Bones of contention
Nov. 28th, 2015 12:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ffuturesSomething I saw in a TV show tonight boggled me slightly...
Posting as someone who has actually prepared small animal skeletons for display, the idea that someone could prepare a human skeleton literally overnight - all flesh gone, all bones dry, bleached, fully articulated and wired - is frankly ludicrous. It takes a lot of physical work to remove the flesh, combined with chemical processes that typically take several days to weeks. On something as big as a human skeleton I'd guess that it's more at the weeks end of the scale. And wiring one up as well as was shown in the episode would take a good few hours after all that was complete.
While Bones and other forensic shows use the same short cut, whenever you see someone messing around with a clean white skeleton only hours after a body is found, they don't usually put such a precise time scale on it.
The silly part is that it was completely unnecessary, they could have simply changed the plot slightly and said that the victim had been missing for a couple of weeks. Not a bad episode, except for that, but I really wish they hadn't started out with something so silly.
Posting as someone who has actually prepared small animal skeletons for display, the idea that someone could prepare a human skeleton literally overnight - all flesh gone, all bones dry, bleached, fully articulated and wired - is frankly ludicrous. It takes a lot of physical work to remove the flesh, combined with chemical processes that typically take several days to weeks. On something as big as a human skeleton I'd guess that it's more at the weeks end of the scale. And wiring one up as well as was shown in the episode would take a good few hours after all that was complete.
While Bones and other forensic shows use the same short cut, whenever you see someone messing around with a clean white skeleton only hours after a body is found, they don't usually put such a precise time scale on it.
The silly part is that it was completely unnecessary, they could have simply changed the plot slightly and said that the victim had been missing for a couple of weeks. Not a bad episode, except for that, but I really wish they hadn't started out with something so silly.
