Mother Knows Death presents External Exams with Nicole and Jimmy.
A few weeks ago, on Mother Knows Death, we talked about a story where a forensic anthropologist I don't know if you heard of this story, but a forensic anthropologist shift was shopping at an antique store and they stumbled across a human skull. And I thought the story was funny because they said, oh, luckily it was a forensic pathologist, and I thought, like, okay, I think that most people, even if they didn't have training in forensic pathology, would know if it was a real human skull or not
because they're just so specific looking to a human. And also on my website, The Grocerroom, we talked about a book called Death's Acre, which is about the field of forensic anthropology. So I thought it would be awesome today on the podcast to interview a real forensic anthropologist and his name is doctor Daniel Westcott.
Welcome.
It's an honor to have you here today. He is a professor of anthropology at Texas State University, which has the largest body farm in the country. And thanks so much for being here today.
Is an honor.
Yeah, thank you, thank you for inviting me.
I anthropology when I was in college in my undergrad and I thought it was the coolest class that I ever took. I really didn't know about it, and it was mostly cultural anthropology, but he touched a little bit on a physical anthropology, which I think is a branch of what you're doing. So can you describe to us, like how what did you originally go to college for and how did you even become interested or know about this field?
Okay, oh, yeah, So biologically apology is one of the subdisciplines of anthology. See so culture anthropology obviously looks at the cultures of people, and archaeology looks at past cultures, and biological anthology looks at the biology of people. And we're interested in biological variation and how humans interact with their environment and with their culture on a biological point of view. So I've actually always been interested in both. And so, uh, when I when I when I started college,
I the same thing. I took a four filled course, uh, in pro course in anthropology, and I it was very interested in doing. It wasn't my major or anything like that, but I was very interested in that fourfilled approach. And then so then I took another UH course. But when I was taking those courses, there was a the if Bulget department had a library attastitute. It's a little small student library, and so I would go in there and
study before class. And one day one of the professors came in and said, you know, somebody brought in some human remains and is there anybody's interested in you know, helped me with them, and of course you're like the Champson that was pretty much. Yes, that was pretty much. Yet you know, a week later I changed my major and been doing it ever since.
I love stories like that because I think that everyone has this pivotal moment. Well not everyone, I guess, but people that are doing really cool jobs and they love their job, they have this pivotal moment that they're like, wait, I'm not in the right thing, and I'm going to change over to this right away because this is something that feels more right for me. When I was in PA school, i interned at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's office, and that was really the first time I ever had
kind of a simil situation that happened with you. They would from time to time have the police call and say, hey, there's bones that are in the woods and we need someone to look at them. And they didn't have a forensic anthropologist that was there all the time, so when they had cases like that, they would have to call someone in to look at them. But in this particular case, I'll never forget that there was it was a trash bag and the emmy dumped out all the bones onto
the autopsy table and he said, oh, that's barbecue. It's probably pork or something, and didn't even call one of you guys to look at it. And I remember thinking how cool that was that he could just look at bones that fast and know that they weren't human. And he explained to us like the weight bearing joints and all this different things. But I thought that was really cool.
So obviously that's one of the jobs that a forensic anthropologist can have, is working on real cases and being a consult But what are what are some other things you can do once you go to school and become a forensic anthropologist.
Well, so, you know, if if you look at kind of modern friends of anthropology, there's a couple of things that there's a couple of different approaches, I guess, or different tracks that you could go into. So there's obviously the academic side, which is where I'm at, where I, you know, a college professor and I teach friendsic anthropology, I do research associated with friendsic anthropology, you know my
and have students and in things of that nature. And then there's the side where you have people that are on the track where they mainly are focusing on working at a medical exeveritor's office. And I know that that wasn't was not common in the past, but it is becoming more and more common where you have friends againsthropologists
that are doing casework in the medical exemveritor's office. Not only are they doing when there's actually skult or remains, but they're also assisting with like looking at blood force trauma and actually analyzing the bones even if there's a plush person the And then the third track I guess would be working for the government and as a friends
against all. Mainly that's associated with locating and identifying US war dead and so, uh, there are a lot of people that well that's their their career focuses on, uh, you know, trying to identify people that died in the in different wars, and they got pretty much any war as long as the US was involved.
