Earlier this spring, a pair of crocodile mummies were scanned by researchers at Stanford Medicine Imaging Center and the medical school's Radiological Sciences Laboratory. Now the reptiles, which the Los Angeles Times reports were "wrapped in worship of the crocodile god Sobek," are part of a larger exhibit of Egyptian objects at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley. From the Times:
The exhibition - "The Conservator's Art: Preserving Egypt's Past," which runs until next spring - not only displays mummy cases, statuettes, hieroglyphics and other artifacts usually locked away in Berkeley's trove of Egyptian treasures. It also describes, for example, the crocodiles' journey to the Stanford University School of Medicine in February for $12,000 worth of rides through CT scanners normally used for humans. The tests revealed that one mummy, which has never been unwrapped, contained jumbled bones from more than one animal.
Most striking about the other, unwrapped crocodile are the 30 baby crocodiles on its back. They'd been attached to the once-sticky embalming mixture, which was shown in tests at the University of Bristol in England to match the ingredients and quality of that used for humans, thus undermining the idea that crocodile mummification was accorded less care or expense.
Previously: Is that a Nile crocodile? Tell you later, Hearst curator; CT images of crocodile mummies scanned at Stanford; and Ancient crocodile mummies scanned at Stanford
