About FOROST
FOROST is a free-access metabase of skeletal trauma and pathology. It gathers specimen records held by institutional collections around the world into one searchable index, so that a researcher looking for a particular lesion, bone or agent can find out where the material actually is.
What is indexed
- Specimens
- 2,518
- Lesions
- 2,097
- Photographs
- 4,303
- Collections
- 21
- Institutions
- 97
FOROST holds records, not remains. Every specimen listed here is curated by the institution named on its record, and any request to examine, sample or photograph material goes to that institution. Browse the collections and holding institutions.
How the search works
You can type a query in ordinary language. It is matched against the controlled vocabularies already in the database: bone names and their synonyms, trauma agents, pathology terms, fracture types, collections and institutions, plus a short list of colloquial phrasings such as "gsw" for gunshot wound or "kneecap" for patella.
The interpretation is shown above your results as a set of chips, one per term the query resolved to. If a term was read the wrong way you can remove it and search again. Nothing about the interpretation is hidden, and nothing is generated by a language model, so the same query returns the same reading every time. That matters here, because these result sets get cited.
Terms of the same kind are combined with OR, and different kinds with AND. Selecting two bones finds either bone; adding an agent narrows both. Anything the vocabulary does not recognise falls through to a full-text search, so free text still works.
Searches are ordinary links. Any result set can be bookmarked, mailed to a colleague, or cited by its address.
How the records are recorded
Records come from contributing collections and vary in completeness. Many entries record a lesion without a force type or a causative agent; that absence is genuine, and the search treats it as unknown rather than as a negative.
Two conventions are worth knowing. Country of origin is what the source recorded as a place, and is not a statement of biological ancestry. Where a source recorded sex as probable rather than determined, the record says so instead of resolving it in either direction.
A small number of records lost their individual entry in the source database while their lesion descriptions and photographs survived. Rather than discard that material, those records are published and flagged as unattributed, with a note stating exactly what is missing.
Accessibility
This site is built to be usable with a keyboard and a screen reader: every control has a label, headings describe the structure of the page, and the layout reflows to a phone. If something here is not usable for you, that is a fault worth reporting.
Contact and corrections
Corrections to a record are welcome, and so are offers to contribute a collection. Quote the catalogue number and the holding institution when you write.