Ologies with Alie Ward - Osteology (SKELETONS/BODY FARMS) with Daniel Wescott

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

Let's dig right into Spooktober with ... BONES. You're a steak-covered skeleton and it's nothing to fear. The amazingly kind and committed osteologist Dr. Daniel J. Wescott of Texas State University's famed Forensic Anthropology Research Center sits down -- surrounded by skulls and femurs and ribs -- and chats about how bones are formed, how they break, why they might hurt when the weather changes, what CSI gets wrong, how long it takes a body to decompose, looking for isotopes in found remains, cast iron coffins, skeleton myths, body donation, and more. Will Alie freak out, or will this exposure to hundreds of skeletons under one roof chill her out? Also, dickbones: are they for winners or losers?A donation went to the Texas State Forensic Anthropology Research Center Sponsor links: kiwi.com/ologies; withcove.com/ologies; HelloFresh.com/Ologies80; More links up at alieward.com/ologies/osteologyBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and STIIIICKERS!Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologiesFollow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWardSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick ThorburnSpecial thanks to Dr. Joe HansonSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's your old pop here, helping you make a robot costume out of boxes and aluminum foil. Alley word. Back with another episode of Allergies and the first in our month of Spooktober. Five Tuesdays of creepy and cozy and scary and chilly topics and we're starting with one that's in the room right now. Your skeleton. Skeletons?

Look around. A skeleton sitting next to you on the subway, they're surrounding you, surrounding you in the office. A skeleton made that warm dirty chai latte that you're cradling. But before we dig into bones and body farms, let's do some business up top. First off, thank you to everyone on Patreon for supporting Allergies and submitting your wonderful questions. Thanks to everyone wearing Allergies merch from olergiesmerch.com.

Thank you to everyone who rates and hits subscribe and of course to the folks who leave a review, which you know I creepily read. For example, Jann who said, I recently got sober and with that has come a renewed passion for learning. Filling the time I would have been drinking with learning about anyology you could possibly imagine has been invaluable to me. I love hearing the incredible passion of the guests when they talk about the subjects they clearly love so much.

It's infectious. Thank you. Thank you and congrats. It's an honor to be in your ears as always. Now let's get into another infectious episode. Okay, osteology really. This comes from the Greek for bone, which is osteon. And this guest is anologist many times over.

He's a professor of anthropology and director of the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University. And he got his bachelors from Wichita State University studying anthropology, got his masters from Wichita State studying skull bones and his PhD at University of Tennessee at Knoxville in biological anthropology. Guy knows his skellies. Huge thanks, by the way, to Dr. Joe Hansen who makes excellent top-notch science content. He created It's Okay to Be Smart and Hot Mess on PBS.

So follow him and Dr. Joe Hansen on all the social media. Thank you for hooking me up with thisologist, Joe. Okay, so thisologist. He also runs a forensic anthropology research facility. This is located on a 3500 acre ranch site, Freeman Ranch outside of San Marcos, Texas. It's one of only seven of its kind in the country and it studies human decomposition rates. So with roughly 50 or so human bodies in various states of decay, forensic anthropologists

can gather all this data and it helps law enforcement agencies solve crimes, identify remains of folks that have died, missing persons. It's very important work. It features wooded areas with shallow graves and an open pasture with vulture-picked bones. There's lush grasses sprouting between ribs of body donors. As a person who once had a panic attack as a child, just seeing a cemetery, this body farm would have just been my nightmare. Now I didn't visit it, not because I didn't want to, theologist was just busy, but I did

meet with him in his office, which is a few winding miles down an oak tree lined road past the Texas State University's main campus and his office is sandwiched between a barbecue restaurant and a funeral home. So sure, went through some double glass doors into a lobby with just a full wall cabinet of skulls and femurs and human vertebrae into this large, gleamingly clean lab. There are towering shelves above us that had rows and rows and rows of cardboard boxes in size somewhere between like a shoebox and a coffin, maybe like what a thigh high boot salesman would bring out from the back to try on for size.

Now in each, a human skeleton. Now did thisologist seem like a person who spends the majority of his waking hours on earth helping college students bury bodies in a thicket? Will I get freaked out? You're gonna have to listen. So take a load off your very weary bones and settle in for a discussion about how skeletons grow and how hard they work to support you and what life stories you can glean from the remnants of a death and cleaning femurs and animal versus human bones and crime drama slip-ups

and why, despite this being spooktober, maybe you shouldn't be so scared of the things that lurk below your surface with forensic anthropologist and human, human osteologist Dr. Daniel Westcott. Do you make people address you as Dr. Westcott? No. No? Never. Do you have to wear a lab coat? I have a lab coat.

Yeah, you do. But I don't always wear it. Are you a forensic osteologist, a forensic anthropologist and osteologist? How do you describe what you do in terms of knowledgy? Well, so I'm an osteologist, so I study bones. Within that, there's a lot of different ways that you can look at it. So there's a lot of areas of study that are associated with osteology, so like paleopathology, which is looking at bone diseases or mainly bone diseases, paleoanthropology that's looking

at fossil ancestors and stuff like that, bioarchaeology that's looking at human populations, typically archaeological, and then forensic anthropology, which is typically focused on the individual. As a director of the Forensic Anthropology Center, I do a lot of stuff where I'm looking at how do you identify a specific individual. So in that sense, I would consider myself a forensic anthropologist. But I also do bioarchaeology work. I also do anthropology.

So I've done some research looking at like homo erectus specimens. So it's that applying that osteology knowledge, forensic anthropology is really the application of osteology. So many ologies. There is. There's so many ologies in my lab, yes. And what is osteology? How would you define it?

It's simply the study of bone. So I mean, obviously, I focus on human osteology. You could be a million osteologists, a dinosaur osteologist, you know, whatever. Somewhere in the world, there is someone studying the bones of wild cats, and they are an awesome lot of osteologists. Even like within forensic anthropology, a lot of what I do is I tell people, this is not human. You're an animal.

I know. So. Does that happen a lot? I noticed you were right across from your ribs place. So does that happen a lot with cattle bones? Oh, yes. Just someone's lunch. Yeah.

So one of the things that we frequently get that's kind of interesting is we get the knee joint of pigs or in deer. And that's because it's basically a hammock, you know, they were cutting it. So you're like, this is a pig patella wind up all over the place and people, you know, because people throw them out and they find up in people's yards, dogs, drag them around, things like that. So we get a lot of that whenever, you know, they're doing a search for a missing person and they find lots of animal bones, obviously.

So we get pictures associated with that that they send to sort of bring in bones for us to identify. I can always tell whether it's human or non-human. And then the question then is how much detail they want. And if that's the case, then I can usually go in and get a pretty good idea of what animal was, even if it's not quite down to the species level, at least, you know, in broad terms, like in the deer family or as a carnivore, you know, things like that. Are people usually relieved or bummed out when they find out it's just a pig knee?

