The mummy lies atop a white sheet on a countertop in the center of the laboratory.

It's impossible to miss, and impossible to forget.

Its bones have yellowed and turned dark brown in some places, the combined result of age and preservation. The tendons in the mummy's feet are defined and intact. The skeleton is relatively whole — except all the internal organs are removed and the chest and skull cut away. Nearby X-rays reveal a tangle of thin blood vessels in the face and pelvis, visible because of a substance infused into the body to tint them red.

This is not a mummy of lore, wrapped in bandages and entombed in a museum. This mummy is roughly 200 years old, part of a collection of anatomical specimens at the University of Maryland once used for study by medical students.

The story of how it arrived at MSU's Forensic Anthropology Lab on the fourth floor of Fee Hall is just as interesting as the mummy itself.

Last month, Port Huron police confiscated the mummy after a Port Huron woman listed it on eBay, describing it as a "mummified human with tendons, ligaments, bones." It received one bid before it was removed from the Web site — eBay forbids the sale of human body parts or remains. However, the policy does allow the listing of skulls or skeletons if intended for medical uses.

The mummy was sent to Norm Sauer, an MSU anthropology professor and director of the lab, for analysis. Sauer and a graduate student created a biological profile of the type of person the mummy might have been, uncovering clues about its origin along the way.

"We've never had a specimen like this before," Sauer said, briefly pausing. "That's not true. We've had plenty of anatomical specimens in here before, but none of them have been mummified.

"It's an amazing specimen."

An unusual case

Most of the cases the lab receives involve unidentified human remains, sent by medical examiners across the state.

Sauer uses the remains to prepare a biological profile, including the age, sex, ancestry, height and estimated date of death.

He compares the results to missing persons reports to try and identify the remains. The lab also assists in body searches and recovering human remains.

Most recently, the lab team assisted in the case of 7-year-old Ricky Holland of Williamston, and last summer's search for mob leader Jimmy Hoffa's remains.

"We do on average a case a week," Sauer said, adding that they do about 50-60 forensic anthropology cases a year. "Some of the cases we get are simple bones. People want to know if what they found were human remains."

The case of the mummy, Sauer said, was unlike anything he had ever seen before. And in the Forensic Anthropology Lab, he's seen a lot.

The mummy arrived on campus on Oct. 16, a few days after the St. Clair County medical examiner's office contacted him about the case.

"This ought to be interesting," Sauer remembers thinking.

Was it ever.

The mummy had been posted on eBay with an end auction date of Oct. 14. As of Oct. 10, there was one bid of $500.

An anthropologist from North Carolina came across the specimen on the site and contacted Port Huron police, said Daniel Spitz, chief medical examiner for St. Clair County.

The police removed it from the home and brought it to the medical examiner's office, where Spitz confirmed the remains as human.

"It was an anatomic dissection," Spitz said. "It had some features that had been dissected and that an autopsy may have been done. I was more intrigued with what it was and where it came from."

That information was up to Sauer to determine.

"We immediately recognized it as an anatomical specimen," used in the teaching of anatomy to medical students, Sauer said. "(But) I had no idea how old it was."

The first thing researchers do in the lab is determine whether a case is of forensic interest to police because the main role of the lab is to focus on those cases, Sauer said.

The mummy qualified because it likely was stolen property and because it was being sold on the Internet.

Researchers can create a biological profile by first estimating age. The mummy was determined to be a child between 6 and 9 years old, partly by looking at tooth formation, X-rays and growth centers in the leg bones. In adults, up to about age 35, the pelvic and rib bones have subtle changes that can help determine age.

After that, Sauer said, researchers look for degenerative changes.

It is unknown whether the mummy was male or female, mainly because there are no good skeletal indicators of sex in children, he said.

"This case created a lot of interest because none of us had ever seen anything like it before," Sauer said. "It's an eloquent specimen that's a piece of medical history."

A mystery solved

The mummy is part of a historical collection of anatomical specimens held at the University of Maryland. The collection is at least 200 years old, the mummy included.

The collection is named after Allen Burns, who prepared all the mummies for student study in his native Scotland. It arrived in Maryland after Burns' death.

Kristin Horner, who is working on her doctorate degree in anthropology at MSU, was the first to recognize the mummy as part of the collection.

She had first seen the collection during a visit to the University of Maryland while working on her undergraduate degree. The browning of the bones and the red blood vessels are characteristics of the Burns Collection, she said.

"It's a very distinctive color," Horner said. "The dissection style — there's a big focus on the artery and the circulatory system."

So when she saw the mummy in the Forensic Anthropology Lab, she knew it was a match. MSU researchers exchanged photographs with the curator in Maryland and both sides realized it was, indeed, part of the collection.

Spitz is unsure how the mummy got to Michigan. He said the Port Huron woman who listed it on eBay said she received it from someone who got it from an old medical school in Detroit. But it could have changed hands numerous times for hundreds of years prior, he said.

"I can't really trace the path of it, but I know it dates back many, many years," said Spitz, who had never seen a mummy prior to this case. "Technically, it's stolen property because it does belong to the University of Maryland, and we're in contact with them to see how to get it back."

Horner said she hopes to research the entire Burns Collection further and create biological profiles for each mummy in it. The collection once was actively used in teaching, but now is in storage.

"It's really exciting because it's a really very early piece of history of anatomical study," she said.

But in the meantime, the researchers know a bit more about at least one of the mummies in the collection.

Case closed.