DENVER – Standing on his toes to peer over the rail, 11-year-old Michael Seltzer looked down googly-eyed at a plastic-like camel, its humps sliced open for all to see. He had just seen dozens of lifeless humans on this field trip, all of them missing their skin to allow a full view inside.Michael happened to be thinking about his mother.”I really thought it was cool to see the placenta, because my mom is diabetic and so I thought it was interesting to know what part is, like, broken,” Seltzer said, recalling one of the bodies. “Because the placenta is what processes the insulin and stuff.”Then he paused.”Maybe it’s not the placenta. … Let me ask,” he said, running to the nearest parent chaperone. “The pancreas! Yeah, that was pretty interesting.”Millions of people have crowded into museums around the world to see the Body Worlds exhibits created by Gunther von Hagens a decade ago. They have marveled at the cadavers dissected to reveal organs, muscles and other parts living beings aren’t usually accustomed to seeing.But it makes an especially interesting field trip for children, including Seltzer and 24 other classmates from the Jarrow Montessori School in Boulder who visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for Body Worlds 2.The day before the field trip, the children had a line of rapid fire questions about what was to come.Do the bodies keep their eyes? How long does the bodies last? How old is von Hagens? “Are there wolves?” one student asked when she found out about the filleted camel.”A man went to a graveyard and dug up the bodies, and the bodies were preserved,” said Paloma Hernando, offering what she thought she knew about the exhibit.The exhibits have drawn controversy in some quarters. Some Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches say the displays are disrespectful to the dead. Von Hagens says the bodies have been donated and are preserved by a process called plastination in which fluids are replaced with a hardening liquid plastic.The Denver museum and Body Worlds officials formed a committee that included religious groups and medical professionals before the exhibit opened. Archbishop Charles Chaput wrote a letter saying Richard Thompson, the archdiocese’s superintendent of its schools, had advised principals the exhibit was appropriate only for high school juniors and seniors.Not that the Jarrow students, equivalent to 4th through 6th graders, were thinking about all of that.The students were quiet as they entered the crowded exhibit, which starts with bare skeletons and ends with sawed cross-sections of flesh and bones.”I was thinking it wasn’t scary or anything at first because I didn’t know what to think,” said Seltzer. “It’s our bodies, it’s nothing to be really scared about.”As the children continued through the display – and skeletons gave way to whole organs and posed bodies – they became more vocal. Each display brought a new reaction – fascination, awe, disgust.”They just look like they’re giving you the death stare,” said Matt Carlston, 10, who wanted to ditch the tour early but decided to continue. “It’s just weird to see the eyes bulging out.”Caela Bialek, 11, said the bodies looked like something familiar.”It looks like a chicken wing,” she said, looking at a skinless man positioned in a kicking pose with a soccer ball suspended above his foot. “Like when you have a roast chicken and you pull out the wing – that’s exactly what it looks like. So, we actually look like chickens.”Many stared wide-eyed at the human head with only its blood vessels. But most, like Seltzer, seemed to learn a lesson about their bodies and what effect certain lifestyle choices can have.”The education factor is tremendous,” said Angelina Whaley, von Hagen’s wife and conceptual designer of the exhibit.In surveys, she said, 10 percent of Body Worlds visitors smoke less or stop 1 1/2 years after they’ve toured the exhibit.”This is our success,” she said.The Jarrow Montessori children vowed they would not smoke after learning the habit can yield results including the blackened, cancerous lung placed in a glass case next to a pink, healthy one.Ali Delgado, Fenno Hoffman, Matt Offutt, Sachi Cordova and Richard Diani chimed in at the same time that the brain makes up 2.5 percent of a person’s body weight, but requires 20 percent of the body’s blood supply to function.The parents who volunteered to chaperone the trip said they were happy and excited to allow their children to go for the educational experience, but they also prepared the youngsters in advance.Maura Waltrip said letting her 11-year-old son, Cory, see what real organs and nerves look like would be valuable to both of them.”The organs, they are such a mysterious thing to us and being able to what they really see them is so important,” said Waltrip, a physical therapist. “You don’t get that appreciation any other way.”Afterward, many of the children couldn’t explain how they felt. Maybe it was the maternity section, which showed a woman exposing her unborn baby inside her belly and other fetuses lying on pillows or inside glass cylinders.Parent Nancy Rao said the kids starting thinking about themselves as they looked at the fetuses. After all, she said, it wasn’t that long ago they were babies.”It was hard for them,” she said. “It made them sad. I think it made kids think who were these people, what happened to their parents, did their parents die?”A week after the field trip, as they sat on the ground in a circle in their classroom, the children had plenty to say.”I just thought it was weird to see everything out and real,” Carlston said to nods and expressions of agreement from the others.”Along the road people, adults, see dead animals and stuff,” Hoffman added. “But we hardly see that. We just aren’t used to seeing dead things.”—On the Net:Denver museum: http://www.dmns.org/mainBody Worlds: http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/pages/home.asp