Beyond the Body Farm

Most people don’t realize it, but all of us except for the extremely malnourished have pockets of fat behind our eyeballs. If you’ve ever seen photos of concentration camp survivors, you’ll notice that their eyes appear sunken, extremely deep-set in their skulls; that’s because they’ve used up all of their fat reserves, including those small pads behind the eyes.

If you close your hand into a fist and you hit a person really hard, you’re likely to fracture one or more of the bones that fan out through your hand. Those bones are the metacarpals, and this type of metacarpal fracture is called a “boxer’s fracture,” since the most common way of getting one is to punch someone really hard.

When someone drowns, or when a body is thrown into a lake or river, the corpse often sinks initially. Eventually, though, as the body’s own acids and enzymes begin to digest it from the inside out, the process of decomposition creates gases as a by-product. During the “bloat” stage of decomposition, these gases build up in the abdomen, causing it to swell…and transforming a submerged body into what is commonly called a “floater.” In earlier times, people believed that firing a cannon near the site of a drowning could cause the victim’s body to rise to the surface.

Our first step would be to make a mold of the cigar tips, using powdered alginate—a hard, fast-setting, rubbery gum extracted from seaweed. When reconstituted with water to about the consistency of pancake batter, alginate can conform to the most minute, subtle textural details, capturing even fingerprints and skin pores. For that reason, the material was widely used in dentistry and also in Hollywood, where it was used to make molds of actors’ faces, as a step in creating special-effects makeup.

One hallmark of Mongoloid skulls is their wide, flat cheekbones; another is the distinctive shape of the central teeth, or incisors: the back side of the incisors is scooped, or concave, rather than flat; if you look at them from the biting edge, the cross section resembles that of a garden spade or an old-fashioned coal scoop.