Photo Gallery Petrified
Those with a weak stomach would do well to avoid the new exhibition at the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums in the German city of Mannheim: "Mummies - The Dream of Everlasting Life" is the world's biggest exhibition of mummified corpses. This young chap comes from the Atacama Desert in Chile.
The exhibition, which runs from Sept. 30, 2007 to March 24, 2008, features more than 70 mummies from around the world, including this female mummy from South America.
This exhibit is the mummy of little Johannes Orlovitas from Hungary.
A mummified child from pre-Columbian Peru is one of the more gruesome exhibits.
Of course, no exhibition of mummies would be complete without a specimen from Egypt. This head is 2,000 years old.
This mummified head comes from New Zealand.
Veronica Skripetz from Hungary lived from 1770 to 1808, but her mummy will last forever.
But it's not just humans who have been preserved for eternity -- animals too have been mummified, like this ferret ...
... and this monkey.
The exhibition shows that mummification can also occur naturally, like with this hyena from Jordan.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is "Windeby I," a body found in a peat bog in nothern Germany. Until recently it was known as the "Windeby Girl," but a scientist recently proved it to be a boy through DNA samples.
Here restorer Gerhard Stawinoga from the Schloss Gottorf state museum in Schleswig-Holstein prepares the 1,800-year-old Windeby body for its trip to Mannheim.
