The reason the body of the Mysterious Lady and the body of the fetus are different in this regard is because they mummified differently. The eggshell is dissolving, leaving only the inside of the egg (albumen and yolk) and the minerals from the eggshell dissolved in the acid.' 'Picture putting an egg into a pot filled with an acid. 'This process of bone demineralization in an acidic environment can be compared to an experiment with an egg,' the researchers write. It's not dissimilar to the natural process of mummification that takes place in peat bogs, where the highly acidic environment ' pickles' soft tissue, but demineralizes the bones.ĬT scan of the fetus in utero A is the head and B is the hand. In addition, the acidifying processes that would have taken place inside the corpse of the Mysterious Lady as her body decomposed would have further demineralized the already delicate fetal bones. Fetal bones are even hard to find during archaeological excavations. Fetal bones are very poorly mineralized during the first two trimesters, which means they are difficult to detect in the first place after undergoing taphonomic ( or preservation) processes. She noted that no bones could be detected in the scans of the mummy, and therefore the identification of a fetus must be inconclusive.īut this is not unexpected, Ożarek-Szilke and her team argue. The question as to whether what they had found was actually a fetus was posed by radiologist Sahar Saleem of Cairo University in Egypt, who penned a reply to the initial discovery. The end result is an almost hermetically sealed uterus containing the fetus.' The placement and filling of the body with natron significantly limited the access of air and oxygen. 'Blood pH in corpses, including content of the uterus, falls significantly, becoming more acidic, concentrations of ammonia and formic acid increase with time. It is not the most aesthetic comparison, but conveys the idea,' the research team, led by bio-archaeologist Marzena Ożarek-Szilke of the University of Warsaw in Poland and archaeologist Wojciech Ejsmond of the Polish Academy of Sciences, explain in a blog post. 'The fetus remained in the untouched uterus and began to, let say, 'pickle'.

As the researchers so colorfully put it, the process is akin to pickling an egg.

Natron salt lakes egypt