Fossils and Footwear Impressions: Useful Evidences In a Simulated Case.

Forensic geosciences allow supplying useful details to understand the dynamic of a crime and in solving it. In Italy, mineralogy and petrography are the branches of the earth sciences better known and more frequently used in forensics, even though, in some cases, other disciplines of the geosciences, less known, as paleontology and ichnology, could take up a great importance, suggesting useful tools of investigation.

This is the case occurred in a simulation carried out by Italian Forensic Police and the University of Rome “Sapienza”. The simulation, serviceable as training for a forensic geoscience team, envisaged a crime in which the victim was killed in one place and his body was left in a different place. The operating team, consisting in the authors, was provided by a list of suspects, including the chosen guilty, all in some way related to one of the two crime scenes.

During the judicial site surveys many evidences, including samples of soil, tire tracks and footwear impression plaster casts, have been collected. The fossil content of some samples allowed identifying a limited area for the primary crime scene, an area in which a suspect inhabited. The record track-way parameters and the footwear impressions, collected at the body finding place, were then successfully compared to the ones from the suspect.

Essentially, the analysis of evidences has highlighted the potentiality of ichnology and paleontology; it's a fact, that these two disciplines have provided important details for solving the case.