PEARL HARBOR — The mottled brown skull and other remains — a lower jaw with eight teeth and a pair of fillings, seven right side ribs, part of a pelvis and some arm and leg bones — showed evidence of dirt and looked like they were buried at one time.

It's up to forensic anthropologists like Gregory Berg to build from the ground up the U.S. service member who died in North Korea more than half a century ago.

There are plenty of challenges to doing so faced by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, but there's been a big advance relating to Korean War fallen, and a new Pentagon impetus to speed up all identifications.

In September, the Hawai'i-based accounting command, charged with investigating, recovering and identifying missing U.S. war dead, opened a new lab at Pearl Harbor devoted to identifying Korean War remains. About 8,100 Americans remain missing from the Korean War.

The new lab is expected to help speed up the analysis of 208 boxes of remains — representing 300 to 400 U.S. servicemen — that North Korea turned over to the U.S. from 1990 to 1994 and are known as "K-208."

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2010, meanwhile, said the Pentagon shall provide the funds to "increase significantly" the accounting of missing U.S. personnel so that by 2015, at least 200 identifications — more than double the current total — are made annually.

The accounting command is primarily based at Hickam Air Force Base. The new lab in Building 220 at Pearl Harbor provides space for about 25 sets of remains, Berg said.

"This is a big bonus space for us. Absolutely," Berg said. "It certainly allows us to do the work that we need to do to keep these cases moving forward."

Lab space to lay out remains has been growing overall at the accounting command.

The approximately 22-table lab space at Hickam doubled last year with a $680,000 addition, and tripled with the opening of the second lab in Building 220, renovated for $1.2 million.

There are plans to replace much of the Hickam lab at a cost of about $100 million.

The lab at Pearl Harbor allows the K-208 remains to be laid out and stay out for sorting and analysis — instead of being packed back up at the old lab when a higher priority came along.

SOLVING PUZZLE

"So what this space is allowing us to do is finally get large portions of the (K-208) collection laid out all at the same time," Berg said, "and then go through systematically and try to sort the individuals based on their morphological and metric characteristics — their size and their shape."

Berg said the North Koreans probably excavated a lot of the remains from cemeteries, battlefields or even foxholes following the 1950-53 war.

"But then they got mixed," he said of the remains. They took the bones and said, 'Wow, we've got a big mess here. Well, OK, this bone looks like that bone, this is about the same size as that one. And they built skeletons.' "

The forensic anthropologists at the accounting command have to go bone by bone in making physiological and DNA comparisons.

Those remains laid out in the lab now are associated with one geographic location in North Korea that had a prisoner of war camp nearby, Berg said.

Accounting command officials won't reveal that town name because families of the missing might see the information and prematurely get their hopes up that a relative's identification may soon be at hand.

Sometimes a set of dog tags will come in with a set of remains.

"That's a start point," Berg said. Records are used to obtain physical characteristics.

DENTAL RECORDS

Dental records can be checked, but a 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis destroyed 80 percent of Army records for service members discharged between 1912 and 1960.

Mitochondrial DNA is sent to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Md., and is compared against a family member database.

That list "is growing all the time, and we need more" family members registered, Berg said.

So far, 36 identifications have been made from the K-208 remains, said Maj. Ramon Osorio, an accounting command spokesman.

In April, the Pentagon announced that the remains of Army Pfc. David Woodruff of Poplar Bluff, Mo., had been identified and were being returned to his family.

"It's great," Peter Wood- ruff, 72, the soldier's brother, said at the time in an Associated Press story. "We're very happy they finally located the remains and put some closure on this situation that's been in existence almost 60 years."

According to the Pentagon, David Woodruff was assigned to Company K, 3rd Battalion, 9th Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division. On Feb. 11, 1951, the Chinese Army launched a a massive attack on the U.S. and Republic of Korea line.

The 2nd Division was forced to retreat to the south and Woodruff was captured by enemy forces. He died in or near one of the North Korean prison camps in Suan County, North Hwanghae Province.

One of the K-208 boxes turned over to the U.S. in 1991 contained Woodruff's dog tag, and a box turned over in 1992 contained remains recovered from Suan County.

NEW IDENTIFICATIONS

According to a June assessment of the accounting command by the Institute for Defense Analyses, the new lab should help lead to 15 identifications from K-208 each year.

Building 220 at Pearl Harbor also is being used by the accounting command for a forensic science academy to recruit new scientists and office and storage space.

The mission of the approximately 400-member accounting command, which last fiscal year had a budget of $51 million, is to achieve the "fullest possible accounting of all Americans missing as a result of the nation's past conflicts."

The command has come under fire in recent years for not making enough recoveries and identifications. In fiscal 2009, 69 missions were conducted and 95 identifications were made — about 18 more identifications than in 2008.

There are about 25 forensic anthropologists, three odontologists and nine individuals who specialize in aircraft crash debris and other equipment, officials said.

Osorio, the accounting command spokesman, said those staff totals will more than double in coming years.

There also remain about 78,000 missing Americans from World War II, with about 35,000 deemed "recoverable," and about 1,750 missing from the Vietnam War.

The identification rate needs to be increased, Charles Ray, deputy assistant defense secretary for POW/missing personnel affairs, said at an April 2 congressional hearing.

"Given the circumstances of the conflicts, the Vietnam War sites are deteriorating at a remarkably accelerating rate," Ray said. "World War II, those family members that we are aware of are getting no younger day by day. And so we owe it to them as well as to honoring those who have sacrificed for the country to do all that we can do to increase the pace."