Well, for the police, they're really excited because it's just saved them hours and hours of work. So it used to be that when I first started, they would, you know, spend all this time out on a case and everything else they bring it in. They'd go to the medical examiner's office. I would go get called to medical examiner's office. I'd walk in and go, it's not human work here is done. So now most, you know, with cell phones, everything, most of the time they're out on the scene

and they, you know, get called and they just send me a picture and I just immediately send them back. So it's not human. And they just say, OK, thanks. So they can just walk away. So it saves them hours of time. Yeah. Yeah.

So in that sense, people that private citizens that send us stuff, they're usually bummed out because they're hoping that they found a human bone. So we'd actually just had a, for example, I had a middle school teacher send me a picture of a bone that one of her students found. And very close to where that was found with that about in August, they found a 800 year old femur of a human. So this kid was obviously excited that he'd found part of the same person or something like that.

And it was just a cow bone. Oh, man. By the way, this first human femur was the discovery of a Parker County, Texas man who was out fishing a few months ago and spotted it floating near the banks of a river. Now he took it home. And his mother-in-law apparently suggested, hey, that's human sized as far as bones go. And lo and behold, he had experts look at it and it dated from around the year 1200. So it's thought to be the remains of a member of the Cato Nation and will now be returned

to its descendants. Now as for the middle school student who found a cow bone, maybe he'll grow up to be a Danny Westcott. But a lot of times people are excited, even with that is just to know a little bit about what's going on, you know, even if it's an animal, what kind of animal it is. And this goes back to your own childhood, correct? Like you used to wander the woods and look for bones. When did this start for you?

Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah. I was a little kid. I used to write up the street from us, was completely undeveloped. And so I would go out there and search for bones and find skeletons and try to figure out what kind of a skeleton was because I didn't know anything about bones at all. But I would try to figure out what kind of animal it was and stuff like that. So I've always had a fascination with bones.

And you know, it's kind of the other thing about, you know, your bones is kind of a written history of your life in those bones. So you can reconstruct whether it's a human or other animal, you can reconstruct a lot of things about not only, you know, their diet and stuff like that as a species, but also what that individual was doing. Interested in osteology, you can always start small, like teeny tiny balls of hairy bird vomit. Did you ever put together owl pellets?

I've done a few things with owl pellets. Actually, my daughter just did a thing where she dissected out an owl pellet and looked at all the little mouse bones and stuff in it. Was it hard for you not to be like, I want to help you, but I know this is your project? Of course. You're like, I'm so good at this. At what point did you decide to pursue osteology as a career? What point did you figure out, oh, me collecting shoeboxes full of bones is actually a job?

Yeah. When I was, so I was in the army for a while and then I got out of the army and decided to go to college. And so I had no idea what I wanted to do, but what I decided I would do was go into engineering and what I wanted to do was kind of design workshops and stuff like that. And so I started taking courses, you know, obviously, you know, your prerequisite courses and stuff like that. I was always interested in like archaeology and stuff like that.

So it took a general anthropology course. And when I was in that class, there was the right next to the class was actually a library associated with the anthropology department and I would go in there before class and study. And one day I was studying in there and one of the biological anthropologists who was actually a forensic anthropologist as well came in and she said, somebody brought this, they found some bones in a field and is anybody interested in looking at them? So I went in and, you know, started working with her on this and it was three individuals and they were kind of interesting.

It was prehistoric skeletal remains. They had one of them was had like a pipe stem notch, you know, so you could clearly tell they were using it, smoking a pipe. But basically from that end, I just switched. Yeah. You're like, oh, this is where it's at. Yeah. This was definitely because I didn't realize that there was something that I could, yeah,

actually study bones. They make a living that so. I asked and much like the paleontology episodes, Dr. Michael Habib, Dr. Westcott, is an into puzzles. So what drives him? So you know, I really like research and I like because I like trying to answer questions that either nobody's ever asked before, no, no, it's been solved before. With osteology is kind of the same way.

It's like, can I figure out what's going on either with this population, if I'm doing bioarchaeology or this individual when I'm doing forensic casework? So. And let's get to the basics of what is a bone? What kind of layers are happening in a bone? I know that that's so basic, but there's a marrow. I'm sure there's some kind of outer cuticle. I'm not positive.

Yeah. So, okay. So this is the other thing too, is that we often think of bone as being this static. It's a living organ. So it can change and reshape itself and everything else while you're alive. But it's a lot different than other organs in the fact that it's got an organic component. So this is made up of what's called osteoid. And this is what gives it its kind of elasticity to it, right?

So it kind of gives it some flexibility. As a matter of fact, you know, well, favorite thing for like kids to do is if you put, you know, a bone in vinegar and let it set for a couple of months, all the, the inorganic component of it will kind of dissolve away and then you can pull it out and you can twist it into a knot or whatever you want to. What? Yeah. I didn't know that.

Yeah. PS, I just went down in YouTube rabbit hole watching people bend chicken bones that have soaked a week in white vinegar. And yes, they are rubbery and twisty. And for some reason it made me want to barf and take a long shower in the fetal position. Bones shouldn't do that. Also only have a day or two and need to make a bone revoltingly pliable. The cleaner CLR dissolves calcium.

So it gets the job done. But unlike the video tutorial I watched, can you please wear gloves before you dip your soft, alive human hands into a cup of high strength janitorial solvent? Appreciate it. But yes, the acids dissolve the calcium and my peace of mind, apparently. And then so it's got the organic component that's got this, you know, the pliability to it. And then it's got the inorganic component, which is calcium phosphate mainly.

And that's what gives it its stiffness. So you know, ability to resist bending and stuff like that. And there again, the other way to look at, if you want to do a little study on that, you take it and just put it in like an oven and cook it for long enough until it's, you know, starting to turn white and then you can drop it and it'll just shatter. Because you've removed all of the organic component of it, you've kind of baked that away. Oh my gosh.

I didn't know that at all. Yeah. Okay, I looked it up. What you're breaking down by baking is the collagen in the bone, which is what makes it flexible. So brittle bone disease can result in easy fracturing and it stems from an issue with collagen production. So bones need to be both strong, calcium phosphate, and flexible collagen and other

stretchy components in order to work in your favor. So strength and flexibility. It's good for bones, good for negotiations, and just general character traits, I think strong and flexible. So it's got these interesting characteristics to it. And then on the, so typically if you look at like a typical long bone, which is just a bone that's longer than it is wide, then you have the shaft, then you have the ends that are used to refer to as the pipsies.

And then, so that's where the joints are also at. And so what you tend to see is in the shaft, you have this really thick, dense outer bone called cortical bone. And then inside you would have yellow bone marrow. So that's where you store fats and stuff like that. And then in the ends, you have the thin outer bone. And then inside you have what's called trabecular bones, and it's a spongy bone. And the thing about the reason you find that in the joints is that it's really good at

absorbing energy. So you think about like if you go jogging, you're actually, every time your foot hits the ground, you're basically have an equal reaction going back up through your bone. And so you've got to be able to absorb that energy. So these little, they have what was called trabeculae. So these little trabeculae bend, and so they can absorb a lot of energy, and then they also then concentrate that energy down into the cortical bone that's really stiff. So it keeps you from breaking your bones basically when you're doing something.

