature’s Giants,” alongside Mark Evans, a veterinary scientist; Simon Watt, a biologist; and the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. The show became a hit in Britain, and now it has arrived in the United States, where four episodes are being shown on public television, with plans for more. (The fourth, in which she dissects lions and tigers, will be broadcast on Wednesday.)

Dr. Reidenberg had to begin the dissection in Ireland by dealing with the bacterial gas that was building to dangerous levels inside the whale’s carcass. “It was inflating like the Hindenburg,” she said. “If you cut in too deep, you end up with a million sausage links all over the place.”

Her solution was to knife a series of holes in the whale’s throat. “It’s like defusing a bomb,” she said. A rush of wind came from each one, producing a symphony of flatulence. It took an hour for all the gas to exit.

Next, she used a meat hook to haul herself about 10 feet up to the top of the 65-foot-long animal, where she carved long incisions into its side. A digger from a local construction company was used to peel away the blubber in long strips. Now Dr. Reidenberg could cut open a doorway into the whale’s gut and haul out the intestines. The next morning, she climbed into the abdominal cavity, where each organ told its own story. She located the vestigial pelvis, a reminder of whale ancestors that lived on land. She extracted the voice box, which was bigger than she was.

After two days of this, she went back to her hotel and tried to clean off the whale grease. Fifteen showers and three baths later, she still had to make up excuses on the flight to New York; it took days for the grease to completely evaporate from her skin.

A couple of weeks later the television producers, happy with their footage, asked her to return, this time to dissect a tiger in London. She went. They called back, again and again, and she returned, to cut open a python, a polar bear, an elephant, a shark and other big animals, all the while explaining their inner workings.

Dr. Reidenberg, 50, had her first encounter with anatomy as a high school student interning for a veterinarian in Norwalk, Conn. The sight of a dog being opened up for surgery captivated her. “We’re so used to looking at the outside of the animal — look how pretty it is, look how fast it can run,” she said. “But there’s a lot of prettiness on the inside that people miss.”

She went to college at Cornell, hoping to become a vet or a medical illustrator. But she gave up those notions when she discovered that there were people who learned new things about anatomy for a living. For her Ph.D., she came to Mount Sinai Medical School to work with Jeffrey T. Laitman, an expert on the anatomy of the head and neck.