I was a bit startled by Lisa mentioning the idea of Bob Church doing a necropsy. Bob isn't a vet and he isn't a pathologist so he doesn't do necropsies, by definition. He does do skeletal analyses, but the sample size to use for comparisons for ferrets is rather low and that limits what can be gleaned from skeletons at this point in time unless the situation is very overt. It's sort of a long-term self-correcting situation, though it takes a long time to build up decent sample sizes. The more samples the more can be deduced from skeletons because things like normal variations, skeletal densities, etc. are better known. If someone saw the skeleton of a pitcher, a waitress, a body builder, a clarinet player, or a pipe smoker without having enough of a sample, for instance, they person looking at them would think that there were marked malformations: one arm with far greater muscular ridges and certain forms of damage but no the other, a female (which usually means gracile) skeleton with pronounced arm musculature -- esp at and near the shoulders-- despite the rest falling into normal ranges, alterations of the mandible, etc. We know that they fall into the normal range for people, but a small collection size would not pick out that fact. For example: Bob worked on our sweet Ruffle. What is known is that she was right on the borderline of being survivable, and that was true for her skeleton as well as for her soft tissues and behavior. (Ruffle was born with multiple malformations and with very limited understanding of her world.) Bob didn't do the necropsy, of course. Our vet did the necropsy, then the vet preserved critical tissue samples which went to Bruce Williams because Ruffie was so strange that a number of her tissues were desired for not only pathologic diagnoses -- which only a pathologist can do and then only from tissues which are properly preserved rapidly enough -- (and she had something like 8 serious things going on beyond her handicaps when she died, with about 5 of those potentially fatal) but for the tissue collection since she was so unusual. What remained went to Bob for preparation for osteological study. Perhaps I had a better understanding of how such things work because I used to be student curator of a comparative mammal collection of bones, fossils, and teeth. I don't know. It seems to me that Lisa has a good deal of misunderstanding of what a necropsy is, who does them, who does pathology and what is needed to do it, etc. I think that understanding those aspects would be comforting to her because she would better understand what occurred. In the FML archives there will be at least one vet post from the FHL explaining what necropsies are, and how tissues must be prepared for pathology to be done. For instance, tissues can't be frozen or the destruction is so great that it's not possible to tell cell types as when looking for diseases or malignancies, the tissues must be prepared while still very soon after death especially for some organs such as intestinal samples, and enough of the involved tissue must be sampled (for example having a pathologist check for lympho in the spinal cord tends to be best done if the entire spinal cord is sent rather than a small sample). I hope this helps. [Posted in FML issue 3868]