The Times - Museum makes daddy of all discoveries about its mummy

An Egyptian coffin, right, which has been in a seaside museum for decades has been revealed to be one of the most important in history. Officials at Torquay Museum, Devon, were stunned when they were told the ornate 4ft-long object was nearly 1,000 years older than the body it contained the 2,500-year-old mummified boy, Psamtek.

The coffin and its contents were donated in 1956 by Lady Winaretta Leeds, daughter of the sewing machine heir Paris Singer, and were kept in storage until the Torquay Natural History Society completed a 2 million refurbishment. Before putting them on display, museum staff took an X-ray, below, and the coffin was examined by Aidan Dodson, a senior research fellow at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Bristol University. He realised that the coffin was "special" immediately. "It is exquisitely carved, inlaid and painted. For a child to have been given something like that, he must have had very important parents perhaps even the king and queen," he said. Barry Chandler, the museum's curator, said: "We thought perhaps the coffin dated back another 200 years or so to about 700BC. But we never realised it had actually been made somewhere between the reign of Ahmose I and the early years of the reign of Thutmose III . . . Not only has it gained an awful lot of age, but it has gone back to one of the most famous Egyptian dynasties of all."