# You never looked your age. Now you're dead. Can a coroner tell how old you were? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 22, 2004, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-never-looked-your-age-now-youre-dead-can-a-coroner-tell-how-old-you-were/281181 "2004-12-22T17:08:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2004, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-never-looked-your-age-now-youre-dead-can-a-coroner-tell-how-old-you-were/281181/1 "2004-12-22T17:08:04Z")
Suppose you are one of the following people who show up as a John (or Jane) Doe in the morgue after dying of the same accidental cause. A. You are in your late 20s, but everyone thought you were 6 to 10 years younger because you had a baby face, no lines or wrinkles, and were a small person to begin with. Also, you never smoked/did drugs/drank and generally were in good health. or b. You are in your late 40s, but everyone thought you were 10 or 15 years older. You spent too much time in the sun so you wrinkled up young, you never got enough calcium so your bones already are more brittle than they ought to be, and you’ve been in poor health over all for a couple of decades and you had all the vices person A didn’t. So, the cornor examines the people above, and the police ask how old they were so they can float descriptions to get the dead idenified. No one who encountered either corpse in life could accurately guess their age. Can the cornor accurately determine how old they were (if yes, how?), or do the police end up looking for leads involving missing persons in their teens/early 20s and in their late 50s/mid 60s? And what if the same senario, but somehow both corpses arrived minus all their teeth (given they make a big deal of teeth on the mummy shows on the discovery channel etc). Maybe they were the victims of a mad dentist/serial killer. blame the CSI shows for this question, well not the second 1/2 half ---
**Author:** ![Otto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/bbe5ce/32.png) [@Otto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Otto)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2004, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-never-looked-your-age-now-youre-dead-can-a-coroner-tell-how-old-you-were/281181/2 "2004-12-22T17:25:10Z")
You mean besides cutting them in half and counting the rings? I found [this](http://www.policensw.com/info/forensic/anthropology1.html): > [@](#): > > Age is determined by studying a number of skeletal features, principally the skull, teeth and centres of ossification. As the young human body develops from soon after conception until early adulthood, the growth of the bones is regulated by centres of ossification which gradually fill out and fuse together to give the bones shape and size. This process is established in a regular pattern which enables the skilled anatomist to give a reliable estimate of age to within one or two years. Examination of the growing ends of the bones epiphyses is especially relevant. The growth centres at the lower ends of the limb-bones permit the limbs to lengthen during childhood and thereby increase the height of the individual. These epiphyses are soft and cartilaginous during the growing period but gradually harden into solid bone and fuse with the main shaft of the bone as adulthood is reached. The head of the thigh-bone (femur) fuses between 18 and 20 years, and part of the hip during the 24th year. Consideration of the epiphyses in the long bones of a skeleton can therefore yield reliable information abut age up to 25 years. After that, age-determination depends on looking at the skull and other bones which show changes with age. As females mature quicker than males, the ageing aspects of the female skeleton are usually about a year ahead of the male. > > Skulls have a number of important features which help to determine the age and sex of a skeleton. The appearance of the sutures or scams on top of the skull can give its approximate age. The vault of the cranium is made up of a number of flat bones which interlock at the edges by means of striations or sutures. In infants there are large gaps between these bones, which gradually close up after the age of 30. This fusing process occurs in a particular sequence beginning from the inside of the skull and working outwards. It is the state of these closures which allows age to be approximated; complete absence of closure indicates that the skeleton is less than 30 years old. > > Age-determinations based on the state of the skull sutures are not exact, but in the absence of other information may be the only method of ageing human remains. ---
**Author:** ![Eve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Eve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eve)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2004, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/you-never-looked-your-age-now-youre-dead-can-a-coroner-tell-how-old-you-were/281181/3 "2004-12-22T17:32:34Z")
I frequently see news articles about unidentified bodies being found, “a black female in her late teens or early 20s,” or “a white male in his fifties,” and when they’re finally ID’d they were a decade or so off. Talk about being embarrassed to death.