A specialist in fixing identities to badly decomposed bodies began work with the Bermuda Police yesterday to help uncover information about the mysterious remains found last weekend in Hamilton Parish.

Police said Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist from Knoxville, Tennessee, arrived in Bermuda Wednesday to assist Government Forensic Pathologist Dr. John Obafunwa in sifting through the murky, hidden clues of the remains and the discovery site.

A badly decomposed body was discovered in Walsingham Nature Reserve last Saturday but Police have yet to release details of age, gender, race, size, or even the body's overall condition.

Ms Kimmerle may prove to be the a key player in uncovering those building blocks of identity, however, as the investigation moves forward.

Ms Kimmerle specialises in forensic anthropology and legal medicine, Police said.

She is a former Chief Anthropologist for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The ICT was set up to examine the mass graves left behind by years of conflict during the bloody disintegration of the former Balkan nation. The information it uncovered has assisted in bringing former war criminals to international justice.

Last night The Royal Gazette spoke with forensic pathologists in the United States about their role within a Police investigation and what key factors Ms Kimmerle may be looking for as her work in Bermuda proceeds.

Forensic pathologists often work in conjunction with police and pathologists to identify bodies, discover evidence of foul play and provide and estimate of the time the remains have been exposed to the elements.

The state of decomposition of the body is the first clue, said Dr. Walter Birkby of the Forensic Science Center in Tucson, Arizona. The rate of decomposition for the area and the state of the remains will determine how long the body has lain there since death. If the remains are solely skeletal the investigators will have much more work on their hands, he said.

Rates of decomposition vary widely by climate and topography of the area where the body is found but it could be as little as a week or as long as a few months before a body is reduced to a skeleton, he suggested.

Nevertheless, Dr. Birkby said there may be hair or skin fibres at the scene - caught in the trees or embedded in the ground - which can provide vital information about race and gender.

If the remains are skeletal, both Dr. Birkby and Dr. Sheilagh Brooks, a forensic anthropogist in Las Vegas, agree the presence of the skull, teeth, pelvic bones, and femura (the long, upper leg bones) are most essential in determining the sex, stature, race and age at death of an unknown individual.

Dr. Brooks said the shape of the pelvic area will tell investigators the gender of the body - with women having a wider pelvic area. Meanwhile, the shape of the skull yields clues with regards to race and the length of the femur can pinpoint stature when cross-referenced with statistical tables, Dr. Birkby said.

Close examination of the skeleton can also reveal foul play. Dr. Birkby said the bones may have to be specially cleaned of decomposition fluids and examined microscopically before evidence of violence can be uncovered. Forensic anthropologists are adept at finding sharp force injuries at first imperceptible, he said. The examination will also look for clues to the person's medical history - evidence of broken bones or other pre-death pathologies.

Once these basic components of the remains are determined, the details are normally fed into missing persons databases to see if there are any matches and released to the public, Dr. Birkby added.

"Sometimes people go missing and no one looks for them though - maybe drug-dealers for example," he said.

In which case, the work of an anthropologists skilled at creating facial approximations, might be called upon. These scientists can build an approximation of what the individual looked like from skull measurements and tissue thickness databases. Layers of clay, in the relevant thicknesses to different facial tissue - muscle, flesh, cartilage, skin - can be laid over the skull with a clearer picture emerging.

"It might not be exact but once the picture is published in the paper with a good physical description, people can be identified," he said.

Sometimes, however, Dr. Brooks said the most important first step is to insure the remains are human.

"You'd be surprised the amount of investigations I've been called in on that turn out to be a bear or some other animal," she said.

"The first thing is to determine it is human," Dr. Brooks said. "You'd be surprised the number of investigations that turn out to be a bear or some other animal remains."

Dr. Brooks said that determination is most easily made in a case of skeletal remains if the teeth are still present. Human remains are recognisable by the shape of the jaw, number of teeth and shape of the canines.

However, scientists can also make the determination from looking at the bones of the hands and feet in the absence of teeth.