Identifying the Dead

Post date: 15-Nov-2016 12:57:28

Lucy has persuaded me to enrol on a new MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) with FutureLearn, which is an offshoot of the Open University. she's interested in it because it involves Forensic Pathology, which is her passion. I'm hoping it will help me to keep up with the forensic team when I go out to crime scenes with Jonah. It's being run by the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee.

The first week felt a bit like being back in Primary School. We all downloaded a diagram of a skeleton and had to colour in the bones to show the various different groups.

Then we were taken up to the top of Dundee's Law Hill to view the scene of a (fictitious) grim discovery. A dog has brought back to its owner an object tat turns out to be a human bone. Our first job was to identify it by comparing it with the bone chart that we'd downloaded and coloured in. I correctly decided that it was an ulna, but I got the side of the body wrong (right instead of left). I obviously need to do a bit more work on my human anatomy!

I found the 3-D picture in the PDF document that we downloaded in order to view the bone fascinating. I'd never seen an interactive 3-D image embedded in a PDF before.

This week, we started with some police procedure, which I already knew, before going on to look at soil evidence. It reminded me a bit of some of the stuff I used to do when I was working with Martin Riess on his Earth Sciences projects.

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