Anna Katharina Maier
Wet Bone Characteristics Persist in Buried Bone after 10 Weeks: Implications for Forensic Anthropology
Maier, Anna Katharina; Manzella, Alessia; Bonicelli, Andrea; Arnold, Emily L.; Márquez-Grant, Nicholas; Zioupos, Peter
Authors
Alessia Manzella
Andrea Bonicelli
Emily L. Arnold
Nicholas Márquez-Grant
Professor Peter Zioupos P.Zioupos@hull.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Abstract
Assessing the timing of skeletal trauma significantly impacts the reconstruction of events surrounding death and deposition in forensic cases. However, there are no absolute time frames in which the characteristics of wet bone (peri-mortem) fractures transition to dry (post-mortem) fractures. The aim of this study was to attempt to identify a point within the post-mortem interval in which the characteristics of bone change from wet to dry bone properties. A total of 32 deer ribs were placed in a laboratory burial environment and a set of three were fractured with blunt force trauma every week during a ten-week period. All samples and the inflicted trauma effects were documented and analysed by macroscopic observation, scanning electron microscope (SEM) analysis, thermal analysis, biomechanical analysis, and attenuated total reflectance–Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR). No significant difference was found in the macroscopic, microscopic, thermal, and biomechanical analyses of the trauma inflicted over the 10-week period. A significant difference was only found in the carbonate-to-phosphate ratio in analytical chemistry. The results suggest that interpreting wet bone characteristics in forensic anthropology as having been inflicted during the peri-mortem period (around the time of death) should also consider that these, in fact, could be inflicted well after death (post-mortem) as wet bone properties as this study has shown persist at least 10 weeks after death in a burial environment.
Citation
Maier, A. K., Manzella, A., Bonicelli, A., Arnold, E. L., Márquez-Grant, N., & Zioupos, P. (2023). Wet Bone Characteristics Persist in Buried Bone after 10 Weeks: Implications for Forensic Anthropology. Forensic Sciences, 3(3), 491-505. https://doi.org/10.3390/forensicsci3030034
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Aug 21, 2023 |
Online Publication Date | Aug 26, 2023 |
Publication Date | Sep 1, 2023 |
Deposit Date | Sep 4, 2023 |
Publicly Available Date | Sep 5, 2023 |
Journal | Forensic Sciences |
Print ISSN | 2673-6756 |
Electronic ISSN | 2673-6756 |
Publisher | MDPI |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 3 |
Issue | 3 |
Pages | 491-505 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.3390/forensicsci3030034 |
Keywords | Trauma; Forensic anthropology; Biomechanics; Peri-mortem; Post-mortem |
Public URL | https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4373961 |
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Copyright Statement
© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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