The lead author was Jana Velemínská, a biological anthropologist at Charles University in Prague who has spent her career studying facial morphology and skull variation.

The team she assembled was international and deliberately multidisciplinary — specialists in forensic facial reconstruction, sculptural reconstruction, virtual computational methods, geometric morphometrics, and ancient DNA.

The goal was not simply to reconstruct Zlatý kůň’s face.

It was to use her skull as a controlled test case for comparing three fundamentally different approaches to facial reconstruction, and to document, rigorously and transparently, how those different approaches produced different results.

This was unusual.