Abstract For some emergency services professionals, call outs to human remains can be frequent events. The degree of completeness and/or decomposition of remains may dictate that it might not always be possible to determine human origin at a first glance, so having a basic knowledge of skeletal anatomy and morphology could prove beneficial. When encountering any form of skeletal material, it is always best to call in a forensic anthropologist, but this is not always possible. If an attending officer was able to make a definitive call that remains belonged to a human or non-human subject, it could greatly assist within the escalation process. The results discussed here represent a workshop commissioned by Thames Valley Police after the organizer attended a similar workshop on bone identification and differentiation through a forensics conference. In total, 50 participants attended the workshop and completed a subsequent survey on the usefulness of the workshop and knowledge gained. Mann–Whitney U tests were conducted to determine any differences in ability from before to after the workshop, and the raw data were studied further to enhance any significances. The analysis showed that overall, participants felt more confident in both their ability to identify skeletal material, and their ability to differentiate between human and non-human skeletal material after the workshop. A further breakdown suggests that participants felt more confident in identifying skeletal material, but slightly less confident in deciding whether it belonged to a human or non-human subject.
Goodison et al. (Thu,) studied this question.