Egyptian Mummy Coffin Chicago - Scientists and the conservator at Chicago's Field Museum decided to expose what's inside an ancient Egyptian relic by lifting its lid this week using specially designed clamps on Friday.
"There's always a risk of damage," scientist J.P. Brown said. "So we like to handle these things as little as possible."
According to Yahoo! News, scientists used special clamps to ensure the safety of the fragile lid of the wooden coffin when it was raised.
Upon opening the Egyptian mummy coffin in Chicago, the team found a 2,500-yr-old mummified remains of a said to be 14-year-old boy.
The remains of the Egyptian boy was carefully lifted using the contraption and it was placed on top of a table in a humidity-controlled lab for further examination.
The mummified boy is said to be Minirdis, the son of a priest, and scientists noted that his remains was clad with burial mask and that his toes were blackened.
The group of scientists then worked on to stabilize the mummy so that it can be transported for the upcoming exhibit "Mummies: Images of the Afterlife" in September next year at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
In the fall of 2016, the remains of Minirdis is expected to be transported to the Denver Museum of Nature, reports MSN.
The Egyptian mummy coffin in Chicago is just one of the 30 complete human mummies from Egypt that have been housed in the Field Museum since the 1920s.
"These are unique individuals, unique objects," said Molly Gleeson, project conservator at Penn Museum's "In The Artefact Lab: Conserving Egyptian Mummies" exhibition in Philadelphia. "There's nothing else like them. If damage were to happen, we can't put things back together exactly the way they were before."
Despite the careful handling of the ancient relic, CT scans and x-ray images taken prior to the opening of the coffin on Friday already showed that the mummified boy's "feet were detached and partially unwrapped with his toes sticking out."
The team didn't really understand why Minirdis passed away at a young age, but they are quite pleased that his mummified body has survived thousands of years.
"The fascinating thing about any mummy is that it's survived as long as it has," Brown said. "They're actually amazingly fragile."
According to News.com, the procedure the scientists performed on the Egyptian mummy coffin in Chicago last Friday was not as simple as it seemed.
There were a lot of pre-planning and tests conducted before they could lift the lid from the coffin and expose the mummified boy's remains.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
