This week, speculation began to run wild about a decades-old case of missing brains from the University of Texas in Austin. The collection began as roughly 200 specimens taken from the capital city's psychiatric hospital in 1986, and that collection was notable for its malformed and damaged brains, many of which had been afflicted with diseases such as Alzheimer's.

As it turns out, half of the collection of brains, stored in jars full of formaldehyde, was transferred from the school's psychology lab to its Animal Resources Center due to space constraints. That 100-strong half went missing in the 1990s, according to neuroscience and psychology professor Timothy Schallert, a fact that had gone largely forgotten until the release of last month's photo-heavy book Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital.

Once the book's stories about fights over the collection and missing brains began to spread to the wider world, Schallert and other University of Texas officials began to poke around, only to discover that they had the brains all along—at the University's sister campus in San Antonio. “They have the brains,” Schallert told the LA Times. “They read a media report of the missing brains, and they called to say: ‘We got those brains!’"

Reports about the collection claimed that it may include the brain of Charles Whitman, the notorious sniper who climbed the clock tower of the University of Texas in Austin in 1966 and killed 16 people; he had been treated at the University of Texas State Mental Hospital. However, because the brains were disassociated from any identifying data when they were transferred to the university in the '80s, Whitman's inclusion in the total brain pool remains speculative.

According to book publisher Powerhouse Books, the University of Texas has begun MRI-scanning the total collection to preserve the brains' forms and information, and the specimens will soon be showcased at the university's new medical school.