Funded by £5,000 from the University of Glasgow's Chancellor’s Fund in 2014, the realistic images are the outcome of a collaboration between historians from the University and craniofacial experts from Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). He waged war to wear down his Scottish opponents and the English regime in Scotland, culminating in the battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Project leader Dr Martin Macgregor, a senior lecturer in Scottish history at Glasgow University, said he was arguably the most significant figure in the nation's story. Image copyright Empics Image caption Face Lab uses computer technology to recreate the face from the skull 
 
 Image caption The face was recreated from a cast made from what is believed to have been the king's skull 
 
 Image caption Robert the Bruce was 54 when he died in 1329 
 
 Image caption The researchers recreated the king's face with leprosy and without 
 
 Image caption Robert the Bruce is thought to have had leprosy before his death 
 
 Gilded tomb 
 
 Bruce's opulent tomb, imported from Paris and decorated with black and white marble and elaborate gilding, was destroyed during the Reformation. I saw an opportunity to apply the technology to the Hunterian skull held here at Glasgow: first to test the credibility of its connection to Bruce, and then to try to add to our knowledge of Scotland’s greatest king.” 
 
 Dr MacGregor requested the expertise of Professor Caroline Wilkinson, Director of LJMU’s Face Lab and a world-renowned craniofacial identification expert, to carry out the facial reconstruction of Robert the Bruce. Professor Wilkinson said: “Using the skull cast, we could accurately establish the muscle formation from the positions of the skull bones to determine the shape and structure of the face. For his skin tones, Prof Wilkinson said they produced two versions; one without leprosy and one with a mild representation of leprosy. He may have had leprosy, but if he did it is likely that it did not manifest strongly on his face, as this is not documented.” 
 
 No reliable visual depictions of Robert the Bruce were made in his own time, and written records tell us nothing about his appearance. “The skull was excavated in 1818-19 from a grave in Dunfermline Abbey, mausoleum of Scotland’s medieval monarchs,” explains Dr MacGregor.
– Robert the Bruce, King of Scots from 1306 until his death in 1329 and perhaps most famous for defeating the English army at the Battle of Bannockburn, has been dead some 700 years, but we're just now getting a good idea of what he might have looked like. Without any renderings of the man from his own lifetime, any likenesses in statues and portraits were dreamed up by artists, reports the BBC. But thanks to two years of work by historians at the University of Glasgow, with help from the Liverpool John Moores University's Face Lab (best known for recreating the face of Richard the Third), experts have captured the man. They were able to do so thanks to a 200-year-old plaster cast of a skull found in a coffin buried under Dunfermline Abbey. Whether the skull actually belongs to Robert the Bruce hasn't been confirmed, because he wasn't the only leader buried at Dunfermline and the skull was long ago reinterred. A press release explains a toe bone taken from the coffin wasn't returned to it, but extracting DNA from the bone would mean its destruction. That means no verification, and no genetic information about Robert the Bruce's physical characteristics. For now, the researchers say they relied on "statistical evaluation" in giving him brown hair and light brown eyes, reports the Telegraph. He is thought to possibly have had leprosy, so one version shows him with a thick neck and build—a "match for super-athletes today," per the release, and another with "a mild representation of leprosy," which would have affected his nose and jaw. (John McCain has claimed to be related.)