Fossilized Fido?

Like human mummies, animals can be mummified both by the natural environment and by humans. There are lots of cases of cats as examples of both natural and artificial (human-made) mummification. It is not unusual for cats to crawl into wall spaces, attics or floorboards of old buildings to die. Somtimes the environment is warm or cool, and dry, with good airflow, and the cat will be preserved. Cats were also deliberately mummified by the ancient Egyptians, as offerings to the goddess “Bastet“.

The mummified cats and kittens were wrapped in elaborately bandaged parcels, with heads and ears shaped to resemble a cat, and eyes and noses painted onto the bandages. Some of the animal mummies from ancient Egypt were fakes: individual bones, sticks and other material were wrapped up to look like a complete mummy of a cat, falcon or other animal.

In Mummies of the World, you can see a beautifully-wrapped cat mummy, as well as a cat in a wooden cat-shaped sarcophagus (coffin). There are several other animals from ancient Egypt, including a dog, an ibis (a bird with a long, curved beak) and a young crocodile whose head peeks out of the bandage wrapping.

All kinds of animals have been mummified in various natural environments. Adult and baby mammoths that date as far back as 40,000 years ago have been mummified in the cold environment of Siberia. In Mummies of the World , you can see a 500-year-old dog from a peat bog in northern Germany that still has lots of fluffy fur. In a peat bog, the bones of the animal (or person) are not well preserved, but skin and fur are. You can also see a boxfish that was preserved in the hot, dry, salty sand of a beach in Egypt. Although this animal is not ancient, it is still an amazing example of an animal mummy. The exhibition also has a preserved hyena from a cave in the Middle East; a hare from a glacier near the findspot of the famous 5,300-year-old Iceman, in northern Italy

One of the oldest animal mummies from the United States is a 10,000-year-old mummy of a spotted bat, which was found in a cave in Arizona. This mummy was carefully studied by scientists at Northern Arizona University, but is not in the exhibition.

Contributor: Dr. Heather Gill-Frerking is the director of science and education for the Mummies of the World exhibition and the scientific research curator for the German Mummy Project, based at the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim, Germany.

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