Interesting, I didn't know that.
So you're a professor at Texas State University, and this is a question I have. I know that you have a doctorate, but can people Are there different levels that people we can go to school to work in the field of forensic anthropology or do you have to have a doctor to do that particular career.
No, you don't have to have a doctor. I would say that, you know, a large majority of forensic anthabologist have a doctor, but not all of by any means. A lot of the investigators that work in medical examiner's offices, for example, will only have a master's Usually, if you don't have at least a you know, some kind of a graduate degree, you tend to do more like crime scene investigation and you might get involved with you know,
the obviously shelter remains in that sense. But same thing with the US Army is that, you know, we have a lot of our students that have gotten a master's degree and then gone on to work for the government with assisting in the identification of war dead. So it's possibleVarious levels and then the same thing there, you know, if you're wanting to go into just teaching. Yep, you can get the job, said like community colleges and things, teaching friends against pology with a master's.
Okay, that's that's good to know.
I like to introduce everyone to all these different jobs they can get because I think a lot of people just think there's only one thing you can do and you have to do a lot of education for it. And a lot of times, like sometimes I hear from young mothers that want to go back to school, but they really can't dedicate like eight years of their life to go into school, but they do have interest. So it's nice to know that there's lower levels that people
can do it. I know that you did get your doctor from the University of Tennessee and that the book that we read this month called Death's Acre was about doctor Bill Bess, who created the first body farm. And so for everyone listening that doesn't know what a body farm is, can you tell us a little bit about that?
Sure? So if they're really kind of decomposition laboratories or what really was called a taphonomic laboratory book, an outdoor laboratory uh tefonomy is the study of anything that happened to a once living organism from the moment it dies to the moment it's discovered. Originally, it kind of came out of paleontology, and the idea was, or the original definition actually was from from the biosphere to the lithosphere,
so basically from a living organism to a bostle. And the idea was to understand, you know, why you don't find a complete body, right, what are the processes that resulted in that. You know, if you find if you're looking at a dinosaur, for example, and you have a handful of bones and some teeth and stuff, what happened to the rest of it and what were the processes that occurred there? And so forensic anthopology we're doing the same thing. We're just doing the very beginnings of that, right,
a very shortened version of it. Uh. And so the idea is is to conduct research that looks at what affects the rates of decomposition, uh, if there's anything that affects the processes of decomposition. And also you know, to be able to understand the uh, the scene better to understand you know, movement of the body, you know, what causes it to become disarticulated because of it to become spread.
What kind of damage do you have from the from the skeleton that might be caused by a tafonomic process rather than something that actually had to do with individual's deaths. Uh So those are the things that go on in
uh decomposition facilities. The other thing too, is that they are also a training ground, and so we utilize these facilities to train law enforcement and medical legal investigators to where they can actually work with real remains and they can we can send up scenarios, you know, or we can you know, teach them how to excavate or teach them how to locate remains. And it gives them the
opportunity to learn that. But also if they're going to make a mistake, to make a mistake, you know, during the training and not in a real life.
Situation, that's interesting because I and then of course the other thing. Oh sorry, I was going to say, I did my first autopsy on a decomposed person, because they were like, listen, this person's not going to have viewing and I mean really decomposed maggots up to my arms and everything. But that's they said, Okay, well you can practice your first cuts on this person because you know they won't be having a viewing.
So it's interesting that you say that.
Right, So, so you have this is cool because it's you have a lab where you're studying how humans decompose and you're actually using real humans. So where so all I picture is because I've never been to a body farm, I just picture huge acres of field with just dead bodies laying all around in certain situations. Where do where do these human bodies come from?
