Dr. Daniel Westcott

This is a mandible to jawbone.

And that skull is in half.

Yeah, this person was autopsied.

So this is an autopsy cut.

Interesting.

So that they can examine the brain.

Lots of little small bones.

So we put them in a separate bag just so that they don't get scattered out throughout the box.

It's easier to keep them together.

While you would think that we would know a lot about how bodies decompose, it actually turns out that we really know very little about what's going on.

So the work that's done here is pretty vital to that.

As a culture, in some ways, we actually are kind of scared of death, and we embalm bodies so that they don't decompose as fast, and we don't want to see that process going on, but that process does go on, and we need to be able to understand how it works.

The facility is 26 acres, and it sits on a 4,200-acre ranch.

And we get about 70 donations a year.

And then the bodies are usually left to decompose for about six months to several years, depending on the research protocol.

And then the skeletons come back here, and so we add about 70 skeletons per year to the collection.

Probably about 60.

And so as they do, they start to produce gases, and these gases initially will just kind of work their way through the arteries and veins, stuff like that, and you get what's called marbling.

And then it also, then the next kind of step to this is that that gas starts to build up and causes the bodies to go through what's called a bloat stage.

So they'll actually kind of puff up.