 Animal mummies are the most numerous type of object preserved from ancient Egypt, numbering in the millions, yet they are little understood. Soulful creatures reveals the purpose and manufacture of animal mummies using traditional humanities and new scientific means of analysis. In 2011, the Brooklyn Museum Curators and Conservation Department took our collection of animal mummies to the Animal Medical Center in New York City so that we could CT scan them. CT scanning is essentially taking an x-ray of an object, but taking the x-ray from multiple angles and then using the power of a computer to compile them into one so that they become like a three-dimensional image. Many different animals were mummified by the Egyptians, but not all of them are what they seem. So the larger mummy here is in the shape of a human mummy because it has little feet modeled like a human mummy would. This is a really interesting example because usually we see animal mummies of young specimens, and when we started looking at the CT scan, it looked like an older specimen, an older ibis. But then as we looked closer, there were a lot of feathers and those little circles, other feathers. And as we were looking closely, we realized that there were two ibises in this mummy, an adult and a juvenile. The smaller ibis comes from the excavations of the Egypt Exploration Fund at Abydos. The shape of this mummy directly reflects the body of the actual ibis with its head folded over on its body. It has a very long beak, it's beautifully preserved, and our veterinarian tells us that the length of the beak indicates that this is a male ibis. We learned a lot about our animal mummies from the x-rays and CT scans. We're still researching by doing carbon-14 testing and studying Egyptian text and archaeology. And with continued research, we're hoping to learn more.