Hair Analysis

Hair recovered at a crime scene can be valuable to forensic scientists. Crime scene technicians collect any hairs that they find and send them to the lab for analysis. Forensic scientists are familiar with hair structure and chemistry.

 A hair is composed of three distinct layers - the cuticle, cortex, and medulla. The medulla is made of cells that run through the center like a canal but it may not be a continuous canal - it can be interrupted, fragmented, or absent.

Forensic scientists first determine if a hair found at a crime scene is a human or an animal hair. If it is human, they compare it with the hairs of suspects to see if they can make a match. If it is an animal, they can often identify the animal species.

Hair found at the crime scene. When viewed through a microscope the crime scene hair looks like this:

What kind of hair is this - human or other? What are the implications and possibilities that this clue could lead to?