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Tennessee Body Farm. For more than four decades, Bill Bass has been one of the top death experts in the United States. He's best known for developing the Body Farm, a 2.5-acre plot of land in Tennessee filled with some 150 corpses in various states of decay.
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For more than four decades, Bill Bass has been one of the top death experts in the United States. • He's best known for developing the Body Farm, a 2.5-acre plot of land in Tennessee filled with some 150 corpses in various states of decay. • The farm -- officially known as the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility -- allows scientists to study decomposition and make better estimates of time of death in criminal cases.
What is at the Body Farm? • They have clothed and unclothed bodies, in the sun and the shade, in water. • They're in automobiles, trunks of cars, houses. • What they’ve tried to do is reconstruct as many situations in which police find skeletal remains as possible.
Where do they get the bodies? • They have over 1,000 people who have willed their bodies, actually their skeletons, to the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee. • They also get unclaimed bodies from medical examiners. • There is a form that a person can fill out to donate his or her body, It asks for things like medical histories, and a picture of the individual for facial reconstruction.
What is a Body Farm for? • Places such as the Tennessee body farm help scientist better understand the way human remains break down • This allows scientists to better pinpoint time of death and other information about murder victims based on the way a body or skeleton looks, and the types of insects and chemicals found on the body.