Monday, November 21, 2005

Mummy update


CT tells mummy's secret: Preservation no accident

Researchers oohed and aahed so much over the patient's internal organs one might be forgiven for thinking he was still alive.

But Sylvester, the object of all the attention Saturday at Inland Pacific Imaging in Seattle, is a mummy.

Researchers who did a CT scan on him four years ago came back for a more detailed look, this time using both CT and MRI equipment.

"Amazing!" and "Awesome!" they exclaimed over images of the mummy's brain. "That is impossible. He can't look like that," said Jerry Conlogue, co-director of the Bioanthropology Research Institute at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn.


It really is an excellent mummy. Not very ancient, however. Apparently whoever embalmed it injected much of its internals with arsenic, hence the good preservation. Read the whole thing.