The death toll of Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires has been revised down from 210 to 173, after the coroner's office was finally able to classify horrendously-damaged human remains.
Some remains which police initially thought came from several victims were, in fact, of one person, while other remains in the initial count of 210 have now been identified as animal.
The drop in the number of victims illustrated the extreme nature of the fires and the difficult task faced by forensic investigators in locating and identifying human remains, police said on Monday.
And they warned that despite the coroner's office confirming the identities of more than half of the 173 victims, some of those who perished may never be identified.
"The DVI (disaster victim identification) process is a very difficult one - the damage that fire does to the human body is absolutely extreme," Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe said.
"The unfortunate thing is ... because of the ferocity of the fires, we will get to a point that there will be remains that cannot be formally identified."
The biggest drop came in Strathewen where 27 people are now confirmed to have died after police had reported that 43 of the hamlet's 200 residents were killed.
Marysville's toll has also been revised down from 45 to 34.
Overall, the death toll in the Kinglake/Whittlesea region has dropped from 196 to 159.
The toll from the Gippsland fires remains at 11, Mudgegonga stays at two and Bendigo at one.
The downward revision in the death toll came more than seven weeks after the February 7 firestorm, which devastated many areas of Victoria and destroyed more than 2,000 properties.
Initially, authorities feared as many as 300 people may have been killed in the fires before posting a provisional figure of 210, which remained for several weeks.
Mr Walshe defended the decision to publish the higher figure, posted on February 23, and also defended the role of DVI teams who, he said, had to work in incredibly difficult and challenging circumstances to find and recover remains.
"What we were trying to do was keep the community informed as to what we believed at the time was the situation, to keep it in perspective. This was a very significant incident, something we've never experienced before," he said.
"The process in the field was to locate and recover remains. It wasn't their (DVI teams') role to undertake a scientific examination of those remains in the field.
"Some remains were co-mingled. In some cases, you can have three or four sets of remains that have been recovered.
"The process has been (about) identifying what remains belong to one body.
"Some of the remains recovered were very minimal in terms of bone and spinal structures and it's not until those remains can undergo some scientific examination that scientists can determine it's not human."
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