Right? So, the studies that are you know, operating now are all tied to or for the most part, tied to a willed body donation prop and so, and they're all pretty much the same as that the one in the Texas State, and that is is that people donate their bodies specifically to us. We don't draw them from some kind of you know, like a an atomical pool or something like that. The other thing, too is that we primarily what we prefer is people that pre register
with us before they die. So we refer to these as our living donors, and and so we can we get more information about them that will help us in the research. But it also we know for a fact that this is what they wanted and they're comfortable with that, and so all that kind of makes a big difference to us. You know, we really want people that well our donated their bodies because they wanted to participate in
this kind of research and education. And as a result, you can imagine we get a lot of people that were you know, prior law enforcement. We get a lot of people that were teachers while they are alive, and you know, just people that are interested in in science. But you know, we also get people that are you know, want for example, a green burial and they want you know, they don't want to be cremated, they don't want to be buried in a coffin and you know, preserved in
that steps. So there's different reasons, but that's the main thing is that they all have know what is going on, you know, you know what kind of research they would be involved with.
And where that this is. I have a million questions.
I'll try to get them out. So do you have to do you take every single person that wants to donate themselves to you or is there do you have a criteria, Like we're going to talk about a little bit later, some research that you've done on bones of obese patients versus or not patients of disease versus not
obese people. But so like, if you're doing you're trying to look for a specific thing that you're doing research on, do you do you try to recruit more of those those bodies or do you just take all of them and then kind of separate them into what you're doing.
We we, we don't. We don't recruit in that sense. It'd be kind of hard to do, I think to some to some except but we we we don't. Also, we don't accept everybody that applies, but we you know, but if it's a person that we have registered and they're a living donor, then we will accept them no matter what. For next to kin donations, which is where the family can donate the body. Uh, in those situations, yes,
it's pretty much. Part of the decision about whether or not we would accept the individual is whether or not they will fit into some kind of research protocol that is going on at the time.
Okay, yeah, that's interesting.
And so you did say some people want to do like a green burial, So are there situations where you would just leave their body out there until it's completely decomposed and just not like this is this is my question. Let's say you're just trying to you're trying to research
a specific person just to see like moderate decomposition. When you're done with that person, do you then give the remains back to the family or do you just continue to use it for other things and just let them all naturally decomposed on the farm.
So we we we do not return any of the remains, but we don't necessarily let them all just decomposed out there. So what we will do is after the research is done, they will get processed down to a skelton. And so that which is also part of the training is that you know, it allows us to teach students their osteology and they get to see a lot of variation. But then we we curate the skelptor remains, and those skeletons
then are used for research. And as you were talking about with the obesity project I have going on right now, that's what utilize those skeltaling me, there are a couple of situations where we've had bodies that have been out there for you know, coming on ten years or so, and most of those there are long term studies that are looking at like how does how does DNA degrade, Uh, you know, where what bones are best to recover from, what portions of the bone or best to recover from,
and whether or not, you know, just destruction of the bone due to the sun can give us an estimation of postporum interval in longer you know, in older cases. So those are the kind of reasons that they would be left out there for a long time, but at some point they all come back in.
So you're in Texas right now. I've never I do want to go to Texas, but I've never been there. But it's pretty The environment from what I understand, is like pretty dry and hot correct very hot.
Yeah, in the summer we have you know, sixty to ninety days of over one hundred degree weather. So it's it's a shoot, but it's not not dry like New Mexico dried, you know, with humidity, low humidity. We have high humidity. Where we're actually located at is right on the edge of the coastal plains in the hill country. So we're actually in the hill country a little bit. So you know, you get a lot of cactus and
juniper and you know, stuff of that nature. As far as planets, go, but it's but it's not dry like you might see like in New Mexico, Arizona.
Oh okay, well my question is is because.
But we don't get young rain.
Oh yeah, that's that was my question.
Because when you're recreating kind of recreating the decomposition process, how do you how do you account for it? Because I know the environment has a lot to do with how bodies are breaking down. Because if you had a body decomposing in Texas, it wouldn't be the same as it decomposing in let's say, like Savannah, Georgia in the summer where it's just hot and super swampy, or in Alaska.