So to recap, your cylindrical bones are made of bundles of other cylinders called osteons. And the cortical bone, a.k.a. the compact bone, is more dense, and it provides a lot of the structure. This accounts for 80% of the mass of a human skeleton. But the spongy bone, a.k.a. the cancerous bone, a.k.a. trabecular bone, is less dense, and it only accounts for 20% of the mass of your skeleton, but it has 10 times the surface area. So go look in the mirror and just be like, hey, look at you.

Smoke and hot babe, look at your bone structure. Amazing down to the cellular level. Within that is what we call the red bone marrow, and this is where your blood cells are produced. And blood cells are produced in your bone marrow, which is so, I guess, bananas to think about, to think that you just have these long blood factories running inside your structures. Do you ever think about that? Sure. I mean, it's interesting.

So that's the thing is that it's like anything else. Why you got put in the bone? I don't know. But your kidneys are the ones that are monitoring your blood cells. And when you are low, they release a hormone that then targets the bone to start producing more red blood cells or white blood cells or whatever you need. But the kind of things that you see that's interesting associated with that is like, if you look at archaeological stuff, when you start having heavy bacterial infections

or diets that are low in iron, you'll start getting kids that are overproducing red blood cells. And they form what's called Criboorbital and Protic Hyprostosis because they're basically just cranking out these blood cells. And then when it comes to healing a bone, if you've got like a fracture, how does that healing happen? So well, you know, it's obviously a complex process. But the first thing that happens is so your bone is surrounded by what's called periosteum.

So it's a tough connective membrane that surrounds it. And that's where a lot of the major blood vessels that go into your bone are. And if so, if that gets torn, and as a matter of fact, that's what when you feel pain associated with a bite could have bone. That's what it is, is that you've torn your periosteum. Okay. So periosteum, meaning right next to the bone, is a fibrous vascular connective tissue, kind of like if you shrink wrapped a carrot, tearing it, yeah, boy, how do you know, thank you.

But that blood then starts to form a clot, right? And then the other thing that if you have a bone that breaks, there's going to be these jagged edges and stuff like that. And you don't want those every time you move for those to keep tearing things and stuff like that. So you actually have bone cells called osteoclasts that actually an osteoclasts remove bone. And so they go in and actually kind of remove the dead bone and round off the sharp edges and stuff like that.

At the same time, you have bones producing cells called osteoblasts and they start to lay down what's called woven bone. It's laid down really fast. It's very random in nature, but it's relatively, relatively strong, but it can be laid down rapidly. And of course, yes, your body would be hard at work, literally taking the edge off so that your bone doesn't act like jagged shives shredding you from the inside and hurting like a bitch.

Mm-hmm. And then over time, the bone cells then just replace that. So the osteoclasts remove it and new osteoblasts lay down new bone until they form the kind of the adult lamellar bone over that. Have you ever broken a bone? I have broken my wrist, yeah. Oh, did you have to wear a cast? I did for a long time, yeah.

Did you think about what was going on inside there or were you an osteologist? I was not an osteologist at the time, so. Really? I didn't think of it too much at the time. I think about it all the time now. Really? Yeah, because I still have problems with that wrist, and so I frequently look at it. And it's kind of interesting, you know, I'll be looking through the skeleton of one of

our donors and they'll see something and I think, oh, I bet your mind looks something like that. Were you rollerblading? No, I was riding a motorcycle. It's always doing something fun that gets not fun. At some point, I feel like a wrist fracture is like, well, you were having fun at the time at least. Does it ever bum you out that you are not going to be able to see your own skeleton?

Yeah. As a matter of fact, I have actually contemplated actually getting a CT scan and then printing my skeleton. How can we get this? How can we have this happen? Money. Yeah. I think you should apply for an art grant.

Yeah. So, yeah, and I always thought it would be kind of interesting then to give that skeleton to my students to figure out who it is. Oh, my gosh. And how much of the work that you do in osteology involves recent human remains versus maybe hundreds of years old? It just depends on the studies that I'm doing. So, more recently, I do a lot of stuff for recent individuals because, for example, one

of those areas that I'm doing a lot of research in is looking at the effects of obesity on the skeleton. And I'm not necessarily doing it for health worship. So, what I'm doing is that we know through lots of studies, clinical studies, that obese individuals have a slightly different gait pattern than non-obese individuals. And therefore, that should directly affect the underlying trabecular bone, that spongy bone, again, because that constantly changes through your life, depending on the forces that are placed on it.

And so, we have an idea of how that should work, but we don't always know, like, for example, if you put greater force to those trabecular thicken, or do you get more of them? And so, the nice thing about looking at, you can use obesity as kind of this natural experiment on that. What I'm there, I'm looking at people that I have really good documented records on. For my dissertation, what I did was looked at prehistoric and proto-historic people of the United States and looked at how mobile they were by looking at their bone structure.

Wow. And how do you have to handle remains that have been found versus donor remains? Like, when you're looking at prehistoric, say, indigenous populations, which I imagine must come up with building sites and things, what kind of protocol do you have to use to make sure that they're treated with? Yeah. So, any, especially now, they fall under NAGPRA. NAGPRA, side note, stands for Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

It was passed in 1990, and it protects sacred or funerary objects and human remains, and it gives a protocol, essentially, for museums and federal agencies to return these items to their descendants, to tribes and to native peoples. So if you want to know more about what's happening right now in this whole vein, there's actually a NAGPRA review committee meeting via teleconference on October 30th. It's open to the public to just dial up and listen in. So you can find the Google form to join. It'll be up at my website, alleywar.com, slash, ologies, slash, osteology, or at nps.gov,

slash, NAGPRA. So get the info, hop on the horn, learn more, and we can all be better advocates and allies. And so, you immediately, matter of fact, anymore before they're even removed from the ground, the tribes are consulted as far as are we going to remove them or not going to remove them and stuff like that. If they are removed, then there again, with consultation with the tribes, as far as what kind of analysis these are done, you know, can, especially if there's going to be any kind of destructive analysis or anything of that nature.

When I did my dissertation, it was using collections that were Smithsonian that had been collected back in the 50s and 60s, so they were very different collections, although most of those have been repatriated now. If it is a frenzy case, then it becomes, you know, evidence. So you have to follow chain of custody, it's always where it means, you know, in a locked room. Matter of fact, for us, when we do casework, we have a single room where the only people in that room are the people that are working on the case.

And then when you leave, it shuts, you know, locked behind you. So there's no access to it otherwise. So that involves found remains. But remember, Danny also runs a body farm. And then for the, for the donation, donated collection on the other hand, that's the whole point of it. The people are donating their bodies to be used for research. So we have people from all over the world to come and study these skeletons because they,

we have so much information about the individuals and about their life and stuff like that that can be valuable if you're trying to tease out small differences. Oh, so since you have a background on them, you can maybe correlate perhaps what you see in the bones to kind of verify, okay, they were a runner or they did, they tended to have this kind of lifestyle and this is what happens to their bones. Exactly. Okay. What types of stories and what types of conclusions can you come to by looking at bones?

