Effects Of Temperature

Forensic anthropologists are frequently called upon to assist in the recovery and analysis of recently-deceased individuals. Estimating postmortem interval, or PMI, is an important part of a forensic anthropologist's job. The PMI serves two functions. First, estimating PMI can narrow down the potential pool of missing persons and ultimately help to identify the remains. Second, in homicide cases, law enforcement personnel use the PMI to exclude possible assailants. Forensic scientists use many methods to estimate the PMI, but anthropologists tend to emphasize the decay and decomposition of soft tissues. Qualitative "stages" of decomposition that broadly correspond to the PMI have served as rough guides for most estimates made by anthropologists. However, nearly all previous studies have considered decomposition as a thing to be described, not as a process to be scored and used statistically to estimate the PMI. Forensic anthropology might benefit from applying quantitative methods to the study of decomposition. Fly larvae (maggots) associated with decomposing remains grow and develop at a rate...