The parade 2 1/2 years ago included full military honors and plenty of pomp: crypts with skulls and other skeletal fragments were placed on velvet and taken down Reforma Boulevard and up to Chapultepec Castle by horse-drawn carriages. Mexicans from across the country paid their respects.

But now it’s time for a bit of an "oops."

Not all of the bones, it turns out, belong to the founding fathers. One was a woman. And others belonged to children.

And deer.

“We’ve been living a lie!” columnist Katia D’Artigues wrote Tuesday in El Universal newspaper in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion. “Or maybe deer are also national heroes?”

One of the anthropologists directing a nearly three-year project to better document the provenance and history of the remains of the independence war leaders says the strange mix of bones is in fact easy to explain.

Many of the national heroes weren’t always heroes, and their bodies were treated carelessly, allowed to mingle with other dead in cemeteries, and only decades later were recovered and given their proper place, said Jose Antonio Pompa, a top member of the investigating team from the National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH.

While it’s true that the remains in the special crypts include dozens of samples from unknown people, a few children and two bones from deer, there are also pieces of 13 of the 14 nationally recognized independence leaders, Pompa said in a telephone interview.

The missing figure is Mariano Matamoros, a priest who led troops in the independence war and, like many of the heroes, was captured and executed by the Spanish. Pompa said it was “abandon and neglect” in the late 19^th century that led to an urn holding Matamoros' remains being misplaced. Investigators later thought they had recovered it, but the current study shows it actually contains the remains of a woman.

The findings of the INAH study were reported this week by La Jornada newspaper, which said it obtained the report through the Mexican equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act.

Despite Pompa’s explanations, the questions surrounding some of the supposed relics that Mexicans have been dutifully revering tapped a strong current of doubt and suspicion in a society that  cherishes symbols but believes few official accounts of anything.

Lorenzo Meyer, historian and political commentator, appeared on a talk show on MVS radio in which the question was raised: Do you continue to venerate bones that you know don’t belong to the heroes? Meyer said the latest revelations made a mockery of the 2010 bicentennial celebrations.

“It makes us lose, even more, any kind of confidence in the official decisions and institutions,” he said.