What can you tell about a person based on their skeleton? I know for you, you can almost immediately tell if it is male or female remains. I've read that about you that you're like, boom, like, ask, ask Westcott. Yeah. Male or female usually, you know, that's kind of across the room, yeah, female or female. But you know, obviously you can tell their age, the younger they are, the more accurate and precise that age estimation is. You know, if you're looking at fetal remains, you can get within, you know, a week out

of how old they are. If you're looking at a 90 year old, you're talking about within decades of how old they are. But you can get an age, you can get some information about their ancestral background. You get information about their health status, even things like how tall they were compared to how tall they probably had the potential being, all that kind of stuff gives you some ideas about their health, looking at their teeth, you know, do they have pitting and stuff in their teeth that's associated with a disease or something like that.

What causes pitting in teeth? You ask me to ask Google? We'll do. Okay, so tuberous, sclerosis, celiac disease, those are a few conditions. Honestly, I could really just sink my teeth into an odontology episode because teeth are so weird, so gross, so helpful when it comes to not swallowing a calzone hole like a python. Anyway, what other bony clues speak for us after death? And then you can tell, you know, general activity patterns.

So, you know, were they using, like their upper limbs, one of their lower limbs, were they running, you could probably tell the difference between a soccer player and a long distance runner because they're putting slightly different forces on their bones and so they got their bones are going to wind up in a different shape. That can a lot of times relate to even things like occupations, you know, or at least a manual labor or non-manual labor. And even a lot of that stuff still stands today. As a matter of fact, I just had a student who did her master's thesis where she looked

at, in our collection, looked at manual versus non-manual labor because the idea, you know, 100 years ago, a manual labor would have been somebody who was, you know, lifting crates but physically lifting the crates where now somebody that had that same job would be using a forklift. But it turns out that they actually still are more physically active and you can you can detect that. Will you be able to tell who did CrossFit in the future? Like this guy was out there turning tires and a gym.

I'm okay. I'm fine. I'm fine now. I think you probably could. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not maybe not specifically what they're doing, but yes, in general, you know, that they were doing something of that nature, you know, you can tell a lot of that.

So side note, another really amazing program in the Texas State Forensic Anthropology Department works to identify and return if possible human remains that have been found along the South Texas border. And it's called Operation Identification or OPID and it's led by Dr. Kate Bradley. And I was looking on their website and it was just heartbreaking so I'll read it verbatim but it says, most counties were overwhelmed and began to bury the undocumented migrants. Most without proper analyses or collection of DNA samples, without documenting the location of burial, leaving little chance that these individuals will ever be returned to their

families and in turn families are left without knowing what happened to their son, their daughter, mother, father, brother or sister. And so the work that Dr. Bradley directs there helps to find the origin of those folks who have lost their lives on that journey. How do they even go about that? The isotopes in the bones can tell you that because basically your bone is recording the history of the water you drink and where, you know, stuff like that. Wow.

Is there something about the narrative that interests you in the job? Is there something about people's history that keeps you engaged as well? Oh yes. I mean that's the whole point of is to understand, you know, I mean I really got started in a lot of this looking at, especially like prehistoric skeletal remains looking at what can we actually tell about the lifestyle of people and differences between, you know, what males and females were doing. So they give you an idea of the structure of the society, when did kids start participating

in adult activities, a lot of that you can tell from the skeletal remains. Wow. All kinds of stuff like that. The whole idea is kind of that long, that population history and stuff like that. But then if you're doing an individual one, for example, we did, I did a case one time where they were digging in a cemetery, which, you know, and found a coffin and you think, well, we guys had a big deal, but nobody was supposed to be in that grave and it turned out to be, you know, a cast iron coffin, which is kind of unique in itself.

And so we tried to figure out who this person was and then follow the history, you know, by doing that, we had to go back and look at, you know, census records and all kinds of stuff to figure out who it was. So and then following the history of this person, once we figured it out, pretty much who it was. Who was it? Can you say? Well, I guess I don't remember her name right now, I can look it up.

But she died in 1854. She was 26 years old. She of tuberculosis. So a little background, this was in 2006 in Lexington, Missouri, and it turned out to be Elizabeth Triplett Stewart, who died in 1854 around the age of 20 to 30. And I found a paper that Dr. Westcott had published and I'll also link to it on my site, but they could tell from her flattened ribs and her burial garments that she had worn restrictive clothing for most of her life.

So I'm guessing that she wore some kind of boned corset just right in the afterlife. I hope that wherever her soul is, she just got to rip that fucker off, just kick back all Lucy Goosey. She's done with it. She had had a son and he died as well. And I want to say he probably died before she did. But then her husband remarried. And the family that was using that cemetery plot was the descendants of that husband.

And they did not really know about her until we started investigating this. And so I actually worked with the family on this. And so we actually wrote a paper with, and one of the family members is an author on the paper. Oh my gosh. That's amazing. So it was pretty cool to follow this. And then also to follow the kind of history of even these cast iron coffins, which is

something that got a rabbit hole that you didn't expect to go down. Yeah. They seem expensive and very heavy. Yes. Well, they are both. And so they were prior to being able to bomb people. So the idea was that they would preserve bodies for travel across the country. And they did a really good job.

And if you look at the advertisements and stuff like that, they talk about the Madison's being buried in them and stuff like that. So typically they were thought to be of the wealthy. But it turns out that the other use of them was for contagious people. So some of the other ones that have been found, like ours had tuberculosis. There was one I know of in New York that where the individual had smallpox. They're either really wealthy or they're really sick. Wow.

Okay. So PS, these cast iron coffins were shaped like a human body, kind of like a giant ghoulish lacrusse casserole dish. But once again, shaped like a dead human with a glass viewing window for the face. And they were the invention of one almond fisk who got a patent in 1848. So an Atlas Obscura article about it dug up his patent application, which reads, The air may be exhausted, so as to prevent the decay of the contained body, or if preferred, the coffin may be filled with any gas or fluid having the property of preventing putrefaction.

So just toss me in a Dutch oven and top it off with wine spritzer. Let me ride that bubbly river into Forever Town. Anyway, what else did they learn about Elizabeth Triplett Stewart? Can you tell them the skeleton that she had, TB? Yes. Yes. Oh, wow. Is that in the isotopes, is that in certain pain?

So not everybody does tuberculosis manifested in the skeleton, but in her did. And what it is, is a buildup of, so you get inflammation going on in the lungs and that affects that periosteum on the ribs, which causes inflammation of that periosteum, so you get this bone plaque buildup associated with that. Now, in really advanced stages of this that you'll see like in some prehistoric populations is that it'll actually get into the vertebra as well and you'll get a collapsing of the vertebra. And so you get this kind of hunchback and stuff like that.

Are you able to look at a skull and almost see what the person's face might look like? Do you notice those details? Sometimes, yes. So it's kind of interesting. So like, especially when we're doing a forensic case, if we have an unidentified person, we'll go through and do the analysis and then we put it into a program called NamUs. So this is a national missing persons. And so there's two sides of NamUs.

