Any one of these photos would make a great album cover for your Danish black metal band. A recent forensic anthropology study at Texas State University, using the remains of those who have donated their bodies to science, is turning up important new information on how vultures eat us when we die.
The skeletal remains of Patty Robinson are shown at Texas State University's “body farm,” officially the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, Thursday, Feb. 9, 2012, in San Marcos, Texas. Robinson donated her body for research at the school. What they're finding at the research facility debunks some of what they and other experts believed about estimating time of death for a person whose remains are found outdoors and exposed to the environment.
(AP / David J. Phillip)
Kate Spradley, an assistant professor at Texas State University, looks over the skeletal remains of Patty Robinson. For more than five weeks, Robinson's body lay undisturbed in a secluded field. Then a frenzied flock of vultures descended on the corpse and reduced it to a skeleton within hours.
(AP / David J. Phillip)
Experienced investigators would normally have interpreted the absence of flesh and the condition of the bones as evidence that the woman had been dead for six months, possibly even a year or more. This recent vulture study has turned that assumption on its head.
(AP / David J. Phillip)
"If you say someone did it and you say it was at least a year, could it have been two weeks instead?" said Michelle Hamilton, an assistant professor at the school's forensic anthropology research facility. "It has larger implications than what we thought initially."
(AP / David J. Phillip)