Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Studies In Taphonomy: Bone And Soft Tissue Modifications By Postmortem Scavengers, Jennifer Ann Synstelien

Doctoral Dissertations

This study documented animal scavengers at the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility. Remotely-captured digital video and still photography equipment was stationed at the outdoor human decomposition facility intermittently from September 2003 through October 2009. The primary scavengers of corpses were identified as the northern raccoon (Procyon lotor), Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), and white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus); and the primary scavenger of skeletal remains was the eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis). Among these species, the raccoon was the dominant scavenger and is the focus of this report.

The captured imagery of …