The human uterus is about as big as your bladder. I did not know that. Another mind-blower is seeing the human head with nothing but blood vessels left, or seeing a chicken and a rooster in the same fashion. All three look like perfectly shaped molds made out of red steel wool.

I woke up at 7 a.m. to see a dead body. Well, technically, they’re called “plastinates,” but when you’ve got a perfect authentic human preserved in a post-mortem state, it’s a corpse.

But it’s really not. The sting of death is gone at Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, now at the Dallas Museum of Nature and Science. New life has been injected into the science of anatomy and brought the human body into the public domain in an acceptable manner.

The thing is, when you’re used to seeing organs falling apart in formaldehyde jars, you come to accept the human body as an awkward and gross creation that you tolerate just because you’d be dead without it. That’s not going to happen after you see this show.

Bodies sliced down the middle, bodies in slabs. Real skeletons with a cross section of flesh still inside. Whole digestive systems and muscle groups just standing around, waiting for you to come up and check them out.

They’ve got a few human hearts and a few livers, which are a lot bigger than you might think. Smaller than you might think are lungs and kidneys. Another weird thing is the heavily muscled gymnast, hanging from a pair of rings. The guy is ripped beyond belief and you can tell because they removed his entire epidermis and left his chiseled Greek-god form suspended in mid air.

Of course, the biggest mind-blower is the horse. It’s an amazing mixture of art and science. The rider holds his own brain in one hand, and the horse’s in the other. The rider’s brain is about as big as a horse’s hoof, and the equine brain is about as big as its testicles. Men: go figure.

They’ve got babies too. Everywhere else the Body World exhibit has been able to show a few babies that had died of fetal alcohol poisoning and cigarettes and a few other things, but the Dallas morality brigade thought that might be a little too much for us to handle.

The pregnant woman’s amazing. I’m not going to get into details here, but the human body can stretch out in all directions when it needs to.

They’ve got a few unspoken lessons for us, too. The show has some healthy lungs next to those of a chronic Marlboro Man. One pair is smooth and clean and the other looks more like a steak rubbed in asphalt.

Any body system you can imagine is displayed perfectly to scale as it appears inside your own body. You can check out a pulmonary artery matrix or a skeleton with only the nervous system. Basically, if you’re the kind of person who’s ever wiped the blood off a cut to see what’s going on inside, you’re going to walk out of this with as much appreciation as would a drunk leaving a bar.

The strangest thing is how un-weird the whole exhibit is. You would expect to be horrified or lose your appetite, but you can literally poke your head into a human stomach and wonder if your breakfast has gotten about that far yet.

Little things are great. For example, I didn’t know how translucent the bones of a human pelvis are. Even the skull and the fingers leak some light through them.

Modern medicine shows up as well. There’s a human heart with two replaced valves in it, which look exactly like the seal of a beer keg. You’ve got a few replaced joints and one body that looks like it lived to be 110 years old because doctors had to replace almost every single pivoting structure in the body with artificial joints. The joints are weird only because they have exact color and shine of a metal car bumper. Yeah, Granny sports a chrome interior.

If you aren’t the kind of person who works out on a regular basis, don’t worry. They’ve got a fat man in cross pieces. It looks just like a huge slice of low-quality bacon with giant clouds of fat.

They’ve also got the muscular structures of dancers, athletes, and what I would describe as the most beautiful female nude in human history.

So check out Body Worlds, which is located in the Dallas Museum of Nature and Science until May 28.