I posted this link and info on another earlier thread. Turns out cadaver dogs can pick up the scent of someone w/in minutes of the time of death (ie where gases have been forming as little as ten--and even two--minutes) with amazing accuracy, the success rate of which only slightly diminishes relative to the amount of time body is in contact w that location.
"One of the questions surrounding human cadaver dogs is how soon after death they can recognise a corpse, and how long a "fresh" corpse must remain in one place for a dog to detect that it has been there. In a study published last year, the forensic pathologist Lars Oesterhelweg, then at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and colleagues tested the ability of three Hamburg State Police cadaver dogs to pick out--of a line-up of six new carpet squares--the one that had been exposed for no more than 10 minutes to a recently deceased person.
Several squares had been placed beneath a clothed corpse within three hours of death, when some organs and many cells of the human body are still functioning. Over the next month, the dogs did hundreds of trials in which they signalled the contaminated square with 98 per cent accuracy, falling to 94 per cent when the square had been in contact with the corpse
for only two minutes. The research concluded that cadaver dogs were an "outstanding tool" for crime-scene investigation."
The next paragraphs naturally caused me to hope these highly trained dogs have continued to be heavily used in search efforts despite not seeing them recently--which doesn't mean they have not, or could not, continue to be used effectively. Amazing.
"But how good are dogs at detecting a skeleton from which all the flesh has fallen away? The anthropologist Keith Jacobi of the University of Alabama has investigated this at a police-dog training facility, where human remains ranging from fresh to skeletonised have been buried (the remains were bequeathed by donors).
In one study involving four dogs and their handlers, Jacobi says the dogs were able to detect remains at all stages of decomposition. Performance varied between dogs, but some could locate skeletonised remains buried in an area of 300ft by 150 ft. "The few single human vertebrae I used in the study were well over 25 years old, and dry bone," Jacobi says. "This made the discovery of one of these vertebrae, which we buried in dense woods 2 ft deep, by a cadaver dog--pretty remarkable."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/sc...es-835047.html
