The detail that Charlie Parker focused on — ear morphology — is genuinely significant from a forensic perspective.

Human ears are highly individual, forming their specific shape during fetal development and changing very little thereafter.

The ridges, curves, and proportions of an individual’s ears are as distinctive as fingerprints, and forensic identification based on ear comparison has been accepted as evidence in multiple jurisdictions.

Parker’s specific observation — that the ear shapes in photographs of Bourdin did not match the ear shapes in photographs of Nicholas Barclay — was not sophisticated forensic analysis.

It was careful visual comparison by someone who was looking critically at the same photographs that law enforcement personnel had access to but had not examined with the same skepticism.