How to Reconstruct a Skull

Reconstructing a human skull, along with the face of the deceased person, is one of the most complicated and time consuming jobs in all of science. However, the basic practice can be broken down into a few steps for the sake of illustration. Read on to learn more.

Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

1. Piece the skull together as well as can be expected. Sometimes fragments of bone from a broken skull are impossible to find, but scientists must piece together all that they have in an effort to reconstruct the most realistic and complete skull possible. This involves hours of intensive labor.
2. Reconstruct the skull completely and prep it for further action. Because bones are delicate, scientists often make a wax version or a three dimensional computer version of a skull to continue their work without damage to the bones.
3. Add flesh to reconstruct the face of skull. The first step in this process is adding depth markers (either plastic or computer generated) to the skull to estimate the thickness of muscle and flesh on the bones. Estimating the amount of flesh to add takes great knowledge of anatomy and forensic prowess.
4. Form the face from clay. Once the depth markers are in place, the scientist or scientific artist can add flesh by using a layer of clay over the mold or computer generated flesh on the 3-D image.
5. Include artistic touches like skin tone, eye color and hair. Often this final process is something of a guess. While scientists can determine race, age and gender from bones, the final, small touches are often conjecture.

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