The remains of the unfortunate litter the highways and back roads.

The gray squirrel that couldn’t decide which way to run. The snake seduced by the sun-warmed pavement. The greedy seagull absorbed by a half-eaten burger tossed from a passing car. The deer blinded by lust — and oncoming headlights.

Once you get beyond the gross-out factor, roadkill has a story to tell about what’s happening in the natural world.

There are patterns when you look for them. Different animals appear on the roads during certain times of the year, depending on their feeding and mating habits. Roads that pass near water and food sources such as fields have more creatures crossing them. The appearance of wild animals could be a sign that a species is flourishing, or that their habitat is being sliced up by development.

Nationally, roadkill science is imperfect. Most official statistics, including those kept by Rhode Island’s Department of Environmental Management, tend to focus on the animal-related collisions that cost human lives and money. The deer-vs.-car collisions are such a problem here that the state is urging more people to allow hunting on their private property.

For other species, the impact of roads is alarming.

Collisions kill more animals than hunters do. Endangered Florida panthers are killed more often by cars than anything else. A recent study in Idaho found so many dead barn owls along an interstate that a researcher worried those hunter birds were vanishing. Nearly half the turtle species in the nation are disappearing, which a researcher at State University of New York is attributing in part to turtles trying to cross busy roads.

Charlie Brown, a biologist who works in the DEM’s quarters at the Great Swamp, in South Kingstown, keeps an unofficial tally of the dead during his daily 70-mile commute from and to his home in Barrington. Aside from the ever-present squirrels (221 during one month in 2004), Brown sees other creatures killed in the same road locations, where their world intersects with the human world.

“Every time you put a road on the landscape, you’re basically bisecting a habitat,” Brown said. “We just keep making smaller and smaller blocks of land.”

What’s the meaning behind roadkill? Ask “Dr. Splatt.”

Brewster Bartlett, a science teacher at Pinkerton Academy, a high school in Derry, N.H., runs the RoadKill Project, an Internet-based program that connects students from schools around the country in studying flattened fauna.

Every spring since 1993, students involved in the RoadKill Project adopt a road and keep track of the dead. From the smallest frog to stray dogs and deer, students dutifully record — but don’t touch — what they see. Even the squishiest blob is recorded as an URP: unidentified road pizza.

The students pose theories about their findings: Does the full moon bring out more animals? Are more animals killed on roads with higher speed limits? Is there more roadkill during daylight-saving time because people are driving in the dark?

Daylight-saving had no effect on the roadkill count, Bartlett said, but the students did count more dead animals during the new moon than the full moon, perhaps because the animals were more freely under the cover of darkness. Roads posted at 35 mph have more creature carnage than highways, because the slower roads are often winding and travel through rural or suburban areas.

A student in Florida found that there was more roadkill in places where people threw food out of the car, Bartlett said. Animals would scurry out to eat the leftovers and get run over, and then predators would rush to eat the roadkill — and also get hit.

The number of raccoon road fatalities plummeted in Massachusetts during the spread of the rabies virus in the mid-1990s. And leash laws throughout New Hampshire dropped the number of dead dogs to zero, Bartlett said. Meanwhile, more wild turkeys are being sighted — and smashed — because their population has come back, thanks to restoration efforts by the National Wild Turkey Federation.

“I’ve been doing this for many years, and it’s interesting because it changes every year,” he said.

But some things never change. Skunks come out of hibernation in early spring, sluggish and hungry, and get run over. In March, squirrels and raccoons emerge hunting for food — and end up under tires. In April, the snakes, the turtles and frogs are out and about, and become the victims of passing vehicles. Young beavers pushed out of their family lodge by the adults in March and April wander out looking for a new home and meet their end on a busy road. Robins chase each other during the mating season in the spring and don’t notice they’re flying into traffic. The slow-reproducing turtles doggedly make their way across roads, and their deaths mean the end of generations of turtles.

The most noticeable road kill are deer, which appear in spring and fall, at first hungry for food and later, for love. Without predators in congested little Rhode Island, the deer have flourished, doubling their numbers to an estimated 16,000 over the last decade. Hunters take 2,000 deer a year, but there are still so many that deer account for more than 1,200 vehicle collisions annually — even in the cities, said DEM supervising wildlife biologist Lori Gibson.

Deer are the only roadkill that motorists can take home with them, under state law. Kurt Blanchard, the deputy chief of the DEM’s law enforcement branch, is always surprised by people who still try to scoop up the bloody remains of other animals they find in the road. “Finders keepers” will get you a fine.

Not everyone is unhappy with the peril on the roads. Turkey vultures, for instance, have figured out that they can easily find a good meal from the hapless creatures mowed down by traffic, and they take their hunt to the highways, said Rob Fergus, a senior scientist at the National Audubon Society.

“You see them flying over roads, looking down,” Fergus said.

For more information on the Roadkill Project, visit roadkill.edutel.com