But today taxis and buses started running again, and people returned to work all across Kinshasa, a sprawling city of five million that is like a carcass of houses, roads and sewers built by Belgian colonialists and abandoned by Congo's rulers.
One image of the rib cage and heart is so clear, Kuzmitz says, that it looks like a "carcass that should be hanging from a meat hook".
Because vultures usually eat virtually all the soft tissues, knowing this conversion factor allows us to calculate the average diclofenac concentration in the food that vultures take from a carcass from that in the liver.
In the distance was the blackened, burned-out shell that used to be Mubarak's NDP party headquarters, destroyed in the revolution and still standing, like a carcass that cannot be discarded.
The "boneworms" were living on the remnants of a carcass that had settled 3000 meters down and were so numerous that they looked like "a shaggy carpet," says Robert Vrijenhoek, an evolutionary biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, California, who led the discovery team.
"Human strains are often spread from person to person, but in cases of water contamination it tends to be animal faeces or a carcass that gets into the supply.
Did early humans start to develop even bigger brains because they became increasingly efficient endurance runners that could get to a carcass before the hyenas and vultures, and strip away a nourishing meal of meat, fat and marrow?
In one episode of almost grotesque comedy, a carcass that had fallen on the floor was run over by a worker pushing a trolley of crates, before our reporter saw it eventually being scooped up and lobbed back into production by a supervisor who then wipes their hands on their coat rather than washing them.
The holotype specimen was clearly a carcass that had floated up on a beach, as Unio shells, water-worn bones, and a baenid turtle were preserved all around.
