By ERIC TICHY

etichy@post-journal.com

MAYVILLE — More information regarding the discovery of two sets of human remains in the town of Portland last week are expected to be shared today by county officials. A press conference has been scheduled for 9:30 a.m. at the county’s Emergency Services Building in Mayville, the Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office announced.

The news comes after Sheriff James Quattrone said he met with a team from Mercyhurst University’s applied forensic sciences department on Monday that also included the coroner, the county’s medical director and an investigator. He said the meeting was to go over the investigation after human remains were found near a public trail along Woleben Road in Portland.

Officials had been awaiting a preliminary report on the initial findings, Quattrone said.

One set of remains were found the evening of Sept. 26 by a woman who had been looking for keys she had lost previously near the Chautauqua Rails to Trails system. Quattrone said the body, believed to be of a woman, appears to have been buried at the site for a while.

The following day, another set of remains were found. Both are being analyzed by anthropology officials at Mercyhurst in Erie, Pa.

The sheriff said during Monday’s meeting, Mercyhurst requested a “few set of records they were hoping to obtain so they could complete their examination of the remains and complete the preliminary report.”

The applied forensic sciences department at Mercyhurst has been called upon by police agencies from Ohio to Buffalo to assist when remains are found. Dr. Dennis Dirkmaat, department chairman, said it’s not uncommon for police to send the department photographs of skeletal remains to determine if they are human.

Dirkmaat said the university can help process outdoor scenes by conducting searches to find all of the evidence, including bones; to differentiate human from animal bones; apply “forensic archaeological methods” to clear the scene without disturbing the evidence; and recover remains and evidence from “all types of scenes,” including surface scatter, buried bodies, fatal fires and mass disasters.

“Our primary goal is to reconstruct what happened in the past at the scene — how long ago it occurred, explain why remains are scattered, or missing or altered,” Dirkmaat said in an interview this week. “It is much more than just finding and collecting the human bones. Basically, we are trying to document and interpret the outdoor scene as well as the police document and interpret the indoor scene.”

The Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office has utilized the university in the past.

“My first experience working with Mercyhurst was with the locating of Yolanda Bindics,” Quattrone said of the September 2006 discovery of remains in the north county. “Since then we have periodically requested assistance in determining if bones were human or not.”

“This investigation is the first major incident since taking office as sheriff that we have brought in the Forensic Anthropology Team,” he added. “This is an invaluable resource that Mercyhurst provides and Dr. Dirkmaat and his team have been great to work with.”