One is for you put in, we put in unidentified people and then other people can put in missing people. And so when you put in an unidentified person, you'll get back of the missing people we have. These are some matches. And there's sometimes when I'll start going to the pictures and I'll go, no, that's not that. Definitely not them because that's not what they look like. You know, I never obviously rely on that.

But then there's other ones where it'll hit and it'll be like, that could be it. That's what this person looks like. So I don't know that I always have this vision, but if I see a picture, I can usually say yes or no. Wow. But obviously I wouldn't rely on that. I mean, we just had one that looked very much like the person and then when they did the DNA, it's not the person.

Is there DNA in bones that you can use or? Sure. And now where in the bone is that? Is that? Every part of bone. So in your bone, you have bone cells, what's called osteocytes that kind of maintain osteoblasts and osteoclasts. And those have cells just like any other.

Okay. So in case you were distracted by like a weird smell or a bird, here's a quick recap. Osteoblasts are like pal, blast, boom, building, making new bone cells. Those are osteoblasts. Osteocytes are mature bone cells and osteoclasts are the ones that decide it's time to run or remodel your bones and reabsorb the osteocytes. Now, speaking of demolitions, what remains in the bones after you die? Is it all just like a bunch of chalky minerals?

I always thought for some reason, and maybe it was because of cremated remains that don't have, cremated remains don't have. Right. Because you've basically, you've removed all of the organic matter by cremating it. So that you're just down to the inorganic portion of the bone. Right. Oh, that was such a dumb question, but I didn't know. I had no idea.

And now you run one of the nation's few body farms, which is kind of an outdoor laboratory that studies the decomposition rates and things like that. How long have you run that? And why do you think there's so few of them? Well, so I've been here since 2011. This actually was established in 2008, and I came in as a director in 2011. There's a lot of reasons, I think. One is that, you know, people have their own perception of dead bodies.

Just to give you an example, we, as you noticed when you walk in, there's some skeletons on display here. We had a delivery driver a few days ago, he came in, and he was, when I went out to help him unload some stuff, he was like, you need to put a sign on the door that says that there's skeletons in there. Oh, wow. Wow. He was pretty heebie-jeebbed.

Yeah. Spooky stuff. So, as a result, and the fact that you are dealing with dead bodies, you have to have a university that is going to support that. If they are not 100% on board, it's going to fail. And so, luckily here at Tech State, our administration is fantastic as far as that goes. The other thing is that it's not cheap. We obviously don't, I mean, I guess we could, theoretically, but we don't want to charge

our donors or anything like that, but we go pick them up, and that costs money, and we have to put them in body bags, and we have to have the facility to do it, and all that kind of stuff. So, it's not an inexpensive process. Yeah. So, a lot of places are not willing to do that, and then it's just a lot of work. We collect data on them daily, and in our case, luckily, our students do most of that work, but if not, you would have to have a lot of employees doing that as well.

And that data is valuable because it can tell a forensic team how long it's been since someone's died, what conditions they've been in, and essentially rates of decomposition, insects, wildlife, things like that, that if you were to, say, die in a setting or be left in a setting that is not a funeral home with an, you know, embalming or commutation. That kind of work, is that ever difficult emotionally, or is it something that you're able to kind of look at the science of it and see it from just that perspective? Well, so, for me, and I think this is probably true for a lot of people, the hardest part about the donation program is actually like when you pick up somebody.

For us, actually, too, is that since we, our donors are, we don't get like donors from some anatomical pool. Our donors donate specifically to us, so in a lot of cases, we actually, they've come into this office and we've talked to them and helped them fill out the paperwork and stuff like that. Wow. So, in a lot of cases, you actually know them or you've met them and stuff like that. But at any rate, especially if they're like young individuals, so we had, for example,

we had an individual who actually took a workshop with us and then died and she was in her 20s. For me, the hardest part is that initial seeing them when you pick them up. Once the process starts and you're doing the research, then it becomes a little less attached to them or something, I guess. You know, I mean, that's the thing. You're always cautious or aware of the fact that, you know, this is an individual and a lot of times it was an individual you had actually met and stuff like that. So you have that respect that they donated and all that stuff.

But yeah, you become, it becomes more doing the science than less, you know, the emotional part of it. I really wanted to ask if he's going to donate his body, but I was like, I don't know. I wanted to just wait for the right time. I mean, it's not like a thing you want to bring up with someone you just met. Huh? So this is one of the things, you know, I always get asked about, you know, am I going to donate my body?

Well, yeah. And of course I will. Yeah. Matter of fact, you know, I mean, I'm thrilled about the fact that 100 years from now, some kids get a lick of my scalp and be thrilled by it. This is the best. Wow. But the, but right now, so I got my, I did my dissertation at the University of Tennessee.

So right now my body is, I'm donating to the University of Tennessee. And there's, one of the main reasons for that is that if I was to die today, it would be my students that would have to place my body and they have to monitor my decomposition. Okay. So quick aside, by place my body and monitor decomposition. This might be to leave it buried under different materials like tires or wood or leave it exposed and track how long it takes for scavengers to find it. Now that answer is about 15 minutes for vultures and they can render a fresh corpse into a

skeleton in a matter of hours. This was research done in this facility and it helps medical examiners and law enforcement estimate a time of death. That way they can correlate it to potential matches for a missing person. So the science is really important. And donating his own body doesn't disturb him a bit, but his students. And while that doesn't bother me, you know, it's not really fair to them. So you're like, you guys, you guys can't be crying over my corpse.

You gotta get, you gotta get the right data. But it's a way to kind of return to the earth and also let your, let your cells become dragonflies and vultures and frogs and flowers and. Right. Yeah. Well, living, you know, close to Austin, we get a lot of, the reason a lot of people donate too is because they want a green burial and we provide about as green a burial as you can get.

Yeah. Seriously, literally sprouting grass underneath you. So the other thing that's interesting about this decomposition facility is, you know, especially since this is obviously a podcast on allergies is that it, and this is a very interesting part of my job that I didn't have before. And that is, is that it's not just anthropologists that are out there. We have, you know, typically on any body, we may have soil scientists, microbiologists, entomologists, botanists, you name it.

They're coming out there and doing some research on those bodies because, you know, it's a little ecosystem, basically, that's short lived and, but, you know, you've got all kinds of things that are trying to get nutrients from that before it's gone. How long does it take between getting placed to being pretty much, you know, skeletonized? It depends on the conditions, obviously. But typically here in Texas, to be completely skeletonized takes about a year, only because of the fact that it takes a long time for the skin to decompose. So you'll have a skeleton with this mummified skin on it, but all the muscles and organs

and stuff like that are long gone. And so that usually only takes, typically, a few months at the most. Danny says it in the winter, decomposition might take a little longer, but hey, listen to last week's phenology and just think of the crisp, false spell that the microorganisms make when they eat all the dead stuff. That's you. Did his global warming effect decomposition rates? I don't know.

My guess is yeah, yeah. Because so typically the way we think kind of think about decomposition is associated with what we call accumulated degree days. So it's basically the thermal energy that's available for the decomposition processes to happen. You know, you think about decomposition is both chemical reactions and then biological. So you have like magnets to have to develop and stuff like that. So and both those are dependent on temperature.

