London ? A Tasmanian aboriginal group is suing Britain’s Museum of Natural History to keep it from conducting tests on bones, teeth and skulls taken from the island, saying Monday that the experiments would desecrate the corpses.

The museum agreed last year to return the bones – mostly obtained during the 1940s – to Australia, but indicated it wanted first to run tests on them, as they represented some of the few remaining pieces of objective data about the region’s original inhabitants.

Tasmanians were almost completely exterminated after the 19th-century arrival of white settlers to their island. Out of a population of 4,000, only 200 remained in the 1830s, and the last full-blooded Tasmanian died in 1876. Those who remain today are of mixed descent.

The Tasmanian Aboriginal Center, which has been awarded custody of the remains, said any tests on the bones would defile the remains of victims of genocide.