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Tue 03 Mar 2009Bones of 39 saints discovered in British Museum
THE NEW medieval gallery at the British Museum in London is full of beautiful images of saints in ivory, stone, gold and wood – but invisible to visitors, it also holds the bones of 39 real saints, whose discovery came as a shock to their curator.
The relics, packed in tiny bundles of cloth, including one scrap of fabric more than 1,000 years old, were found when a 12th-century German portable altar was opened for the first time since it came into the British Museum collection in 1902.
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