New study reveals that the bones found on a Pacific Island were likely the remains of Amelia Earhart

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Amelia Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

• A new study using modern forensic osteology methods reveals that the bones found on the the remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro are likely to be of the famed aviator Amelia Earhart.
• Earhart disappeared during an attempted flight around the world in 1937.

A new analysis concludes that bones found in 1940 on the remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro were quite likely to be remains from famed aviator Amelia Earhart.

The new report is the latest chapter in a back-and-forth that has played out about the remains, which are now lost.

All that survive are seven measurements, from the skull and bones from the arm and leg. Those measurements led a scientist in 1941 to conclude that they belong to a man.

Now University of Tennessee anthropologist Richard Jantz has weighed in with a new analysis of the measurements, published in the journal Forensic Anthropology.

"Some have summarily dismissed these bones as the remains of Amelia Earhart because they were assessed as male by Dr. D. W. Hoodless, principal of the Central Medical School, Fiji, in 1940," Jantz wrote in the abstract of the study.

But forensic osteology was not a well-developed discipline when Hoodless' conducted his assessment, especially concerning the methods and data used to determine the sex of the bones, Jantz wrote.

Jantz compared "Earhart's bone lengths with the Nikumaroro bones using Mahalanobis distance," he wrote. "This analysis reveals that Earhart is more similar to the Nikumaroro bones than 99% of individuals in a large reference sample. This strongly supports the conclusion that the Nikumaroro bones belonged to Amelia Earhart."

Earhart disappeared during an attempted flight around the world in 1937. The search for an answer to what happened to her and her navigator has captivated the public for decades.