A tiny, 2,100-year-old mummy from ancient Egypt had long been thought to contain the remains of a treasured bird - which would make sense, considering the hawk-themed decorations and small size. But researchers conducting a CT scan have found something else entirely - the remains of a severely malformed human foetus, stillborn at no later than 28 weeks.
The mummy had been in storage at the Maidstone Museum in Kent, England, listed in the inventory as EA 493 Mummified Hawk, Ptolemaic Period. The funerary casement was the perfect size for a bird, bearing the head of a hawk painted in gilt and hieroglyphics referring to Horus, the falcon-headed sky god of the ancient Egyptians.
In addition, the mummification of animals - from crocodiles to cats to kestrels to scarab beetles - was a very common practice in ancient Egypt. So the mummy did not stand out as anything particularly special or unusual. It nearly didn't even get CT scanned. The museum was having a human mummy scanned in 2016, and figured it may as well put in a few animal mummies from its collection to be scanned too.
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