Historians and scientists have exhumed the remains of legendary castrato Farinelli in Italy to study the anatomical effects of castration carried out on young boys to turn them into high-pitched stars of the opera.
Castrati played heroic male leads in Italian opera from the mid-17th to late 18th century when the bel canto was the rage in Europe. Farinelli, born Carlo Broschi in 1705, was the most famous of them all, in a stage career lasting from 1720 to 1737.
Carlo Vitale of the Farinelli Study Center in Bologna said they had recovered the bodies on Wednesday of the singer and his great-niece, who moved his body from a first grave destroyed in the Napoleonic wars.
Hard to tell what they're going to get from a 'skeleton', although the article also states that the remains are "in a middling state of preservation" whatever that means. Soft tissue? You could get stature from skeletal remains, but that might not say anything other than that "he was tall".