Thirty anatomic models of vertebrate hearts were produced in order to study the right and left coronary arteries in different species such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. The hearts were injected with vinyl acetate and then submited to corrosion and/or partial corrosion with hydrochloric acid to obtain the anatomical coronary artery model allowing correlation with the evolution of the species and its morphological adaptations. Based on these models we concluded that: the technique using vinyl acetate associated to corrosion produced models of coronary vessels with enough details to visualize the branches; the number of structures and the vascular complexity increased as the species evolved in the zoological scale. In the reptile Iguana iguana a three outlet double ventricle was found, which has not yet been reported as a human congenital disease in the literature surveied.
Coronary vessels; Vertebrates; Models, anatomic
