and establishing and comparing physical evidence
to link a suspect to a victim and crime scene.
Typically, two or more of the lab’s seven divisions—
administration, chemistry, criminalistics, genetics,
morphology, pathology and digital evidence—handle
the evidence, from analyzing blood and tissue to extracting DNA for species identification. Lab analyses
provide vital clues that can link a trafficker to his or
her crime, especially when evidence has been processed beyond recognition. The lab works with more
than 200 federal FWS agents, all 50 state wildlife
agencies, and the 175 signatory countries of the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
Working on the Lor case, lab morphologist Yates
scanned the evidence submittal form. Many of the
items, listed as “unidentified,” had never been seen
before in international trade, and their chopped up
and desiccated nature made guessing difficult.
With gloved hands Yates began investigating bits
and pieces. This work was a far cry from her teenage training in a Dallas cosmetology school, yet the
school had required 1,000 hours of human anatomy
study, which had captivated Yates and sparked
her interest in science. She landed a job as a paid
bone-washer at the University of North Texas’s
archaeology department, where she cleaned and
identified millions of bones and bone fragments.
Yates later earned a master’s degree in ecology with
a minor in zooarchaeology—the study of animal
remains—from the University of North Texas, and
eventually joined the FWS forensic lab in 1992, a
natural fit that allowed her to continue teasing stories from old bones and reconstructing past events
from animal remains.
Yates slipped on high-powered magnifying visors to
inspect a flat gray disk and noticed some filaments of
protruding hair, a clear sign that the chunk of “
rubber” was actually skin. She put the specimen under
a microscope and immediately recognized it as part
of an elephant. The “wrinkles” of elephant skin are
small capillary accumulations called papillae. Under
a microscope these structures look like little volcanoes. Depending on their location on the body, they
can project up to one millimeter above the skin and
be either tightly packed or loosely spaced. Yet around
an elephant’s hair pore, the bumps always disappear.
“If you think of the skin as a landscape,” says Yates,
“elephant skin has a very unique topography.”
With this positive identification, Yates knew that
the item listed as “unidentified mammal bone” was
actually the cornified foot pad of an Asian elephant
(Elephas maximus spp), a protected species under
CITES, which regulates wildlife trade to prevent
the over-exploitation of certain species. Authorities
estimate the global illegal wildlife trade could be
worth $20 billion annually, making it perhaps the
third largest black market crime in the world behind
drugs and human trafficking.
in this room with a view
of confiscated and
illegal wildlife products,
Bonnie Yates, chief
morphologist with the
U.S. fish and Wildlife
forensics laboratory,
shows an ornately
carved ivory object to
a local group of boy
scouts who have come
to the lab for a special
educational tour.
Credit: USf WS forensic laboratory
DNA Works Its Magic
The Lor case proved to be an immense undertaking. A couple of confiscated animal parts, labeled
Lab items 12A and 12B, looked like stork bills—long,
thin, and black—and had been listed as “bird beaks.”
But the lab’s forensic ornithologist, Pepper Trail, examined the items and quickly recognized that they
weren’t beaks. They weren’t even from a bird.
Yates, the coordinator for the case, assigned the
items to Dyan Straughan, a forensic specialist in
the lab’s genetics division, often considered the
last resort for identification when an item’s origin
is unrecognizable. A specialist in forensic genetics,
Straughan had sought a job at the lab in part at her
father’s urging. As a lifelong hunter, he despised the
illegal killing of game and passed on his ethics to his
daughter. Now here she was, inspecting two beaky
items. Each was composed of a thin, black, dried
object stretched along a skinny, foot-long wooden
