My main reference: http://www.answering-islam.org/Quran/Science/embryo.html

Keith Moore intro: http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Science/scientists.html

I’m partly responding to this video (and it’s part 2): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xw9VXrw-Vk

Journal article on Greek author Galen’s conception theory: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4330958?seq=2

Sahih Muslim
Book 033, Number 6390:
Abdullah (b. Mas’ud) reported that Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) who is the most truthful (of the human beings) and his being truthful (is a fact) said: Verily your creation is on this wise. The constituents of one of you are collected for forty days in his mother’s womb in the form of blood, after which it becomes a clot of blood in another period of forty days. Then it becomes a lump of flesh and forty days later Allah sends His angel to it with instructions.

That would make the Mudghah stage, the stage where the fetus would be predicted by Mohammad to look like a mouthful of chewed meat, from 80 – 120 days.

Here are a couple of images of 12 week (84 day) fetuses:

Click on images for more information.

Meet Galen. He’s the Greek I quoted in the video as describing four stages of embryonic development that match closely with those mentioned in the Quran.

He was writing in about 150 AD.

The rest of the above video is interesting too

Journal article on Greek author Galen’s conception theory: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4330958?seq=2

Here’s the relevant Quranic verses with four embryonic stages:

Thereafter We made him (the offspring of Adam) as a Nutfah (mixed drops of the male and female sexual discharge) (and lodged it) in a safe lodging (womb of the woman).

Then We made the Nutfah into a clot (a piece of thick coagulated blood, Arabic alaqa), then We made the clot into a little lump of flesh (Arabic Mudghah), then We made out of that little lump of flesh bones, then We clothed the bones with flesh, and then We brought it forth as another creation. So blessed be Allâh, the Best of creators. (Al-Mu’minun 23:13-14)

Here’s Galen’s writing on four embryonic stages:

But let us take the account back again to the first conformation of the animal, and in order to make our account orderly and clear, let us divide the creation of the foetus overall into four periods of time. The first is that in which. as is seen both in abortions and in dissection, the form of the semen prevails (Arabic nutfah). At this time, Hippocrates too, the all-marvelous, does not yet call the conformation of the animal a foetus; as we heard just now in the case of semen voided in the sixth day, he still calls it semen. But when it has been filled with blood (Arabic alaqa), and heart, brain and liver are still unarticulated and unshaped yet have by now a certain solidarity and considerable size, this is the second period; the substance of the foetus has the form of flesh and no longer the form of semen. Accordingly you would find that Hippocrates too no longer calls such a form semen but, as was said, foetus. The third period follows on this, when, as was said, it is possible to see the three ruling parts clearly and a kind of outline, a silhouette, as it were, of all the other parts (Arabic mudghah). You will see the conformation of the three ruling parts more clearly, that of the parts of the stomach more dimly, and much more still, that of the limbs. Later on they form “twigs”, as Hippocrates expressed it, indicating by the term their similarity to branches. The fourth and final period is at the stage when all the parts in the limbs have been differentiated; and at this part Hippocrates the marvelous no longer calls the foetus an embryo only, but already a child, too when he says that it jerks and moves as an animal now fully formed (Arabic ‘a new creation’) …

… The time has come for nature to articulate the organs precisely and to bring all the parts to completion. Thus it caused flesh to grow on and around all the bones, and at the same time … it made at the ends of the bones ligaments that bind them to each other, and along their entire length it placed around them on all sides thin membranes, called periosteal, on which it caused flesh to grow.

Here’s the original Greek:

Corpus Medicorum Graecorum: Galeni de Semine (Galen: On Semen) (Greek text with English trans. Phillip de Lacy, Akademic Verlag, 1992) section I:9:1-10 pp. 92-95, 101