background: the aim of his study was to determine development time and thermal requirements of three myiasis flies including chrysomya albiceps, lucilia sericata, and sarcophaga sp. methods: rate of development (rod) and accumu­lated degree day ( add) of three important forensic flies in iran, chrysomya albiceps, lucilia sericata, and sarcophaga sp. by rearing individuals under a single constan...

Megnin's book "La fauna des cadaveres" published in 1894 in France is generally accepted as a mile-stone in forensic entomology. It is hardly known that at the same time this topic was likewise explored in the German-speaking countries. Even PMI estimation based on developmental data of blowflies was performed. After a more descriptive period in the first half of the 20th century the complexity...

Forensic entomology (FE) is increasingly gaining international recognition. In Germany, however, the development of FE has been stagnating, mainly because of the lack of cooperation between police, forensic medicine and entomology. In 1997 a co-operative research project 'Forensic Entomology' was started in Frankfurt/Main at the Center of Legal Medicine and the Research Institute Senckenberg. T...

Wounds of living persons are a potential target for the same flies that live, or feed early on corpses. This can lead to complications in estimation of PMI but also allows to determine additional information that might be valuable in a trial, or during the investigations [e.g., M. Benecke, R. Lessig, Child neglect and forensic entomology, Forensic Sci. Int. 120 (2001) 155-159]. With forensic en...

Apart from an early case report from China (13th century), the first observations on insects and other arthropods as forensic indicators were documented in Germany and France during mass exhumations in the 1880s by Reinhard, who is considered a co-founder of the discipline. After the French publication of Mégnin's popular book on the applied aspects of forensic entomology, the concept quickly s...

Insects are the dominant group of animals on earth today. They occur practically everywhere and far outnumber all other terrestrial animals taken together. Several hundred thousand different kinds of insects have been described, three times as many as there are in the rest of animal kingdom and some authorities believe that the total number of different species of insects may approach 30 millio...

The continuous development of forensic sciences has given his contribution to the formation of different kind of highly skilled and specialized scientists who have to work together in order to help judicial authority and police to understand dynamics of a criminal event. These are experts in different fields of traditional sciences, such as chemistry, biology, physics, entomology, but they also...

The perfect crime is increasingly hard to commit; almost any crime that involves physical contact inevitably leaves traces from which forensic laboratories can gather information. The jackpot for law enforcers is biological material, such as hairs or cells, that forensic scien tists use to establish the DNA profile of the suspect. Once a high-tech tool used mainly in serious criminal investigat...