Are there bones in the titanic

That was deep inside the ship. What do the new photos show? The most discussed photo captures leather boots and what appears to be a coat buried in the mud near the Titanic 's stern. Deep-sea scavengers are less interested in devouring leather than bodies. The way the boots are laid out, says James Delgado, the director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA , strongly suggests that they landed there while still on the feet and back of a person.

Why is the photo just surfacing now? A cropped version of the photo actually appeared in a book by Ballard, the explorer who discovered the Titanic in and who worked with the NOAA on the expedition during which the images were captured. This is the first time the NOAA has released the uncropped version to the public and it did so just days after Sen. John Kerry D-Mass. If the site is essentially declared an undersea cemetery, that would bolster the government's argument.

What do skeptics say? Those who have spent the most time exploring the wreckage insist that any bodies at the site have long since decomposed, arguing against the graveyard designation. We've seen pairs of shoes, which would strongly suggest there was a body there at one point. About of the drowned were recovered in the days following the tragedy, but a great many corpses were never found. While the assumption is that decades in the ocean would have led to total disintegration, the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic in also prompted a debate over whether there could be human remains embedded in the wreckage, two and a half miles below the surface of the Atlantic.

Photos were taken during submarine explorations of the site, and the release of some of those photos suggest that corpses were indeed dragged to the ocean floor. One photo was taken in and released in , when the year anniversary of the Titanic tragedy was marked. The image showed a crumpled large coat with a boot protruding from beneath its seam. Evidence of human remains on the Titanic, over years later.

It was Ballard who discovered that the ship broke into two sections, almost a half mile apart. In between the two sections was a debris field, and Ballard and his men took photos of not only items from the ship but also many pairs of shoes. RMS Titanic Inc. The firm is the court-recognized steward of Titanic artifacts, overseeing thousands of items including silverware, china and gold coins.

The Titanic sits about 2. Yet whale bones have been discovered at similar depths, as were human remains on a Air France plane that crashed into the Atlantic. I have new artifacts to show the public. Hunley, a Confederate submarine that sank in And human bones were found at a first-century B. Show Caption. By Associated Press.