There's all different variation, even the desert. So do you have do you have certain ways that you could mimic a different environment, like a cold, dry environment versus a hot, humid one. Do you guys study that we.
Can't really mimic a different environment, but what we can? But you know, there are facilities in other areas that we can you know, do studies in collaboration with each other and get some ideas what's going on. You know, there there are certain things that you can take into consideration.
So one of the things that we look at instead of like how long somebody's been dead in calendar days, we look at how long somebody's been dead in accumulated degree days, which is basically the thermal energy that would be available for the decopposition process and also for you know, the development of maggots and bacteria and things of that nature.
So we can control that to some extent. But you know, decomposition is a drying process, and so you know what could happen different in you know, for example, in Georgia versus Arizona, is that the body is going to dry out a lot faster, uh, which is going to slow down decopposition. Where in Georgia you're not drying the body out as fast, and because it's so hot, humid, and so it allows for that remove all the soft tissue a lot wrap and so you can control for that to some extent.
Okay, so you were talking about how sometimes that you have people that are cleaning off the bones so you could study them for other things. So that was my next question. I when I did intern at Theme's office, I had never I'd never I've only saw regular autopsies at the hospital, so I'm used to that, just like fresh smell of a dead body, and I'll never forget. The office was an older office in Philly. It was
their old office. And I walked in and it was it was a situation where you walked in, the lobby was on the on the ground floor, and then the morgue was in the basement and you had to walk down the super creepy metal, old spiral staircase and I went down about halfway and I got punched in the face with this smell that I've never smelled in my life,
and I was like, what is that? And it was it was a d comp was downstairs, and I just was mind blown because right at the bottom of that staircase all the investigators sat there and they're like they have their legs up, They're drinking coffee, eating donuts, and I'm like, hell, is anybody eating around this? It's just it's just the most disturbing smell. But then obviously, like by the end of the week, I was eating Chinese
food with them for lunch. You know, you get used to it, but there are people that that just can't ever get used to that smell and everything. So when you hire somebody to work there and help out do you have to kind of give them a test in a certain kind of way, like, hey, this is not like a regular dirty job, it's on another level.
Yeah. So you know, what we're doing is you know, working with people that you know, hire as far as people that were hiring, we've we're hiring people that have been in the build and know what they're getting into. As far as students go, you know, that is actually one of the things that is beneficial about a facility like this is that a lot of times students realize that this is not what they want to do, is that they can't handle the Sometimes it's the smells, sometimes
it's the the appearance. You know. So it's different for different people, but you know, it's it's a good thing to learn before you know you're out in the field for the first time. You know. We also do the same thing for what we do a day of training for some of the local police cadet and part of the reason for that is is just so that they they know what decomposition is going to be like. But they also the first time they ever see a dead body is not when they're you know, doing an investigation.
Yeah, I can't imagine I remember the first time that I ever went on a scene to see I had to go pick up a dcomp with the with theme's office, and I thought, like, how upsetting that would be for a family to see one of your family members in that condition, because it's just so it's not only the smell, but just the way that they look and everything. So I think that's cool that you teach cops and stuff that because they're going to come across that kind of
stuff all the time. My husband's a firefighter. He sees that stuff all the time, you know, and it can be really disturbing, especially if you're kind of at work when it happens and you're not really prepared for it.
So that's cool.
And I was going to ask you that like, cause when I was doing autopsies at an academic center one time, I had a nurse that was observing and I before we started the autopsy, I went up in surgical pathology and was just showing the students some stuff and I pulled a placenta out of a bucket that had been fixed in formaldehyde already, so it had really no like
real blood on it, just like a brownish color. And I pull this thing out and put it on the cutting board, and she turned white as a ghost and had to like sit down on the floor and do deep breathing. And I was like, you might not want to be a nurse because this is nothing compared to what you're going to see in real life, you know.
So I was gonna ask you, like, have you had students drop out because they do class work and they're totally fine and then they say it in real life and just like can't handle it.
