X-rays reveal what ancient animal mummies keep under wraps
Egyptian animal mummies can look like little more than bundles of cloth. Now high-tech X-rays have unveiled the mysterious life histories of three of these mummies — a cat, a bird and a snake. While 2-D X-rays of each specimen existed, little information existed beyond generic animal labels. So Richard Johnston, an engineer at Swansea University in Wales, and his colleagues used a microCT scanner to see what lies beneath the wraps of animal mummies at the university’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. The mummified cat’s head (seen in this 3-D model created from microCT data) was separated from the body after death. The skull may also have been dropped at some point, creating more fractures postmortem.Swansea University The bone scans of three of those specimens provided such detail that researchers could identify the cat as a domestic kitten (Felis catus), the bird as a Eurasian kestrel (Falco tinnunculus) and the snake as an...