Curiosity may have killed the Egyptian cats on display in Tring next week but their legacy lives on as visitors are given the chance to examine their mummified bodies.

The cats were preserved in bandages thousands of years ago and are on display from next week at the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum.

Preserved baboons and birds are also on display as part of a fascinating collection belonging to Walter Rothschild's sister museum, The Natural History Museum.

Richard Sabin, curator of mammals at the Natural History Museum, reveals how these creatures are helping to unravel the secrets of ancient Egyptian animal mummification.

"The mummified specimens are so well preserved that we've been able to study the skeletons to make close comparisons with the modern wild and domestic animal specimens held in our research collections," he says.

He also explains how the mummies have helped to reveal some quirky things about ancient Egyptian culture.

"Through x-ray examination of some of our wrapped cat mummies we've discovered that many appear to have had their necks deliberately broken. This suggests that cats may have been killed to meet the demand for them to be high status ritual tomb deposits."

Richard also says that mummification in general was used by the Egyptians to protect bodies in the afterlife, and they were used in religious sacrifices.

They also used mummification to preserve their favourite pets and animals. Monkeys and gazelles which have all been found buried next to their owners.

"Cats sometimes even received their own elaborate burials with cat shaped coffins," says Richard.

The study of these mummies by archaeologists and scientists has revealed more about the importance of animals in ancient Egyptian society.

It has been discovered, for example, that animal statues and amulets have been found, showing the love owners felt for their pets.

The Natural History Museum's collection has also been used to investigate the process of domestication, primarily in cats and cattle.

Richard says: "Research into the morphology of the Apis bull has shown that selective breeding took place in order to develop the moon-shaped horns that were considered a sacred characteristics by the ancient Egyptians."

Like the scientists who made this discoveries, visitors to the exhibition are also getting the chance to "peer" beneath the bandages and, with the help of x-rays, they can find out all of the gory details of mummification for themselves.

Animal Mummies of Ancient Egypt is at Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum, Tring, February 14 to July 3, Information: 0207 9426171 or visit www.nhm.ac.uk/museum/tring

Facts about animal mummies:

  • When the Arabs settled in Egypt in the eighth century AD they looked inside some of the tombs and noticed that the bodies were covered in black sticky stuff, which they thought was tar. The Arabic word for tar is ‘mummia'.

  • The most commonly retrieved mummies were those whose prey were rats, mice, snakes and other household pests. The most abundant mummies were cats, mongoose, ibises, vultures, hawks and crocodiles.
  • At the end of the eighteenth century there were so many mummified cats excavated from Bubastis, and other sites, that boat loads of them were brought to Europe, thus creating a glut in the market.
  • Animal mummies were ground down and used as fertilisers in the UK; out of one consignment of 19 tons of mummies imported to England only one skull was kept. This was given to the Natural History Museum by the Royal College of Science in 1900.
  • The Natural History Museum has 190 skulls of cats that were presented to the museum by the famous Egyptologist Flinders Petrie in 1907.
  • Eight of the cat mummies were elaborately bound with a geometric pattern of light and dark bandages, which is similar in pattern to that used on human mummies of the Ptolemaic period (305 – 30 BC). The remaining cats were all wrapped in plain uncoloured bandages with only one of the mummies having a painted head.