It happens occasionally, not very often, but occasionally it does happen.
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check it out. You can go to thedooramatter dot com slash book and find where you can get this great book. So let's get into your research and everything you One of the things I so, I I know a little bit about the research you're doing on obese bones versus not because not because I have done any research on it, but just doing autopsies on I would say, you know, ninety percent of patients or either overweight or obese that
I would do autopsies on. And one case I had this I did we would have patients that were called super obese, like a BMI over fifty or something like that. And this guy had this large penis that was hanging to one side, like a big thick section of belly skin. And even when I did the autopsy and laid them on the table, it was just kind of hanging to the one side. And I was shocked when I opened I did the y incision and his ribcage was completely distorted from all of that weight bearing on the one
side for years and years of his life. It was like the one side of his ribcage looked totally normal and the other side was huge. So it was it was really cool. So what what are what's some work that you've been doing with that, because it's it's really interesting.
Yeah, so you know, we're we're really interested in trying to figure out at least whether or not we can tell whether somebody's obese or not. And then of course, the other the other reason for doing this is that, you know, we know a lot about clinically about gate patterns and obese individuals and how they shift their weight and and so it also helps us understand how bone
bonds to mechanical loading. But the idea, like I said, is that I think currently about forty percent of people in the United States are obese, and if you include overweight, it jumps to about sixty percent. And so you know, knowing if an individual is obese has a you know,
is telling us a lot about that individual. And it also the the other thing that we know is that carrying that extra weight has an effect on adult age indicator, for example, because most of what you're looking at for adult age indicator is actually wear and tear on the joints, and so you're going to get some variation in that.
And so what we're doing is taking approach where we're looking at how does obesity affect the shape of the overall shape of the bone, and then how does it affect the cross section of the shaft for example, there's a you know, if you think about the shaft being a beam, you know it's going to need to be thicker, uh, you know, heavier beam to to hindle the wheat that's
associated with that. And then also the trabecular structure, which is the uh, the fine straton bone that you have in your joints that it absorbs a lot of energy associated with you know, ground force reactions. And so by looking at these different structures we can get a pretty
good idea whether the individual was obese or not. And like I said that, right, there can be a major factor of the biological profile because weight has been pretty much ignored in the biological profile because in the past
it's been relatively hard to determine. And one the arguments too, is that, well, you know, what's affecting the skeleton is the lean body mass, and that is true, but if you have individuals that were obese, especially if they are obese most of their life, then they actually have a log and slow it does affect the structure.
That's really interesting what you're saying about about the bones. I'd never even really thought about that actually, So when you are trying to age bones. You look at like the articular surface to see if there's if there's any kind of degenerative joint, which you would normally see in an older person, but you're saying that in a younger person that's obese, you might you might see something like that.
Right, yeah, you And in reality, right now, what we are finding is that until we get some better data is that we really can't even tell.
We really just have to have a broader age range if we're looking at somebody that's obese, because what we what we found was that, you know, when we first started doing this research, we were thought, well, when we when we look at obese individuals, we're going to be overestimating their age all the time because of wear and tear. But it turns out that that's not always true, you know, especially in people that are you know, like you said to have a BMI O woe or fifty or something
like that that are you know, very very obese. A lot of times they're actually not moving around that much and so they're not actually putting that much uh you know, stress on those joints, and so we can have you can get where you're actually underestimating their age as well, so that you get a lot more variation now, you know, to have some kind of idea of how active they are. If you have a way that's obese and active, they are probably going to have greater wear and tear on those joints.
Yeah, that's there's just so many things to think of. It's just it's just it's just so cool.
That's why your job is just really cool because there's there's just all these little nuances that that just make it really interesting. So now so you're at a Texas State University and obviously you're you're a professor there and you're doing some active research or you're working on anything like cool that you could talk about with us.
