All the Time in the World
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What is the body farm at Texas State University?
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You can use Fetch for any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. This week, we wanted to share one of our very favorite episodes. We released it back in 2017, and people still write to us about it all the time. And I still think about the day we recorded it.
What is that you're holding?
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.
There's a little bag here that says hands and feet. Do those usually get separated because it's... It's just there.
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.
This is Dr. Daniel Westcott, the director of the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, about 30 miles from Austin. We met with him in a nondescript building, a warehouse really, so plain we drove right past it twice. But when you get out of the car and walk to the door, you see a small paper sign with a vulture and a skull, and you know you found it. there are very few places in the world that do what they do here.
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.
At Dr. Westcott's center, they deliberately set out human bodies to decompose in nature. Most of the bodies are lying on the ground, face up, with their arms at their sides. But researchers also place bodies in trunks of cars, wrap them in tarps, and bury them in shallow graves.
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.
How big is the facility, and how many bodies are here?
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.
So if you had to guess how many bodies are in some state of decomposition here right now, do you know?
Probably about 60.
The bodies are donated. They're called gifted bodies, and the people who plan to donate themselves to the research when they die are called living donors.
You know, if they want to do something like put me in the trunk of a car to see what happens there or under a tarp or a slab of concrete, I've got no problem with that.
This is Grady Early, a retired computer science professor who decided long ago that he wanted his body to go to the Forensic Anthropology Center. Why did you decide to become a donor?
I think that everyone should be useful in life. And if you can be useful after death as well, so much the better. After all... Which would you rather do, wind up in a box in the ground just wasting real estate or be in a box in the lab and at least potentially useful to a researcher sometime in future?
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