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Dani Bolte, a junior at North Pole High School, was staring intently at her latest anatomy assignment Friday morning.

Her assignment stared back.

Bolte and the dozen or so other students in the high school’s anatomy and physiology class have been building human heads from the skull up over the past week.

“Eventually it’s supposed to look like a person, I guess,” Bolte said as she worked to cover a plastic human skull with clay, molding the clay to serve as skin and muscle.

By taking clues embedded within the bones of the faces themselves, the students were able to determine the gender and ethnicity of the person the skull used to belong to. For example, males have a pronounced protrusion on the back of the head while females tend to have a softer jaw line. The bones between the mouth and nose are angled differently depending on the ethnicity. The differences are surprisingly distinct once the skin is removed.

“A lot can be told from a skull,” senior David Nicholson, 18, said.

Students spent the beginning of the week studying bones. They quickly learned the physiological differences between the genders and different ethnicities extended into the muscles and skin as well. Certain ethnicities generally have slightly thicker cheeks or thinner chins, for example.

The students’ skulls were covered with little nubbins glued on at 20 or so strategic spots — the cheeks, the bridge over the eyes, the chin. Those nubbins, cut to specific lengths based on precise calculations, determine the tissue depth for the specific gender and ethnicity of the students’ skulls. Like a three-dimensional game of connect the dots, the students added clay to the skulls using the nubbins as guides for how thick to lay it on.

The process, the same one utilized by crime scene investigators and facial reconstruction experts, is a precarious mix of art and science.

“I definitely respect the people who do this for a living,” Nicholson said. “This would be hard to start from just a skull and to get it to look even close to human.”

Shaping the nose, ears and lips were especially hard for several students.

But that hands-on, artistic element is one of the reasons anatomy teacher Elizabeth Beks has the students do the project early in the semester.

“We start with facial reconstruction because it’s cool and yet it’s human anatomy,” she said. “It’s an art, its very much an art.”

The project, besides letting the students play with clay, gets their hands dirty — in a manner of speaking — in terms of using calipers, scalpels and other tools.

The students have also been learning about diseases of the endocrine system as well as the differences between the axial and the appendicular skeletal systems. But of all they’ve learned, Nicholson and others in the class said they liked the facial reconstruction the best.

Nicholson said he thinks he’s leaned more about the structure of a skull by building the face of an obese Caucasian male than he would of by simply reading about it in a textbook.

“It’s hands-on. It creates a mental link between touch and feel and the actual concepts,” he said.

Contact staff writer Robinson Duffy at 459-7523.