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Eerie Ancient Egyptian ‘cat mummy’ found with five legs and three tails
A DIGITALLY dissected cat mummy shocked scholars when they found out it had three tails and five hind legs.
The 2,500-year-old mummified Egyptian cat was scanned and reconstructed in 3D but the researchers discovered more than they were expecting.
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Experts from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) the steps they took during the cat mummy investigation and the technology used.
This included the cat visiting the vet for a scan and an augmented reality and 3D reconstructions.
The researchers were baffled when the scan revealed the seemingly singular cat mummy actually contain pieces of different felines.
In fact, the mummies interior holds five hinds legs and three incomplete tails.
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The Frankenstein-like creature has no ribs or vertebrae and has a textile ball where its head should be.
INRAP researcher Theophane Nicolas said in a statement: "There are millions of animal mummies, but few have been imagined.
"Some are empty, others contain only one bone, sometimes the cat is complete.
"The mummy of Rennes is a variant. Some researchers believe that we are dealing with an ancient scam organised by unscrupulous priests, we believe on the contrary that there are innumerable ways to make animal mummies.
"We will know more once we have made a body of imagery, which joins a field of study that is developing on a global scale."
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Mummified animals weren't just a way of trying to keep beloved pets.
It's thought that the ancient Egyptians offered mummified creatures as sacrifices to the gods or wanted them in tombs in the hope of taking them to the afterlife.
Some scholars think the demand for mummified animals is what made it a rogue trade as there have been other examples of animal mummies containing a mixture of different bones or sometimes none at all.
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It is well-known that the ancient Egyptians love their cats and they even had a feline god called Mafdet.
She was a god who was worshipped in Egypt's First Dynasty between 3,400 BC and 3000 BC.
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Mafdet was seen as a protector against snakes and scorpions, which could have meant death for the ancient people.
The cat mummy from the 3D scan can now be found in France, usually at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, where it has been since the 1920s.
The exact location of where the mummy was found has not been revealed by the researchers.
A brief history of Ancient Egypt
Here's everything you need to know...
- The Ancient Egyptians were an advanced civilisation who at one point owned a huge portion of the globe
- The civilisation began about 5,000 years ago when ancient humans began building villages along the River Nile
- It lasted for about 3,000 years and saw the building of complex cities centuries ahead of their time – as well as the famous Great Pyramids
- The Ancient Egyptians were experts at farming and construction
- They invented a solar calendar, and one of the world's earliest writing systems: The hieroglyph
- The Egyptians were ruled by kings and queens called pharaohs
- Religion and the afterlife were a huge part of Ancient Egyptian culture. They had over 2,000 gods
- Pharaohs built huge elaborate tombs to be buried in, some of which were pyramids – at the time among the largest buildings in the world
- The Egyptians believed in life after death, and important people's corpses were mummified to preserve their bodies for the afterlife
- The Ancient Egytpian empire fell due to a mix of factors, including wars with other empires and a 100-year period of drought and starvation
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