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Res Natural The entomologist will not be able to give you an exact time of death, but rather an estimate. The estimate will always be a range of time. The range will vary from a few hours to months to years. The ?bugs? you find on a dead body can tell a forensic entomologist how long the body has been dead. The idea behind using insects to estimate a minimum PMI, or post-mortem interval, is based on how insects develop or grow up. Some insects, those with a so called complete metamorphosis, have immature stages whose movement is extremely limited, but have adults that are among the most mobile animals on earth. Some of these insects are specialized to develop on dead animals or carrion, including corpses. The adults fly far and wide searching for a suitable corpse. When they find one they lay their eggs. The eggs develop into larvae, white flabby eating machines that grow by eating the corpse. The larvae cannot move far, and eventually change into winged adults via an intermediate stage called the pupa. Therefore, if one collects an egg, larva, or pupa of one of these carrion insects on a corpse,, this eggs, larvae or pupa had to develop at that corpse and did not come in already formed from somewhere else. If an entomologist k