An American student at Cornell University was able to discover the gender of a mummy that had been in the university’s treasury for more than a hundred years. It turned out that it belonged to the sacred ibis bird in Egypt and not to a falcon as was believed at the university over the past years.

Graduate student in archeology, Carol Ann Barsodi, said that she was working on studying how to integrate technology into the museum’s exhibits. For this purpose, she contacted the curator of the anthropology collections at the university, who showed her two small mummies that had been in the treasury for about a hundred years, so she could choose one of them.

Ibis, the sacred bird of the ancient Egyptians

It was believed that this mummy belonged to a falcon, but the student realized that it had been incorrectly classified and conducted her research and experiments until she was certain that the mummy belonged to another bird, the “ibis,” which the ancient Egyptians used as a sacred bird.

The amazing thing is that the bird, which was estimated to be between one and three thousand years old, still has its soft tissues intact. This means that many studies can be conducted on it.

But the mystery of the arrival of this sacred Egyptian bird, the “ibis,” to that city is still a course of research amid many speculations, including that it may have arrived with one of the mummies coming from Egypt, especially since the ibis was used by the ancient Egyptians to sacrifice as a vine to the god Thoth, who was the moon god at the time. Ancient Egyptians.

Moon god

Another theory about the way the ibis arrived at the American University says that it may have arrived from among a number of artifacts that were donated to the university in 1930 AD from Egypt.

How the bird arrived in America was not the only mystery that confronted the researchers. There was another, more ambiguous mystery: its head was twisted backwards and placed in the opposite direction of its body. It was also missing its rib cage and cage bones.

Today, Carol Ann Barsodi is working on transforming the bird into a three-dimensional image, as she said in press statements, “I simply want to bring this bird back to life.”

The American student confirms that she is currently trying to compare the mummy's DNA with a similar one in Egypt, which will help her shorten the search for broader information about the sacred bird, including knowing the time period during which this bird lived.