Data from: The chinchilla as a novel animal model of pregnancy

Several parameters are important when choosing the most appropriate animal
to model human obstetrics, including gestation period, number of fetuses
per gestation and placental structure. The domesticated long-tailed
chinchilla (Chinchilla lanigera) is a well-suited and appropriate animal
model of pregnancy that often will carry only one offspring and has a long
gestation period of 105–115 days. Furthermore, the chinchilla placenta is
of the haemomonochorial labyrinthine type and is therefore comparable to
the human villous haemomonochorial placenta. This proof-of-concept study
demonstrated the feasibility in laboratory settings, and demonstrated the
potential of the pregnant chinchilla as an animal model for obstetric
research and its potential usefulness for non-invasive measurements in the
placenta. We demonstrate measurements of the placental and fetal
metabolism (demonstrated in vivo by hyperpolarized MRI and in vitro by
qPCR analyses), placental vessels (demonstrated ex vivo by
contrast-enhanced CT angiography) and overall anatomy (demonstrated in
vivo by whole-body CT).