Case Report Essay

Introduction: A young couple was out for an early morning run, where they stumbled upon a human skull. The police arrived at the scene and unearthed two human skeletons lying side by side. The police have a lot of missing people cases and are looking for answers. Like whom these people are? Also can bones tell their story and give there grieving families a closure?

Summary of findings: I started my research with trying to find the sex of the skeleton. The most variable bones in sex determination are the pelvis and the skull. In most cases a pelvis of a woman will have a sub-pubic angle of less than 90 and a greater sciatic notch angle less than 68. After measuring the skeleton, I found the sub-pubic angle to be 80 degrees and a greater sciatic notch angle 65. Most importantly a women pelvis is circular and wide, showing mostly the coccyx. This was found to be the shape of the pelvis from the skeleton. The measurements for the sub-pubic and greater sciatic notch might have been wrong, so I used the shape of the pelvic as the greatest determiner of the sex to be female. This was further proved by examining the skull. In women the external occipital generally has no protuberance, which I found to be true for the skeleton’s skull. To find the ethnic origin I used the skull, more specifically the nasal. The nasal spine on the skeleton was somewhat prominent which is true for an Asian (mongoloid). Also the nasal silling/guttering was rounded also true for an Asian. Another determiner was the shape of the orbital opening was rounded and somewhat square, another characteristic of an Asian. Lastly I found the skeleton’s nasal width to be 20mm and the nasal height to 40mm. Divided together to find the nasal index of .50, which is between the common Asian nasal widths of .48-.53. After finding the ethnic origin to Asian, I was able to use the humerus to find the skeleton’s height. I found the maximum length of the humerus (MLH) to be 29cm. then I used the equation 2.58(MLH) +83.19+/- 4.15 to find the Asian female height range to be 149.05-140.35cm. Next I took the minimum value 140.35cm and divided by 2.54 to get 55.26 which I then divided by 12 to get the minimum height of the skeleton to be 4feet 6inches. I did the same thing for the maximum value of 165.07cm to find the maximum height of the skeleton to be 5feet 4inches. The last thing I found was the age which I used the pelvic. All segments of the sacrum on the skeleton’s pelvic were united with no evidence of epiphyseal unions meaning the pelvic had to be of an Asian woman over the age of 25. This was hard to determine since the bones we had were not real.
Further analysis: Facial reconstruction can be used in this case by using the soft tissue thickness for an Asian woman to reconstruct the

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