Taken without consent The complex history of Edinburgh's skull room

Hundreds of skulls are neatly and closely placed, cheekbone to cheekbone, in tall, mahogany-framed glass cabinets.

- Hannah Devlin Severin Carrell

Most carry faded, peeling labels, while some have their catalogue numbers painted directly on them. One has gold teeth and a few still carry skin tissue. This is the University of Edinburgh's "skull room".

Many were voluntarily donated to the university; others were not. Some were sourced from Scottish executions and some from military expeditions to Indigenous people's homelands. Several hundred were collected by supporters of the racist pseudoscience of phrenology – the discredited belief that skull shape denoted intelligence and character.

Two of the skulls belonged to brothers who died while studying at Edinburgh. Their names are not given in the skull room catalogue, but other records suggest they were Robert Bruce Richards, an 18-year-old divinity scholar who died of typhoid fever in 1833, and his older brother, George, a 21-year-old medical student who died of smallpox the year before.

Just how the Richards' skulls came to be separated from their bodies – recorded as interred in the South Leith parish church cemetery – is unknown. But they were almost certainly acquired by the Edinburgh Phrenological Society to study supposed racial differences.

Researchers say the brothers' case exemplifies the challenging questions facing the university, which is now understood to have played a major role in the creation and perpetuation of racist ideas about white superiority and racial difference. From the late 1700s on, such theories were taught to thousands of Edinburgh students who then dispersed across the British empire.