Larvae, woodcut engraving, 1894
In his landmark Fauna of the Cadaver, Mégnin showed that eight waves of insect species colonized exposed corpses in orderly succession. In contrast, buried corpses only had two waves.
Pierre Mégnin, La faune des cadavers; application de l'entomologie à la médecine légale [The fauna of the cadaver; the application of entomology to legal medicine], Paris, 1894.
National Library of Medicine