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General information |
Course unit name: Identification Methods
Course unit code: 568588
Academic year: 2021-2022
Coordinator: Araceli Rosa de la Cruz
Department: Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Credits: 2,5
Single program: S
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Estimated learning time |
Total number of hours 62.5 |
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Face-to-face and/or online activities |
20 |
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- Lecture |
Face-to-face |
10 |
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- Laboratory session |
Face-to-face |
2 |
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- Field trip |
Face-to-face |
8 |
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Supervised project |
14.5 |
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Independent learning |
28 |
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Learning objectives |
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Referring to knowledge In this course, students learn to use skeletal remains to reconstruct biological profiles of an individual’s sex, height, cause of death and age at death. They also analyse features of remains that can indicate an individual’s profession or life experiences, injuries, dental history and other such information used by police investigators for the purposes of identification. Finally, they learn to classify living human beings according to their constitutional, anatomical, physiological, and psychological characteristics, relating these to aspects of crimes and to other events of legal importance. |
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Teaching blocks |
1. The biochemistry of death. Chemical and ultrastructural aspects of decomposition. The post-mortem interval: thanatochronological estimation.
2. Dating methods
3. Identification of the living and the dead
4. Identification of cadavers in an advanced stage of decomposition
5. Identification based on study of the skeleton
6. Forensic dentistry
7. Identification of burnt human remains
8. Identification from a genetic study
9. Context analysis: forensic botany and entomology
10.
Disaster victim identification
Note that the total completion of this content may be subject to official COVID-19 restrictions.