Ancient Egyptian animal mummies used as offerings to the gods will go on display at a Manchester Museum exhibition which will unwrap the mysteries of this ancient art.

Millions of animal mummies - including bandaged crocodiles and cats entombed in wood - were prepared for votive offerings during ancient times.

The Gifts for the Gods: Animal Mummies Revealed exhibition will reveal how experts from The University of Manchester used imaging technology to learn about the mummies.

The first exhibition of animal mummies ever to be held in the UK, it will feature more than 60 mummies, reuniting mummified material from different archaeological sites for the first time in more than a century.

Museum curator Dr Campbell Price said the exhibition will show how images of animals could be used to communicate with the gods.

He said: “We expect the exhibition to be very popular at Manchester Museum, and look forward to enabling more visitors to share in this exciting subject.”

Mummified specimens such as jackals, crocodiles, cats and birds will be on display alongside stone sculpture and bronze statuettes, 19th Century art and never-seen-before archives.

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It will explore the British fascination with Egypt, the discovery of animal mummies by British excavators, and how the mummies ended up in the UK.

The Ancient Egyptian Animal Bio Bank Project, based at The University of Manchester, aims to catalogue data from animal mummies in museum collections outside Egypt.

Dr. Stephanie Atherton-Woolham and Dr Lidija McKnight have analysed more than 800 individual animal mummies from Britain, Europe and the United States.

Dr McKnight said the exhibition will showcase the role played by the British in the discovery, excavation, collection, curation and scientific research of this ‘understudied’ subject.

She said: “The University of Manchester, with its long history in Egyptian mummy research, is leading the field; helping to shed light on the material remains of this ancient practice and, hopefully, to reveal more about how and why these animal mummies were produced.”

The exhibition will open at Manchester Museum on October 8 and will run until April 17, 2016.