What's Inside a Cat's Mummy will Blow Your Minds

When they used digital imaging technology to scan the insides of a cat's mummy, the researchers at the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) expected to find the remains of a cat - only to find the scattered remains of three cats instead!

CT scans allowed the INRAP researchers to peer inside mummies without unwrapping them, a newer process that helps preserve the ancient cadavers. When the researchers used 3D imaging technology to recreate the insides of the mummy, they were astonished to find that the head contained a ball of fabric, while the body contained five hind leg bones from three different cats. But the unnatural amalgamation may have an unsurprising explanation.

The fact that the body within the mummy was incomplete isn't the strange part. Bones were often decomposed and filled with holes by corpse-eating insects. "Cat mummies have been found in very large quantities sometimes in extremely degraded states and reduced to the state of accumulation of bones," Théophane Nicolas, an INRAP researcher who participated in the project, told Live Science. Referring to the scanned mummy, which was taken from the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, Nicolas added, "Some are empty, others contain only one bone, sometimes the cat is complete. The mummy of Rennes is a variant."

The ball of fabric in the head also wasn't unusual, in and of itself. In Ancient Egypt, larger mummies sold for more money, especially when the mummy is meant to serve as an offering to the gods. The temples of the feline goddesses Mafdet and Bastet would receive many mummies of cats that have passed away in order to receive the goddess's blessing. According to a Live Science report, priests would create mummies that were larger than their occupants, with the spaces filled in with fabric and gravel.

But if some cat mummies contain the complete skeleton of a single cat, what was going on with the Frankenstein's monster-style remains in the mummy from Rennes? Some researchers believe it may have been part of an ancient Egyptian scam. While he himself does not think it is necessarily the case, Nicolas has explained to Live Science that priests may have attempted to fill the demand and "resorted to less elaborate preparations, impossible to detect by sight."

Essentially, grifter priests may have created fake mummies to make a little extra money. And we've only just recently been able to catch on to them. Talk about a long con.