A Grizzly Discovery (by Mason, 8th grade student)

The Q?rius “A Grizzly Discovery” program (pronounced “curious”) is a hands-on forensic educational program. The goal to this is to determine whether bones found in the forest belong to a missing person who disappeared in that same general area. The instructors provide all of the bones and provide instructions and assistance in using them to determine if they belong to the person missing.

The adolescent class, as well as the fifth and sixth graders from the elementary class, drove over to the Natural History Museum in D.C. The Q?rius program was located within this building. We were able to touch the bones for examination purposes, but we had to be careful and use gloves because they were real bones (It was a real investigation- it had already been solved long before we showed up, but the bones were real, which made it cool). One of the bones was still decaying, and it was in a bag because it stank. There were six stations, each were designed to examine different evidence found, like their sex, age, time since death, and possibly even their cause of death. I’m not going to spoil the answers to everything (I can’t even remember them), but it was very educational and fun, and we all learned a lot (more than I expected) about bones.