The last presentation was in the morphology assessment of mammals. And to talk to us about it is Dr. Verity Mathis. Hi. Welcome to the Junction.

Hi. Thank you for having me.

So can you let our audience know about what it is that you do?

So I work at the Floor Museum of Natural History. I am the mammals collections manager there. So I take care of all of our research collections that we have that are of modern mammals.

Excellent. So how does that, how does that apply to forensics?

That's a good question. So, um, we have skeletal material, hair, bone for you name it. If it's a part of a mammal, we have it. So it's a very useful resource for comparing things that you might find at a crime scene or at an investigation. If you have a piece of bone or a piece of skull that you don't know what it is, natural history collections can help you identify that. And it doesn't even have to be mammal. There's collections for birds and snakes and. You name it, there's a collection for it. So we can help figure out what you might have if you don't know, and if DNA is not available.

You used the term during the lecture, mammology. What does that mean?

So mammology is basically the study of mammals. So that's what we do. We study all aspects of mammals generally. Some of us have more specialties than others. Um, but yeah, it's just the general study and appreciation of mammals.

What kind of species do you guys hold?

So we have a little bit of everything from all around the world. So we have almost all the orders of mammals represented except for two very small Australian orders. So we, you know, we have a lot of rodents and bats and carnivores and huge number of whales and dolphins. Um, manatees. Panthers. We have a lot of representation from a lot of, from the southeastern United States 'cause that's where we're housed. But we also have representation from all over the world, from Central South America to Pakistan to Africa. So we have, I think a little over 1100 species of mammals in our collection. Um, so it's not representative of everything in the entire world, but it's a good cross section.

I have a friend that does forensic anthropology and they go on excavations and they try to dig out bones and stuff. Mm-hmm. So basically what you do would be, uh, probably say provide samples to be able to compare what they pull out.

Exactly. Yeah. So we work a lot with anthropology collections ourselves, so especially our, environmental archeology collections and paleontology collections. So if they find a piece of a bone and they don't know what it is, they can bring it to our collection and we can help them decide what species it was. And so they know the context of what the found, you know, like if it's domestic versus a wild animal, um, if it's been worked or cut, we can kind of help figure that out and go from there. Yeah.

Do you get calls from law enforcement to help you identify remains?

Uh, every once in a while, so that's part of the reason why I wanna come here today to give a talk, is to let people know that we are a resource. 'cause we actually, we don't deal a whole, whole lot with law enforcement, but we are there, we've done some stuff with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the past to give, um, opinions on evidence that they've collected. But it would be good to let people know that we are a resource for those, those things that they might find at their crime scenes.

I guess so, yeah, that was gonna be my last question was gonna be where do you, where do you see this going?

Yeah, so I mean, that's just, you know, we're, we have these collections of mammals and we love to have them be useful to people not only for research, I mean, the foundation of research of these collections are for research purposes, but they, they can expand beyond that in so many other capacities in terms of education, outreach, and identification for. You know, crime scene investigations, wildlife forensics, anthropological questions. Um, just to know that it doesn't have to be, you know, a specific research question. It can be just a purely identification kind of mystery that we like to solve. And so that's why we have these collections just to kind of help maybe solve those mysteries. I don't know. Yeah. It's fun. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for being here, and thank you for what you're doing. I think it's, it's really cool.

Oh, thank you. Yeah. It's a fun job.