ABSTRACT
Dogs find things. We all know that. We also know that dogs like to be helpful and please their owners (Gell 1988, p. 7, describing dogs as “biddable”). In 1998, members of a sheriff’s office came to the Laboratory for Human Osteology at the University of Alabama with bone gathered from the grounds surrounding a house that had caught on fire in a rural area of the county and subsequently burned to the ground. I identified the bone as human, and the police asked if I could accompany them to the site of the house fire. As we drove to the site, the investigators indicated that they did not think that I would find any bones, because the fire was too hot and the structure had collapsed and burned pretty completely. I told them that the bones they had brought to me were smoked and burnt but in relatively good shape.
