Bone Identification Class
The course on Sunday was excellent. Lots of practical, hands on training and a lot of knowledge gained. We went over the basics of determining whether a bone was human or non-human, and even got into estimating age and gender of human remains based on bone characteristics. The latter will never be required in the field, but was interesting nonetheless.
I kept having recollections of episodes from Bones the TV show haha. Some of their dialog in the lab will make more sense to me now :)
Holding a real bone from a real human child in my hand was an odd sensation. For some reason I didn't expect it to be; it's just matter at that point, but nonetheless it provoked a minor emotional response that I did not expect.
It's funny too, how similar the skeletal structure is across species, to the extent that the same bone in entirely different species will be nearly indistinguishable from each other to the untrained eye, even though the full bodies of the animals are wildly different.
I kept having recollections of episodes from Bones the TV show haha. Some of their dialog in the lab will make more sense to me now :)
Holding a real bone from a real human child in my hand was an odd sensation. For some reason I didn't expect it to be; it's just matter at that point, but nonetheless it provoked a minor emotional response that I did not expect.
It's funny too, how similar the skeletal structure is across species, to the extent that the same bone in entirely different species will be nearly indistinguishable from each other to the untrained eye, even though the full bodies of the animals are wildly different.