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By Root 821 0

career, I found myself rendered momentarily speechless on the topic. An attractive young coed in the front row, directly in front of me, chose that exact moment to uncross her legs and languidly drape one leg over the arm of her desk. As her skirt slid up her taut thighs and her flawless pelvic structure, it became clear that underneath, she was wearing nothing at all. Astonished, I looked up at her face; she cocked her head, raised an eyebrow, and smiled sweetly. Beating a hasty retreat to the other side of the auditorium, I struggled manfully to salvage my sentence, my lecture, and my composure. This same student appeared in my office a few days later—I’d just handed out midterm grades, and hers was an F. Her lower lip quivered as she leaned toward me across the desk in a low-cut blouse. “Oh, Dr. Brockton, I’ll do anything to pull up my grade,” she breathed.

“Then study,” I snapped. She dropped the class three days later, but not before turning in a quiz on the bones of the hand and arm, in which she defined humerus as “something that, like, makes you laugh.”

Today’s class—like the day of the migrating miniskirt—also happened to focus on pelvic structure. That seemed fitting, since I’d just been examining the pelvis of the body—the woman—found in the cave in Cooke County. As a teaching aid, I’d brought to class two sets of pelvic bones, one male and the other female, from the skeletal collection I’d been building over the years. Using red dental wax as a temporary adhesive, I reattached the pubic bones to the innominates, or hip bones, and then held them up, first the male, then the female. “Okay, I’ve noticed some of you carefully studying the pelvises of your classmates. So I’m sure you’ll have no trouble identifying the differences between the male and female.”

A laugh rippled across the room—a good beginning. “Which is the female, number one or number two?”

“Number two,” chorused a handful of voices.

“Very good. How can you tell?”

“It’s wider,” chirped one girl.

“Cuter, too,” added a boy.

“The bones in front come out farther,” said someone.

“That’s right, the pubic bones project more,” I said. “Why is that?”

“Pregnancy?”

“Right, to make room for the baby,” I said, “not just during pregnancy, but also—especially—during childbirth.” I rotated the pelvis backward by 90 degrees, giving them an obstetrician’s-eye view of the bones that frame the birth canal. “You see the size of that opening? That’s what a baby’s head has to fit through during childbirth. Now compare it to the male’s.” I held up the narrower pelvis in the same position. “Any of you fellows think you could pop a baby out through there? You better hope you never have to try!” I heard a few murmurs along the lines of “Ouch, man.”

Next I showed them the female’s sciatic notch—the notch just behind the hip joint where the sciatic nerve emerges from the spinal column and runs down the leg. “See any difference here?”

“Wider.” “Bigger.”

“Correct. That’s another result of the geometry of childbearing: as the female’s innominates flare out at puberty, this notch gets wider. Notice that I can easily fit two fingers into the base of this notch, but only one in the sciatic notch of the male? So ten years from now, when you’re working a forensic case, and a hunter or a police officer brings you nothing but a single innominate bone, you can tell immediately whether it came from a man or a woman.”

One of the girls near the front—Sarah Carmichael, according to the seating chart; she wore sensible clothes and asked sensible questions—said, “But if those changes don’t happen until puberty, how can you tell the sex of a child’s skeleton?”

“Good question, Miss Carmichael. The answer is, you can’t. Before puberty, there’s no reliable way to distinguish between the bones of males and those of females. All you can do is tell whether the bones you have are the right size for a boy or a girl of a given age.”

Most of them looked puzzled, so I trotted out an example. “When I looked at the child’s bones that were recovered in the Lindbergh kidnapping case”—a few heads