Quote Originally Posted by Khendraja'aro View Post
By the professional metric, having been around people who had to dissect stuff on a regular basis

I'd have expected at least a scalpel, given that those are sharp.
I'm not sure who you're talking to. During human anatomy, we routinely used Stryker saws and hammer/chisel for bones. Scalpels were useful for fiddly bits of soft tissue, but most stuff could be done with a probe and forceps with some scissors thrown in for good measure.

Scalpels and other high quality surgical instruments are very useful for survival surgeries when you need precision above all, but aren't that useful for dissections, to be honest. I only use them for very delicate tasks like severing ACLs/MCLs of rat knees, not the grosser dissections.

Even in surgery, though, we regularly use power tools. This isn't just for animal work - we work with a lot of plastics guys and orthopedic surgeons, and they use them a lot. Obviously the surgical tools are a bit more refined for human work, but basic hardware and tools are often the easiest and most effective for a given task.