Read the excerpt from "Bone Detective," by Lorraine Jean Hopping. Diane pointed to an area of reactive bone on the femur. Reactive bone is a rough patch where there was an injury—heavy bruising from a bullet, for example. The injury stimulates osteoblasts to grow new bone. On Dixon’s skeleton the reactive bone was near the hip joint, right at pocket height.
The Hunley recovery team planned to display Diane’s casts in a museum that was about to be built. But did the casts belong in a public exhibit? Some people objected to displaying soldiers' remains—even though they were plastic replicas. Diane saw nothing wrong with it. In fact, she had no qualms about showing the real bones.
"If people want to really learn about the soldiers," she said, "you have to show the bones. The bone is a record of a person’s life, especially the last part—the circumstances of death."
How and why did the Hunley sink? What can we learn about the lives—and death