This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from How Stuff Works.com.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Dablina Chalker Boarding.

And I'm Fairdality.

And this episode starts off in one of my favorite ways with the mysterious unidentified heads, or skull, rather.

It is a good way to start a podcast.

We've done it a few times, but it's always a classic intro.

So here's how this story starts.

In 2009, a West Australian farmer named Tom Baxter turned in a skull to the authorities,

claiming that it's the skull of Ned Kelly, a famous bush ranger or bandit who was executed back in the 1800s.

His body was believed to be buried in a mass grave, but for decades, Kelly's

skull lived in a display case in Melbourne jail. Until that is, it was stolen in 1978.

So nobody has really known where the skull or the head was since then. It's been a mystery.

And Baxter didn't really help illuminate that question very much. He refuses

to say how he got the skull or if he was involved in its stuff, which is kind of sketchy if

you think about it. Yeah, I wonder if there will be more details on that aspect of it in the future.

But as far as we know right now, researchers haven't positively identified the head as Ned's.

In 2010, they issued kind of a request for help.

They had sort of reached to the end of the road as far as they could go in testing things.

And they asked people to turn in any information that they know, any stories, any photographs.

And at least one man, according to a story in August 2010, has come forward with a tooth that he believes belonged to the skull.

So a tooth that had been handed down through his family as a relic of Ned Kelly.

...