Bambi’s revenge: deer photographed gnawing on human bones

Although they are herbivores, deer have been spotted eating meat and gnawing on bones before. But not this kind of bones.

Peer closely at the accompanying photos, and you might discern that the bones in question are people bones. More precisely, they are rib bones.

There are no horrified relatives just now learning that their missing loved one’s fate was to be deer dinner. The body from which these bones came was placed on the floor of that forest legally and deliberately, at the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in San Marcos, Texas.

The 10-hectare facility is one of several “body farms” around the US where researchers place donated bodies out in the elements to study the process of human decay and decomposition. Usually the bodies are placed inside a cage to prevent the interference of scavengers. But sometimes they’re left unprotected to see just who might come along to snack on the carcass. Images from remote cameras have revealed that regular diners include rodents, coyotes, raccoons and foxes.

This particular body, which researchers deposited in July 2014, was initially stripped by vultures. Then, the following January, a remote camera snapped shots of a new visitor to the scene: a young white-tailed deer. It looked very dainty but for the human rib bone “extending from the side of the mouth like a cigar,” in the words of the researchers, who wrote about these first-ever images in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

Eight days later at the same location, a deer - maybe the same one - was spotted casually gnawing on another rib bone.