Uh, Well, we're you know, constantly involved in different research. So you know, out of the facility. Part of the research that I do is actually using you know, how do we use remote sensing to locate clandestine remains? And so you know, in our case, we we primarily take you know, weag just uh using a drone just because it's easy to move around and you can get you know up and down, you know and move around on
different things. But trying to figure out what kind of imagery you need depending on the plain of year that you're looking, the time of day, you're looking in the those state of decop of your body, whether it's buried or on the surface. And so we can use you know, just normal red, blue, green, video or or imagery, you know, but you could also use different spectrums where you're looking
at for example, near infrared or infrared. So infrared obviously will give you a heat signature, and there's and nearer for red is really near a bread is really good for example of looking at vegetation. So one of the things when you're looking, especially for buried remains, you're not actually looked for the remains, you're looking for some kind
of environmental disturbance. And so UH, the vegetar the we can use what's called the vegetative index, and that is uh kind of gives you an idea of the help of the thing because it reflects the floor filled differently. And so we can usually utilize differences in the vegetative
index UH to you know, find areas of interest. We can also use if you have a body that's in a decomposition process, uh, buried, you can use near our infrared, but there you have to do it during the you know, the like the early morning before the sun comes up, we can on the surface for example, it actually turns out that you can use things like, uh, the algorithms that are used in automated vehicles because they have to
be able to recognize people. Well, those same algorithms will recognize a dead body on the surface if it's you know, looks like a body still. So the part of what we're doing, we are working at a big, large collaboration between Colorado State University and then a bunch of the other facilities looking at the microbiome associated with decomposition and how that microbiome changes over time, and whether or not that can be used to estimate the postpart of interval
or give us any more about the individual. You know. I think one of the key things that we'll find as time goes on is that, you know a lot of how the rate at which you decomposed is associated with the microbiome that you already have in your body. For example, let's see, well, so we're doing fire death
investigation training and research there. So what we're looking at is can you tell, for example, for it is a body in a state of decomposition when it was burned versus burned relatively fresh up and also then just looking at the pattern of burning on the bone and along the same lines looking at obesity and that does does fat actually act as a buffer? You know, I mean it's later I'm sorry, Uh, up to the fire or does it act as a fuel source?
Uh?
Does it depend on the types of buyers and it's been on, how long it's burned, things of that nature. So we have a lot of things like that going on as far as in the lab goes. We have the large obesity research going on. We have actually a project that I have a student that just finished our dissertation on looking at immobility and how that affects the skeleton and the remodeling rates that you would see. So all kinds of research going on pretty much at all times.
Yeah, that's just it all sounds like so exciting.
Honestly, when I hear you talk about this stuff, it's it's just cool, especially because when you were first talking about the the using the camera and infrared and everything, I was my first.
Thought was like, well, how could you tell the.
Difference between a dead deer versus a human? And it's cool that you're that you could use algorithms and and like probably some kind of AI technology at some point to to be able to help because I'm like it, I'm like one of these most anti AI people because I think it's just going to be.
Really bad, like more bad than good.
But but then you hear things like this that you say, like, Okay, well if this could help police and investigations, that that would obviously.
Be better for for humankind. But I don't know. I still don't know.
I'm still on the fence about thinking if we need that stuff or not. But yeah, the other stuff that you're talking about is really cool too.
Yeah, the case of you know, finding the Claniss remains a lot of that has to do with just narrowing the search area, even if you can't for sure tell whether it's a human or not, if you can narrow down the possibilities of where someone could be because you know, we do a lot of searches where for example, you know, we know that person was last seen at us at a ranch in Texas well that ranch is five thousand makers.
That's a lot of searching that do. And of course you know the research with the Sculpton that is, you know, understanding sculptal variation and stuff. That's one's always excited me as far as you know kinds up and then you know or the research has application beyond and even forensics, so we can use it in to understand archeological remains, but we can even understand it to understand remains, uh,
you know, flies remains. So we've done research looking at body masks, for example, and then using that emission to look at body mass at home Erectus and other species.
