A human skeleton used for decades to train staff at the Royal Hobart Hospital was likely made from imported bones, a coroner has found.
The half-skeleton was kept at Orthotic Prosthetic Services Tasmania and used as a teaching tool by the hospital’s amputee prosthetic clinic.
In August 2024, the clinic’s lead prosthetist handed the remains to the hospital mortuary.
A forensic anthropologist found they were an incomplete teaching skeleton, likely made up of bones from more than one person.
The remains were cremated in November 2024, after Coroner Simon Cooper authorised their disposal.
In findings published this month, Coroner Madeleine Wilson said the remains “were probably brought into Australia from the Indian sub-continent”.
Wilson said the bones were believed to have been imported for anatomy teaching, a practice that has since stopped.
India was the world’s largest exporter of human remains until 1985, in a trade established under British colonial rule.
Wilson was unable to determine a cause of death.
She said the case did not require any comments or recommendations. Her findings do not say why the clinic handed over the skeleton.
It was delivered to the mortuary four months after the coroner’s office revealed it was investigating human remains held by the University of Tasmania’s RA Rodda Museum of Pathology.
Cooper later found the museum had kept 177 specimens taken from coronial autopsies between 1966 and 1991, without the knowledge or consent of families.
The Tasmanian government formally apologised to those families in May.
