For more than five weeks, a woman’s body lay undisturbed in a secluded Texas field. Then a frenzied flock of vultures descended on the corpse and reduced it to a skeleton within hours.

That kind of sounds like the beginning of a new crime novel, doesn’t it?  But, no, this is serious work.  This is science.

But this was not a crime scene lost to nature. It was an important scientific experiment

I said that already.

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. Now a study of vultures at Texas State University is calling into question many of the benchmarks detectives have long relied on.

Okay, hang on.  Here’s the thing.  Yes, looking at a skeleton which is free from flesh might lead you to assume that it had been there for a period of many months, but wouldn’t experienced investigators at least take the possibility of predation into account?  I mean, there are numerous carnivores, omnivores, predators and carrion eaters out there who will take ready advantage of a free meal.  (If this seems disturbing to you, just think of it as part of that whole circle of life thing.  You didn’t really see this part in any Disney movies, but it’s still part of the circle.)

After all, I teach Forensic Biology, and this is one of the topics that we cover in the course.  If you check the (admittedly rather gruesome) photos of the Maxwell project, you can see that carrion eaters were a problem that we took into account from the beginning, so why wouldn’t experienced detectives also take it into account?

But perhaps I am being needlessly picky.

No.  I don’t think I am.

Back to the article.

The time of death is critical in any murder case. It’s a key piece of evidence that influences the entire investigation, often shaping who becomes a suspect and ultimately who is convicted or exonerated.

And it is also known to be one of the hardest variables to pin down.  The quest for a way to determine time of death is ongoing even as you read this, assuming that anyone actually is reading this.

“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.”

Okay, then.  It’s up to you, dear reader, (if any – we still don’t want to assume) to consider whether or not consultation with a wildlife biologist, an ecologist or a park ranger might have helped.

The vulture study, conducted on 26 acres near the south-central Texas campus, stemmed from previous studies that used dead pigs, which decompose much like humans.

Like Maxwell!

Scientists set up a motion-sensing camera that captured the vultures jumping up and down on the woman’s body, breaking some of her ribs, which investigators could also misinterpret as trauma suffered during a beating.

Now that’s an interesting point.  I didn’t know vultures did that.  Perhaps I should have consulted with a with a wildlife biologist, an ecologist or a park ranger before I read this article…well, it’s too late now.

Researchers are monitoring a half-dozen other corpses in various stages of decomposition, and they have a list of about 100 people prepared to donate their bodies to the project, which the school says is the first of its kind to study vultures.

Scenic Texas…

Actually, this is a fine idea.  This sort of work has been done for quite a while in various facilities around the country.  The most famous is the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility in Knoxwille, Tennesee, but there are others in North Carolina, two places in Texas and one at the the interestingly named California University of Pennsylvania.

“Now that we have this facility and a group of people willing to donate themselves to science like this, we can actually kind of do what needs to be done, because pigs and humans aren’t equal,” Hamilton said.

True enough.

At the farms, forensic pathologists observe the decomposition process in natural surroundings to see how corpses react to sun and shade, whether they decay differently on the surface or below ground and what sort of creatures — from large to microscopic — are involved.

There you go.  In other words, they make use of donated bodies to help give forensic investigators the tools they need.

And, to give credit where credit is due:

The body in the vulture study was that of Patty Robinson, an Austin woman who died of breast cancer in 2009 at age 72. She donated her remains to research, and they were placed in a five-acre fenced area.

Her son, James, said the Texas State research seemed like a worthy project.

She’d be delighted “if she could come back and see what she’s been doing,” he said. “All of us are pretty passionate about knowing the truth.”

The project began after scientists noticed scavenger damage on other bodies, an anomaly that puzzled them because the site several miles north of campus is secured against animal intruders.

Now, here’s the question…should this have been puzzling?  I don’t believe it really puzzled them for more than a moment or two.  How was the campus secured against animal intruders?  With a fence?  Are there any scavengers that might be able to get over a fence in some mysterious way?  Are there, for example, any carrion eaters that could…jump really high, perhaps?  Or, I know this sounds wild…fly?

I suspect that the article isn’t giving the researchers enough credit.  Surely they came to the conclusion that carrion birds such as vultures were the problem almost immediately.

The initial surprise was that it took vultures 37 days to find the body. Researchers visited the site daily and checked the camera for any activity.

Now that one is surprising.  But I thought the initial surprise was that was there was scavenger damage on the bodies…

Now, don’t get me wrong…this is important research and the data which it provides may significantly help law enforcement because it will give us more precise information about how vultures affect bodies.

What gets me is the impression this article gives that none of the people involved had ever even considered the idea that vultures might attack dead human bodies.  Many people have seen vultures eating road kill, so of course they would be a factor in this sort of situation.  That much should be obvious, and I’m sure it must have been obvious to the researchers in question, even though this article makes it sound like they were absolutely stunned to discover it.

Vultures, possums, foxes, coyotes, wolves, dogs, rats, insects and countless other animals out there will eat whatever is to hand (or paw or talon) when they are hungry.  That’s how the world works.  Don’t let it disturb you.  Remember, circle of life.

Hakuna matata, everybody.