So, you know, it's just like if you take a stake and you buy it and you put it in the refrigerator, it's going to stay a lot longer because you've slowed down the chemical reactions and you've also slowed down the bacteria if you put it, you know. On your dashboard. On your dashboard. It's going to go very fast, right? But then there's also, and this is the one thing that most people don't think about. And that is there actually is an upper threshold to that too.

And that, and sometimes this happens to Texas, it gets so hot that it actually slows everything down too. But I mean, that's makes perfect sense too. I mean, you think about the same kind of analogy with a stake is that if you cook it, you're basically killing off all the bacteria and stuff like that. You are a scaffold of minerals covered in stakes wrapped in supple leather, serving as a spaceship for trillions of tiny little souls. And you'll be recycled into millions of other living beings.

I mean, life, man, nature, it's a wild ride. So go cut some banks, text your crush before you become a mushroom. So there's this upper and lower thresholds that in there that wanting these optimum areas in there. So things have decomposed since the beginning of time, obviously. And so you would think that we'd know a lot about it. It seems like it's amazing to me how little we know about how decomposition works. Even things like, you know, why do flies come?

You know, how do they know there's a body there? You know, things like that. So that would be, I guess, a forensic diptyrologist, I think. So the thing about this is that there is all kinds of people that are interested in doing this research and they have different perspectives on things that I would have ever thought about. It's kind of really fascinating to work on these, you know, multidisciplinary projects where, you know, I may be the only anthropologist or big group. Now what about movies and TV shows about what you do?

Do you ever watch CSI and you're like, that's not how it works? Or are there any that like actually get it right? For anthropology that, you know, is like bones. So typically they obviously over interpret what can actually be told, or at least they're confidence and that is overblown. Let's put that away. So like I was telling you before, I might be able to, you know, get an idea of what somebody did for a, like an occupation.

But at this point in time, I couldn't tell you the, you know, like within a 95% confidence interval, how good that, you know, estimation is or anything like that, where they seem to just like. I found some trace on the weapon. It's chemical makeup suggesting a type of SAV, but it's a synthetic tripeptide. Synthesize from what? Snake venom. There's a few things that they obviously can't do or they wouldn't likely do.

But most of the time, what I tell, like my students is a lot of things that get done in like CSI where there's multiple, not just sculptor image, but there's multiple things going on is that, you know, you, in the show, they have one person doing all this stuff. In reality, basically every time they turn their chair to a different table, it's a different person, probably in a different lab, it could even be in a different state. Yeah. So yes, sexy shows like bones make osteology glam and cinematically efficient. But in real life, no one is swiveling their lab chair around from like one microscope

to another doing DNA sequencing and then histology and looking at audio files and spectroscopy while also putting the bones in bones and making out in a morgue. Real life, real lives, they are not wrapped up in 59 minutes. Do you ever, if it's something that is forensic, do you ever follow the case at all or is it once it's out of your lab, you're on to the next? It depends. I mean, some cases I have no idea what happens to them once they leave the lab. But there are other ones where, especially if they're, you know, something that winds

up being, you know, in the news a lot, you know, even if I didn't want to, you know, I wind up kind of following along with it. And then of course, in some cases, you might actually be called to like testify in the court case. And so, you know, that you have to kind of follow up on it. But overall, I would probably say that for me, I actually don't really follow up on them that much. If I happen to see something on it, great, but I don't spend a lot of time.

That's not what attracts you to the field. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Can I ask you some questions from listeners? Yes. Okay. So before we get to your questions, we may have some words about sponsors who make it

possible to donate to a cause of the oligists choosing every week. This one was very easy. Dr. Westcott said that to continue to do the work they do at no burial cost to donors or to their families and to literally pay for things like body bags and transportation, they're funded in part by donations of the monetary kind. So a donation will be going to the Freeman Center. You can find a link to that. There's also info on body donation if you're inclined to have a free, very green and scientific

and dare I say pretty heavy metal burial at a link at alleywar.com slash oligies slash osteology. That will also be in the show notes. There will also be links to the sponsors who made that possible, which you may hear about now. Okay. Back to your questions. This one was asked by Hayden Sloan, Andrew Bain, Erica Smith, Elizabeth Kirsten Wallace,

who also asked, Hey, have you seen that when you're dead inside but still want to brighten other people's lives meme, AKA this year's Halloween costume? So I went and looked it up and it's a skeleton with shimmery fairy wings holding a sparkly wand. And I don't think Danny had seen the meme, but I will be giving double high fives to anyone dressed as that this year and to you, Kirsten Wallace. Anyway, that question was a few people asked, what is the most useless bone in the human body?

The most one that we could evolve right out of there. Most useless. Why are you here? I don't know that there is a useless bone in the body. The one that most anthropologists, I think, would tell you is the fibula. The fibula? Really? Why?

Because it's not weight-bearing, it's just a muscle attachment site, basically. And if you, as a result, its shape varies a lot from person to person, the shaft of it. And so it's a lot of times it's hard to side and things like that. But every bone, you know, at least serves as a muscle attachment site or something like that. So I don't know that you could get rid of any of them. Are you ever just exasperated in the dirt looking for those last ear bones?

Not ear bones, but wrist bones and stuff like that, yes. And then there are two little bones associated with your big toe. These are sesamoid bones. So they're bones within a tenon. The only one that we name is the patella, which is your kneecap. But these aren't named, but they're associated with a muscle called flexor hallucinus brevis. And I have spent a lot of time actually looking for those because it's like I want to find them.

And they're just like little pea-sized bones. Okay. So this tiny knee bone is sometimes called the fabula. And we might also have some of these sesamoid bones in our feet or by a thumb. And sesamoid comes from the word for seed, like sesame, because they're so teeny-tiny. And folks who have knee pain are more likely to have an extra teensy bone in their knee tendons. So no, you don't really have 206 bones because you got some little floaters.

The three in each ear, by the way, are called ossicles. It means little bones. The ear bones, you never know whether because, you know, I mean, they could very well be inside the temporal bone and so you never know until you get back to them. And look. And look. Okay. This next question was also asked by Ella Thompson, Juan Isaac Moriera Hernandez and

Maria Hancox. Rebecca Fitchett wants to know, what's your favorite bone? The femur. Femur? Yeah. Because there's a lot of information in it? There's a lot of information in the femur. So I can tell you the sex, how tall the person was, what kind of activities they did.

And I can even tell, for example, like when I go through the femur here and are donated, I can go through and tell you the obese people from the non-obese people. Wow. Just based on that spongy bone tissue with the joints? In the shape of the bone. Wow. So. Oh my gosh.

I wonder if, now I wonder what my bones look like because I used to be a runner and now I'm not. And so I wonder if my bones are like, hey, come on, we're built for this. Leanna Schuster wants to know a question for my nine-year-old son. How does the skeleton stay upright? Muscles. There you go. So your skeleton, it works with your muscles to form lever systems and those lever systems

are what keep you upright. There you go. I've got a lever. I just need to pull it. Levers. Muscles. Scapegoat T, McKenna Hopwood, Natalie Krinka, Bryn Bell, Donald McGregor, Kimberley Fajardo, Amy Sally, Jessica Fizz, Danielle Dorman, all asked about big milk.

