Dallas Lawyer, a History Buff, Tracks Down Soldiers’ Skulls
A Dallas lawyer and history buff researching the Battle of San Jacinto has tracked down the skulls of six Mexican soldiers who died there.
Jeff Dunn, a shareholder at Munsch Hardt Kopf & Harr, is co-founder of a nonprofit organization known as the Friends of the San Jacinto Battleground, Texas Lawyer reports. The battle took place in 1836 near Houston when Gen. Sam Houston defeated Mexican forces.
Dunn was researching the battle online when he learned of an 1857 catalog that listed the soldiers’ skulls in its collection, the story says. The skulls were owned by the Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia, which transferred them to the University of Pennsylvania in the 1930s, Dunn learned. The skulls are now housed at the university’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Dunn’s nonprofit group sent a Smithsonian anthropologist to Philadelphia to study the skulls, who told Texas Lawyer that they are “exceptionally well preserved.” A sculptor is now relying on three-dimensional images of the skulls to recreate what the soldiers looked like. The Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Houston is expected to display the re-creations in the spring of 2011.
