Back in graduate school at San Diego State University, the late Spencer
Rogers moonlighted for the Coroner's Office and kept crime scene specimens around
for identification. One particularly gross-smelling "arm" lay adjacent to my
chair in the lecture class for a month. Gads, but I believe I was nauseous the
entire course! Finally, he keyed out the bones and declared it was a mature
mountain lion! I was still sick.

Then there was the very human-looking saw-cut skeletal foot with the bullet
hole crunched through the tarsals, found outside the Catholic chapel at the
Royal Presidio de San Diego de Cosoy. Given that it was 1968 and world events
such as they were, we joked that it was the foot of California's first draft
dodger. We wrapped the feature in plaster and shipped it off to the physical
anthropology lab. A month later, a letter posted that the foot belonged to a
California Grizzly Bear.

Ron May
Legacy 106, Inc.