French physician Jean Pierre Mégnin published La Faune des Cadavres in Paris in 1894, establishing forensic entomology — the systematic use of insect evidence on decomposing bodies to determine time and place of death — as a scientific forensic discipline. Building on earlier observations by the thirteenth-century Chinese investigator Sung Tz'u, Mégnin showed that the succession of insect species on a corpse followed predictable patterns that could be used as evidence in criminal investigations. The discipline became standard practice in homicide investigations in the twentieth century.

Forensic entomology introduced the natural world — insects, decomposition, biological time — as evidence, extending the reach of the detective's gaze into ecological processes. This forensic attention to the body's dissolution in the natural world resonates with Romantic and Victorian poetry's meditations on mortality, decay, and the relationship between the human and the organic. Contemporary crime writers including Patricia Cornwell made forensic pathology — encompassing entomology — central to their narratives, creating a literary genre as much about death's biology as about crime.