Anastasia—Dead or Alive?

Student Handout

Like fingerprints, each person's ears have a unique shape and distinctive features. With your partner, collect data about your own ears. Then create a class data chart to compare your measurements and observations with those of the rest of the class.

Name:

Your teacher will secretly select one person from the class to be the subject of a study. Compare the photocopy of the person's ear with the data about the rest of the ears in the class. Based on the data that you know about your classmates' ears, can you find a match? What do you think is the likelihood that more than one person's ears would match? What are some of the challenges you found in trying to identify the subject?