| Author | Message | ||
     Graham Ford |
Dominique. Well, the answer can be yes and it can also be no. It can depend on the circumstances of the cause of death and the condition the body remained in after death. Now lets see. If you drowned in the sea and you became the food source for fish, then it is likely you may not have any hands and feet left after 3 days, let alone 3 months. If you died of some other cause and was subsequently cremated, well there again would be no footsies and tootsies left. Enough of the extemes. If a deceased person was buried in the normal (coffin) manner, then I would hope (& expect) ridge characteristic detail to be present on the hands & feet after a 3 month time lapse. It must be remembered that if the outer skin has deteriorated, then the ridge structure will still be present on the lower dermis layer. As brushed upon (no pun intended for the latent aficionados) above, there are many variables (decomposition, heat, water, body indoors, body out in the sun etc) which will all have some bearing on the final outcome on the ridge detail present. But lest I forget, I have seen ridge detail on the fingers of an Egyptian mummy that was over 2000 years old. The ridge detail was searched through the national fingerprint archives in London UK, with no match. But then we rarely arrested and charged 2000 year old mummies for committing an offense, except Boris Karloff of course!!! | ||
| Dominique Walker |
Do your finger and foot prints go away within three months of being dead? | ||
| Michele |
Don, One article that can be found on the internet is called "Loss of Ridged Skin Before Birth" by Harold Cummins, Ph.D. This was originally printed in the February 1965 issue of Finger Print and Identification Magazine. Michele | ||
| Don Culberson |
I am a biology professor at a small liberal arts college. One of my students in a basic "non-majors" type course came to me after a lecture on human genetics and showed me that he apparently has no fingerprints.. that is, no visible ridges or whorls. His twin brother shows the same phenomenon however their (non-twin) sister does not. Their father also has no visible fingerprints and, he believes, their grandmother was also smooth fingered! He added that his sense of touch is phenomenally acute, perhaps due to the lack of ridges getting in the way. He can, for instance, easily feel the ridges on other people's fingers. I am interested in learning more of this phenomenon, especially the genetics associated. Any help would be appreciated! I am an utter novice to the science of fingerprinting! Don Culberson Biology Department Spring Hill College Mobile, AL |
