During the Spring 2012 semester, we completed internships at the Grady Early Forensic Anthropology Research Laboratory (GEFARL). This internship involved projects at GEFARL as well as other work at the Osteology Research and Processing Lab (ORPL) and the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility (FARF). These labs constitute the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State (FACTS), a multifaceted program with the purpose of advancing forensic anthropology and the related sciences through education, research, and outreach.
At ORPL, the processing of human and animal remains took place; this entailed preparing and defleshing donations, forensic cases, and animal skeletal remains for placement in their respective osteological comparative collections. At GEFARL, each intern had their own specific project. Gabriela identified and organized the skeletal fragment collection, and Nicole identified and organized the non-human faunal skeletal collection. At FARF, the interns assisted with donation placements (which included helping catalog, label and document donated specimens) and the daily photographing and notation of decompositional changes of the donations.
Nicole Troutman
Nicole: My internship project at GEFARL was organizing the non-human faunal skeletal collection. This collection includes all of the animal bones that FACTS has collected over the years. At forensic sites it is often imperative that the morphology of certain faunal skeletal remains be known so that remains can be ruled as human or nonhuman. For example, a couple of the more common mistakes include misidentifying turtle shell as cranial fragments, and a bear claw as a human hand. My job was to identify the unknown skeletal elements and create a display on the bookshelves for comparative use by volunteers, graduate students, and faculty, so that mistakes such as these can be eliminated.
I attempted to find one of each skeletal element listed above for each species I had previously identified. After the elements were chosen, I began a numbering system to catalog the entire non-human faunal skeletal collection. I started with the skeletal elements on display, as I had made this my top priority since the display is the first thing people see when entering the lab.
Gabriela Martinez:
Gabriela spent much of her internship in the evidence room; a locked room in the front half of the lab containing the fragment collection, the archaeological collection, the Donated Skeletal Collection, and the Donated Forensic Skeletal Collection. A table in the center of the room is where she did much of her analyses of the fragmented remains, after which she organized on a shelf along the perimeter of the room.
My internship project at GEFARL was organizing the fragmentary skeletal collection. This is largely made up of the fragments that were donated to FACTS by Corpus Christi. When I began in January, the skeletal remains were still in the numbered boxes that they had been received in. While there had been attempts by Corpus Christi to identify the fragments, there were many which had been misidentified. Sophia wanted me to identify the fragments and categorize them by bone so that we could build a known fragmentary collection that people could use to test their osteological knowledge.
In order to make sure that I correctly identified fragment remains, I used the Human Bone Manual (White and Folkens 2005), and Human Osteology (White et al 2012). If these books proved to be unhelpful I would take the fragment in question to Dr. Wescott or Sophia to see if either of them knew what bone it was. For the most part figuring out which bone I was looking at was fairly easy since I had taken Osteology the previous semester. In addition, identifying fragments became easier for me the more I did it and the farther into the semester I got. While I was sorting the fragments I checked for any juvenile bones, as those go in a separate box. In order to determine juvenile bones I would look at the size of the bone and the amount of fusion that had occurred at the epiphyses.
During this project I identified fragments of various sizes. Some would be almost the entire bones, or at least large enough pieces that they could be quickly identified. However, sometimes there were only small pieces of long bones; when this happened I examined the shape of the cross section in order to determine what bone I was looking at. For each long bone there is a distinctive cross sectional shape; in order to confirm that I was identifying the correct cross sectional shape I would use Human Osteology (White et al 2012), which contains images of the different cross sections.
Both:
For both of us, this internship was a refresher course in osteology and human decomposition, and taught us research methods in decomposition studies. At GEFARL, Nicole learned crucial techniques in differentiating between human and nonhuman skeletal remains, and Gabriela learned techniques in identifying remains that were at various levels of fragmentation. Both of these skill sets will be very useful at forensic sites where bones are discovered, allowing the morphology of specific species to be quickly recognized and identify if a bone is human or not, as well as to later determine what skeletal element is being looked at. We would both recommend this internship for anyone interested in the forensic sciences. Having hands on experience with fleshed and skeletal remains can help solidify an appropriate career path. Even if the internship alters an interns’ career goals, it will still provide invaluable data collection experience and knowledge pertaining to the identification of various objects and the utilization of multiple resources in research; skills that are transferable to any laboratory setting.