A lot of folks wanted to know, does milk build strong bones or is that just really good advertising? Well, so it is calcium phosphate, so you need that calcium in your diet, whether or not, I mean, so as long as you're getting calcium in your diet. The main thing about, like, is that by the time you hit your early to mid-20s, you have the best skeleton you're ever going to have in your life. And thereon, it's actually kind of loose skeleton over your life. So as a matter of fact, when we look at, like, age estimation, before 25, we basically look at growth and development.

After 25, what we're looking at is breakdown of the skeleton. After 25, that's so depressing. So but what really builds skeleton is activity. Really so. Obviously you have to have an adequate diet as well, because you have to have all those components in it, but is activity. And is that because you're doing little micro fractures or what's making that bone stronger? How does the impact make you stronger?

Yeah, so you're putting bending forces on it and your bone basically adapts to resist fracturing. So it adds bone in places where you have a lot of stress, and if you don't have any stress at all, it will either not build it or remove bone from that place. So do you think that, like, weight lifting is good for bones? Sure. But any activity is good for bones. It's just that it's going to, so a weight lifter, its bones are going to be under different

stresses, so they're going to, or different strains, I should say. That's kind of the deformation that's going on. So it's going to be different shape than, like you were talking about, you were a runner. So you're putting more forward and backwards force on the bones versus, like I say, like soccer player that's actually like changing directions a lot. So they're putting a lot of twisting forces. So both of them are going to build bone. They're just going to build those slightly different shaped skeleton.

But keep it active. But keep it active, yeah. Keep it active? This is so good to know. And then the same thing even with later in life is that, you know, the way you keep from losing bone and becoming osteoporotic and stuff like that, a lot of that has to do with how active you say. Okay.

So side note, Joyce Dvorak, Kelly Evans, and Breanne Wharton, my sister in garbage ovaries, aka POI. Hey, lady. What's up? I have that too. All mentioned osteoporosis in their questions. Just a little info on that, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation. So two million bones fracture every year in the U.S. because of osteoporosis.

That's so many bones. And osteoporosis just means porous bone. So the structure of the bone becomes weaker because it's less dense and it's more porous. So think of like a pumice stone versus granite. So many hormonal factors and inactivity and medications can cause it. But what about slurpy sippy yum-yums, which was asked by Emily Burns? What about if you're drinking soda? Soda can be terrible for your skeleton.

They can cause osteoporosis. Is it because it's acidic? Yes. The acid's in it. Oh, my God. Same with lemon water or no? Lemon water is probably worse on your teeth. Oh, Lord.

I looked into this. And yes, soda may be considered bone-herding juice. Ow, my bones. And some theories are that this is because the phosphoric acid in colas leaches calcium in order to neutralize it from your bones, while other studies suggest it's the caffeine that's going to fudge your bones up real good. But the main moral of the story is that drinking just plain filtered water is great and that your bones splintering off after 50 is bad, speaking of.

Someone asked about flim flam, some myths to bust. Rachel Weiss says, someone once told me that elderly people's hips will randomly break and then they will fall as opposed to the other way around. Is that a myth? Is that flim flam? Will the bone break and they fall or do they fall and the bone breaks? That's true. So typically what happens is that, so a lot of times people will say, you know, I was

getting out of my chair and I fell down and broke my hip. In reality, when you are standing or starting to get up, you're putting a lot of forces, your muscles are putting a lot of force on that bone. And so what will happen a lot of times is the femoral neck will break as they're standing up. Ouch, ouch, ouch. Oh my God, so that's not flim flam. Any other myths about skeletons that you would want to bust?

They can't walk around without muscles. Good point. Also, isn't it weird that when used for anatomy, skeletons used to be the real deal? They had to be. What else are you going to get one? So Atlas Obscura, once again, just coming in clutch with gross, fascinating research, has an article up all about the trials of being a med student hundreds of years ago, in that you had to somehow acquire a human skeleton to have, kind of like trying to

score a laptop. Only your laptop is made of people that you had to dig up, steal, or hope didn't have the plague. So now we have not real ones available. Just in the seasonal Isle of Walgreens. Put it in the doorway. It's October. Do you ever go to like an amusement park or you walk down the Halloween Isle and you're

like, these skeletons are so buster. This is not what they look like. Oh, yes, of course. Yeah. Why do they get wrong a lot? Oh, you know, the shape of the joints, the, I don't know, the vertebra especially, they tend to just kind of oversimplify them. You know, I don't know.

I mean, there's, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I mean, how is the jaw staying on also? Right. Yeah. So like one of the things that I thought was kind of interesting, for example, was like that show Sherlock Holmes. My wife was fascinated with the show and I was watching once of them one time and they had a guy who had died and he was at his chair and he was completely skeletonized, but his

hand was all attached and his jaw was attached to stuff and it's like, all that stuff we just fall apart. No. We're so used to seeing them all wired together. Yeah. This next question was wondered about by the skull encased minds of Maddie, Christie Chapman, Haines Sloan and Ruby Johnstone wants to know, is there any scientific basis for the phrase I can feel it in my bones?

How about weather? Can you feel weather in your bones? Ah, I don't know to be quite honest. So I mean, I think it's just saying that you feel it deep, but is it really your bones? I don't know. I mean, you have this this periosteum that's around your bones and it's got a lot of nerve tissue and stuff. So if something irritated that, I mean, you know, that's what Schenzmann says, irritated

your periosteum because of all the little micro fractures. But so I don't honestly know. Now, like I said, I broke my wrist when I was 18 years old and I had a pin in it for a long time. And when the weather would change, I could feel that. Really? Yeah. But that was probably because the pin was changing temperatures at a different rate

than my body was. So getting cold. And if you don't have any aftermarket parts in your skelly, but you can still feel weather in them bones, some researchers report that a sudden drop in barometric pressure can cause squeaky bone feelings. So in one paper titled, not squeaky bone feelings, but rather self-perceived weather sensitivity and joint pain in older people with osteoarthritis in six European countries, researchers were like, hot damn, yeah, there may be something to this.

Now, what if you're on the uphill climb to 25 instead of the downward lope? Daniel Dorman and JSB asked about bone growth, as did Mackenzie Campbell. Mackenzie Campbell wants to know, where do growing pains come from? Is it really from our bones growing? My guess is this combination of your bones growing and them stretching the muscles. Okay. Oh, yeah. Because like a like taffy, right?

Right. Poor little kiddos. Now, they have a growth plate. And so you could have been, say, 5'10", but maybe certain conditions happen in your life and you only got to like 5'7". Sure. Yeah. Is that why doorways were so little in older houses?

Do people just... Yeah. I mean, we have what's called secular trends. So these are non-genetic or non-evolutionary changes and, you know, statues, one of those. We clearly are taller than we were in the past and a lot of that has to do, well, there's a couple of things it has to do with. One is diet, a better diet or at least more constant nutrition. But another thing that people don't think about a lot of times is like antibiotics.

