Researchers in Japan are investigating the origins of a nightmarish, 300-year-old mummified ‘mermaid’, which has been worshipped for centuries due to its supposed medicinal properties.
The haunting remains are most likely a gruesome amalgam of a monkey’s torso sewed onto a fish’s tail, potentially embellished with hair and nails from a human.
Hiroshi Kinoshita, board member of the Okayama Folklore Society, discovered the mermaid mummy, which is around 12 inches (30.5 centimeters) long, inside a box at a temple in Okayama Prefecture. He first became aware of the mummy after he found a picture of the bizarre specimen in an encyclopedia of mythical creatures.
A fisherman supposedly caught the specimen sometime between 1736 and 1741, and he subsequently sold it to an affluent family, according to a note left inside the mummy’s box. Researchers still don’t know exactly how the mermaid ended up inside the temple, according to Japanese news site The Asahi Shimbun.
Now, Takafumi Kato, a paleontologist at the Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts, and colleagues have begun looking into the mummy’s origins after Kinoshita convinced the temple to let the scientists investigate the unusual remains.
image credit: The Asahi Shimbun.
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