Hey, it's Lauren Chulgin, and I'm here to introduce you to a new series called What Remains.

It comes from my colleagues at Outside In, another great narrative podcast from my HPR about the places where curiosity and the natural world collide.

For months, reporter Felix Poon has been digging into how museums, universities, and other big institutions are rethinking what to do with their collections of human remains.

Felix takes us to the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

And to say this topic is controversial would be a huge understatement.

We're dropping the trailer right here so you can check it out.

About 10 years ago, Lyra Montero was walking through the prestigious Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

And when I was there, I entirely by accident, found myself in the middle of an exhibit of skulls from

Morton's collection.

Five yellowed human skulls, collected by 19th century white supremacist Dr. Samuel George Morton.

I was shocked that it was on display.

And then even worse, the display itself was structured to teach people what Morton thought.

These five skulls, they were just a fraction of the approximately 1,300 human skulls

held by the Penn Museum. And even though they're no longer on display, the question remains,

why are they still there at all?

We're talking about a problem that's created by white supremacy, by colonialism over centuries and generations.

And for people who are alive now, who've made their career and made a living out of the exploitation of other people's ancestors, to even think that they

get to have a say in what happens? To me, that's really fucked up.

I'm Felix Poon, and for the past several months, I've been reporting on the tens of thousands

of human remains that are held in museums and institutions across the country.

When I first got interested in the subject, I thought it was just a grotesque story about philosophy, science, and ethics.

But the more I talked to people, the more they told me that I could not understand this in the abstract,

...