So the way that typically, you know, you hear people say, you know, my kids grew overnight. It's because they literally do. So kids, typically, if you watch kids, you could see this, I see this is my daughters all the time, you know, they'll like go through this period where they eat everything inside and then you can't get them to eat anything. And part of that is they're building up this energy and then they go through this growth spurt. Well, if you're sick during that growth spurt, then it doesn't happen.

Oh. And if you have enough of these, then you wind up being shorter than you genetically had the potential to be. Wow. So hold on to your actual butts because some folks such as CuriousDNA, Graham Tattersall, Juliana, Josie Kambas wanted to know why tailbones exist. And shockingly, no one used the word coccyx. But in the same vein, but a different kind of growth spurt, Zach Smollin, Pandore 2 and

Ali Brava were like, what's up? Why don't humans have a baculum, a.k.a. ye olde dickbone? A few people had questions about why do we have a tailbone, but we don't have a penis bone? Well, that's a good question. I don't know why we don't have a penis bone. It is just something that in humans got lost and it's been gone for millions of years. And I honestly don't know why that is the case.

I imagine that, well, imagine there's a lot of reasons. Right. Why do we have a tailbone? So this is, our tailbone is really small, but it still serves as a muscle connection for all the muscles of the pelvic floor. So, you know, we wouldn't be able to go to the bathroom or have child kids or anything like that if we didn't have that muscle attachment site. So thanks, tailbone.

We didn't think we needed you, but it looks like we do. P.S. real quick, because I know you want to know. So humans evolved out of having a dickbone to ensure paternity. So it behooved the penis enabled to mate for shorter lengths of time more frequently with the same partner. Now, in marmosets, teeny dickbones and walruses, nearly two foot long numbers, they needed that extra support, kind of like an inner dong corset, if you will, because they don't chill with the same chick for as long.

So when they encounter a partner, they just need to make the most of it, because it probably won't happen again. So yeah, dickbones are for losers. And last questions I always ask, what is the worst thing about your job or about skeletons or about your field? What do you hate? What do I hate? Is it digging for those little wrist nuggets or something totally different?

No, I mean, you know, it's like any other job, though. Things I hate worst is like having meetings about how we're going to do this or whatever. But I don't know, you know, so I don't know if this is the worst thing. But I mean, so part of this, too, is that, you know, especially if you're looking at like a forensic case or something like that, a lot of times there is soft tissue left. And so you have to basically cook that down and scrub it off and stuff like that. So it's this long, tedious project that usually doesn't smell very well and everything else. Oh, oh, you had two conference calls and the Keurig machine broke.

Try picking human flesh off the bones on a Wednesday morning. Okay, this next answer was very surprising. Is it hard for you to get that smell out of your nose or are you desensitized to it? I don't know if I'm desensitized to it, but so it kind of sounds weird. But you know, every smell that you have, whether you like it or dislike it or whatever, is because that you've learned something to associate with that. And so over the years, I've actually learned to not dislike the smell, that makes sense. So it's not that I don't notice it, but it just doesn't bother me anymore.

It's the aroma of learning. Yes, exactly. It's science and process. Yeah, is what that is, okay, that's a good, that's a really good way to look at it. It's very positive. Why shouldn't people be afraid of skeletons? What associations do you wish people had if they saw skeletons? Well, to me, like I said, skeletons is just a history of that individual.

So it's recording everything that's going on and so there's nothing scary about a skeleton. It's just totally fascinating. And like I said, a skeleton by itself can't do anything. It can't move, it can't do anything. But it is this kind of biological history of that individual. So it's kind of like the individual's diary. So it's more like finding someone's journal instead of finding someone that wants to recruit you to the other realm.

Yes, exactly. So just think, your skeleton is the memoir, you never actually have to sit down and write. That's a beautiful way to look at it. It's a diary, it's your ossified diary. And what do you love the most about skeletons or your job? Well, I don't know, I find skeletons just fascinating, the fact that you can, you know, whether it's an old skeleton or human, all the things that you can tell about it. Another part of my job, for me, as a professor, I love mentoring the students, I don't really

like teaching this. I don't necessarily like teaching a class, but I like to sit in the lab with the students and go teach them and stuff like that, work with them on cases and stuff like that. So I find that fascinating. Is there something about their enthusiasm and their wonder that's kind of infectious that keeps you also engaged in what you do? Yeah, that's what I mean. It's always interesting to be around people that have the same interests and are excited

about the same thing. I think back about, you know, when I was growing up and then when I started doing anthropology and how exciting it was and stuff like that. So I kind of feel that, you know, with them as that, wow, it's like, this is the first time I've ever seen this. And I actually, you know, really excited about at some point, obviously I don't want to die right now, but at some point, my skeleton being the first thing that gets somebody interested in doing this kind of work.

That's a beautiful thought. Yeah. That's a beautiful thought instead of just maybe burning it up or just leaving it in a box in the ground. Right. Like put your diary in a library, you know, share your work. He's spent all your life forming your skeleton, at least share your work. And so before I packed up my gear and walked into the parking lot in the warm September

sun, taking in the Texas breeze, I had one more question. Is it odd being next to a funeral home or is that on purpose? No, that's totally by accident. Oh my God. So. There's literally a ribs place across. Yes, a ribs place across the street and. You're surrounded by bones.

Yes. Oh my gosh. Thank you so, so much for doing this. This was a joy. Yeah, it was fun. I'm not scared of skeletons anyone. So ask smart, kind, non creepy, but totally sweet, intelligent and committed scientists. Stupid questions.

Because not only will you be able to walk into a lobby filled with dead people and be comfy, but you'll also be comforted. And perhaps have a greater appreciation for the extraordinary machine that you are. If I may borrow that term from a Fiona Apple album title. So to find out more about donating to Dr. Westcott's work, either in money or in your bodily form, if you're done using it, there are links in the show notes as well as sponsor links and oligies merch is available at oligiesmerch.com. Thank you, Shannon Feltes and Bonnie Dutch of the podcast.

You are that for making that possible. Thank you, Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo for managing the Facebook oligies podcast group and happy, happy, happy birthday to the strong and flexible assistant editor and a skelly that gives me hard-eyed emojis and stomach flutters all year. Jared Sleeper. Don't worry. I'm not just his creepy boss. He's also my boyfriend.

And of course, the ligaments that hold all these tiny pieces together every week, editor Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts the Percast and see Jurassic Wright. So I am convinced his skull has a mustache. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, you know, I tell you a secret. This week's secret is that sometimes, you know, if you get new jeans, you're like, whoa, new pants. But for some reason, like the denim powers it be, put extra blue dye in it that rubs

off on your hands and your car and it gets under like the tiniest fingernail shelf. And it makes it look like you've just come straight from like replacing a carburetor. I hate it so, so much. This is my plea to denim makers. Just like scale back on that indigo. Please don't make me look grosser than I already do. Okay. Thanks.

Also, back next week with another spooktober episode, aren't you curious what it'll be? I decided to stop telling you. I was telling you in advance for a few weeks, but I decided now I'm going to make you wait for it. It's more fun. And I love you. Okay. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye.