Scientists working on mummified remains from Egypt recently made a huge discovery: a set of remains they thought was a man and a woman were actually a woman and a pregnant woman.
Before the Warsaw Mummy Project analyzed the remains, no one had ever seen a fetus in a mummified body.
The leader of the study told Insider on Friday that it had always seemed weird.
He said that women in reproductive age were not always pregnant, but every few years. There was no proof that pregnant women died.
Fetal skeletons are usually used to spot a developing baby on the X-ray scans. It took the scientists to develop a technology that wasn't looking for bones.
Our case shows that you shouldn't be looking for bones. He said you should look for the soft tissue with a unique shape.
The researchers gave a hypothesis for why the fetus might have vanished from scans in a letter published on December 30. It comes down to the final product.
The soft tissue of the fetus is highlighted in red on the cross-section of the mummy's body.
The Warsaw Mummy Project.
It's like an experiment with an egg. Esjmond said that if you put an egg with an acid, the eggshell is dissolving.
He said that when the acid is evaporated, you have a pot with an egg covered in minerals.
The mummy's body is likely to have something similar.
Esjmond said that the environment in the body becomes more acid as the body becomes more decayed.
The bones almost all dissolved when the fetus was hit by the acidic environment. The water that was left in the uterus contained remnants of the chemical reaction.
The little body was invisible to the X-ray machines.
Esjmond said that one way to explain it was that it was pickled.
A 3D reconstitution of the mummy shows the soft tissue that is thought to be a fetus.
The Warsaw Mummy Project.
Did the mother's bones not break?
During the mummification process, the body is covered with natrium salt to dry it out. Esjmond said that the minerals were captured so the bones could still be seen.
The Warsaw Mummy Project has studied only one mummy that is believed to have been pregnant.
Esjmond said that further research may show that it's more common than they think.