One of the cool things about this is that you're the evolution of humans in general. I always like love this from a scientific perspective of that you're studying all this obesity stuff that's kind of new in our evolution as far as as what you would see changes in bones and different things like us using like devices and just sitting at computers all day versus how life used to be. Right, I mean, now you don't even need to go to the store, leave your house to go
Christmas shopping. It's insane. So I think the skeleton is going to be gradually changing. It's kind of cool, like just in your lifetime that you can be able to work on this stuff and study it.
It's really neat.
Yeah, I have a student that is actually looking at how all occupations affect with skeleton. And so you think about just even the last one hundred years, you know, you've had If you had somebody who was a a dock worker, for example, oh you know, one hundred years ago, that would have meant that they would have been, uh utilizing their muscles a lot. They would have you know, had which would have given them really strong bones. Uh, and you'd be able to tell that from their skeleton.
But a dock worker today is basically driving a fortanly. Yeah, you know, so they're there. They're there. It's the same occupation, and yet because of technology, uh they it, the way it affects their skeleton is completely different.
Yeah, it's just it's so cool. I love it. Are you working on any other projects?
Like not not even necessarily anthropology related, but like what are you This is just personal question, like what else are you into besides looking at dead people decomposing?
You mean as far as polity, just your life?
Like I just I'm curious because every everyone always thinks, like people that don't know me, they'll just think that, like my whole life is is like skulls and dead people and stuff, and I like I have, Like I'm a normal person. I like other things. Besides I love my job, but I also like other things.
Yeah. Well, so I'm a woodworker, so I do a lot of word working. I have a shop here at home.
I love that.
I enjoy doing that kind of.
What kind of things have you made?
Oh, I've made all lots of different kitchen cabinets, and but I also make furniture occasionally. Before I went in and have polity, and I actually was a cabinet maker and so now I just do it, you know, for enjoyment. But before that, I did uh, you know, custom cabinets and worked on things like uh, you know, bars for uh, you know, restaurants, cash register stands for you know, different retail outlets, things like that. Of that nature.
That's awesome. I love that.
I'm like, I'm really into It's funny too because I do a lot of like home stuff too. I'm more into painting and things like that and just doing little tiny projects around the house.
But I I love that so much. It's cool. I think it.
I think sometimes a job like ours is like really heavy, and it's nice to just have something completely separate that that you can wind down with and not have to think about all of all of the sometimes horrible things that are going on in the world. It's just like a nice thing for your mind. Sure, well, thank you so much for being here with us today. It was
awesome and really informative. And I hope one day I could come visit you there and go check out the body farm because I've never seen and obviously I'm so interested in it.
Yeah, we'd love to have you. It's it's definitely an interesting and you know, it's it is. Ah, it's turned out to be, you know, a very rewarding career. I enjoy going to work, you know, and and because of the fact that I you know, the with the outdoor facility and everything, I also get a lot of different variety of the you know kind of research that I do. I'm not you know, stop doing one single thing, you know, And I also get to work with lots of different people,
you know, so we do you know, all kinds of things. Actually, for example, we have a mass grave project going on where we actually have people from five different countries working on the project and they those include you know, apologists, biologists, microbiologists, dog handlers, drone operators, you know, geophysicists, all kinds of different people, so I get to see this different, different perspective that I that I would otherwise, you know, in most academic settings.
Yeah, that's cool too.
It's always cool to make friends with people that are like kind of in your field but not and then you could just learn all these other things that you don't normally do at your job. But it's I mean, you know, when you're when you like, if you and I went out to dinner, we would just have a lot to talk about because we kind of do the same thing, but not really, but you know, all right, well cool, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, thank you,
thank you for listening to Mother Knows Death. As a reminder, my training is as a pathologist assistant. I have a master's level education and specialize in anatomy and pathology education. I am not a doctor, and I have not diagnosed or treated anyone dead or alive without the assistance of
a licensed medical doctor. This show, my website, and social media accounts are designed to educate and inform people based on my experience working in pathology, so they can make healthier decisions regarding their life and well being Always remember that science is changing every day, and the opinions expressed in this episode are based on my knowledge of those
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Thanks M