If a motorcycle crashes into a tree, and explodes, leaving two bodies with no paperwork, the police will discover that the owner and her girlfriend are missing. The dental records of the two will be sought, and the two bodies identified. If the records are inadequate, they only need to distinguish between the two bodies to establish which is which.

If a commercial airliner crashes into a hotel, the situation is a little more complicated. The aeroplane is technically ‘closed’, so the people aboard are known, but it cannot be certain who was in the hotel at the time. In this situation, a higher level of proof of identity will be required, and visual identification may not be acceptable on its own.

The process of dental identification is much the same as in individual cases, except that dental evidence is also used to exclude possible ‘matches’ reducing the odds for other agencies.
Dental evidence played a significant part in the identification of victims from the 7/7 London Bombings, the South East Asian Tsunami, the Concorde crash in Paris, the Mont Blanc Tunnel fire, the Zeebrugge Ferry disaster, and many other disasters.