Cats are secretive beasts – you never can quite tell what they’re thinking. And this Ancient Egyptian cat is no exception, hiding a secret for generations, before scientists and the British Museum figured out what had happened to it.

Collected by Major Robert Gayer-Anderson in the early 1900s, and housed in his personal museum/ house in Cairo, it was sold to the Museum in the 1930s. For years it was noted as a beautiful depiction of the goddess Bastet. But once it went under the xray, it was found to contain a load of new material, especially inside the head.

Gayer-Anderson ‘restored’ the object, piecing much of it back together and covering the whole thing in a greenish paint, to give the appearance of copper. Little did we know, this cat had been hiding something of a secret from us for years.