The skull is the foundation on which the entire reconstruction rests.

If different reconstructors working from the same incomplete skull produce somewhat different virtual completions — different estimates of what the missing portions looked like — those differences will propagate through to the final reconstructed face.

Some of the divergence observed between the three Zlatý kůň reconstructions may reflect divergence in skull completion decisions as much as divergence in tissue depth or artistic interpretation.

Disentangling these sources of variation is itself a scientific question — one that the geometric morphometric analysis of the 2026 study partially addresses, though the full decomposition of uncertainty sources remains an active area of research.