Dental Identification of a Decomposed Body

Identification is an essential part of postmortem examination, for various reasons: ethical and humanitarian; to establish the fact of death in respect of that individual, for official, statistical, and legal purposes; to allow legal inves-tigations; for administrative and cere-monial purposes (1, 2). The dental iden-tification of humans occurs for a num-ber of different reasons, mainly in those cases when the body is fragmentized or disfigured and visual recognition can-not be done (3,4,5,6). The advanced step of putrefaction disables determination of identity by recognition and dactilos-copy and therefore such cases require dental identification (7). Using dental or medical radiographs for identifications is one of the most reliable methods for identification (8,9,10).