I Really Don't Know Where Reginald's Skull Went

The arm and leg bones are a bit
confusing when it comes to proximal
and distal ends and siding them.
They all just look a little bit the
same to start with.

Today Jackie and I went really early to go to open lab.  Almost everyone was there.  This is because the quizes are REALLY hard and on things we haven't exactly learned yet.  My crowing achievement of the day was learning how to side both the fibula, which I has never known, and the tallus, which is part of the ankle and just a really weird bone.  I also figured out better ways to side the scapula, patella, radius, and ulna.  Today was a day fro learning.  today's quiz was really tricky because it included not only whole bones but also fragmentary bones that we needed to identify and side as well as nonhuman bones.  However, besides forgetting the name of the Olecranon Process of the Ulna, I think i did better today than other days.  The fibula was on the quiz.  I was excited.

Today was the Taphonomy day.  This means decomp.  So, after two cups of instant coffee and a lecture on what the environment can do to bones, absolute vs. relative dating, and the difference between antemortem, perimortem, and postmortem trauma, we all sat for a guest lecture on how bones are processed for the lab.  This includes prepping, de-fleshing (be it via beetles or water rot) and preservation.  we got to meet the two beetle colonie that U Mass has, and we got to see some de-fleshing in action as there was a bird being eaten at the time.  We also got to see some water rot (which is soaking fleshed bones in water for months to get the flesh off), but it smelled and none of us wanted to get too close.  Lastly, we say how bones are de-oiled by being soaked in ammonia.  All in all it's a pretty time consuming process.  Also lunch happened.


We watched a movie on the body farm in Tennessee where they allow bodies to sit in different conditions so that anthropologists can measure the rate of decomposition for different situations.  It's helped to solve a lot of crimes, and we can learn a lot from it.  But decomp is also kinda gross.  We also got our assignments four our class blog post and the case study we have to present, which will be interesting.  Jackie and I have the case where forensic anthropology was used to help identify the people in the mass graves in Argentina, the Disappeared.  It's basically about how forensic anthropology can help in human rights violations.

This one isn't dead because I thought that would be too
gross for people to look at.  The dead ones were really
flat.  

The most interesting part of the day, however, was when we went into the field for the first time.  It was nice weather until the the moment we decided to leave, when it started raining, hard.  And we weren't going to learn about our sites.  No.  This was a taphonomy lab, which is a nice way of saying we were trying to discern the time since death for two heavily decomposed opossums, Reginald and Lola.  The answer was four months.  It took a lot of digging around with gloves on to figure that out.  All the insides had mostly decomposed into kinda a liquid mush, and the ground had oil stains from the oil dripping from the body.  Our opossum was missing his skull somehow, which is strange since Nick said it used to be there.  It was kind of interesting though to see the effects of trauma on the bones, since the animal had originally been hit by a car.  It was also cool to see mini versions of all our own bones.  Anyway, it didn't smell as bad as i'd thought it would, which was a pleasant surprise, but I do think I'm more of a lab person and less of a soft tissue person.  He also let people take bones home, since he didn't need fully articulated skeletons to finish his senior thesis

Dinner was PB and J, as usual, and the evening will spent doing homework and starting season two of Dr. Who.  The mystery girl is already quite loud, and it's only 6:30.  Sad day.