A bizarre ‘mermaid’ that seems to be part fish, part monkey, and part reptile is being probed by scientists in a bid to unravel its mysteries.
The mummy was brought back from Japan by an American sailor and donated to the Clark County Historical Society in Springfield, Ohio, in 1906.
With a grimacing face, strange teeth, oversized claws, fish-like lower half, and downy layer of grey hair, it’s been giving museum visitors the creeps for decades.
But now its secrets could be revealed, after the so-called mermaid was X-rayed and CT scanned for the first time in an effort to decipher its true nature.
Joseph Cress, a radiologist at Northern Kentucky University, said: ‘It seems to be a hodgepodge of at least three different species externally.
