Inside the Southern Forest World Museum in Waycross, Georgia, there is a tree stump that contains the remains of a four-year-old hound dog. The shocking thing about it is the dog's body was well preserved for almost 60 years even though there was no Egyptian mummifying technique used to preserve him.
The dead dog was found when loggers for The Georgia Kraft Corp. cut off the top of a chestnut oak tree to load it into a transport truck. The brown and white hunting dog got stuck in the hollow space in the log approximately in 1960 and they found the canine around two decades later. Reportedly, he got stuck while chasing a 'raccoon' and starved to death in Georgia.
According to Newsweek, the dog quite ran into the hole at the bottom of a tree and the loggers found him in a dried, mummified, and petrified in an eternal struggle to escape kind of state.
The strange phenomenon was recently explained by Kristina Killgrove -- a biological anthropologist at the University of West Florida who studies decay in humans.
After a human or an animal dies, the microbes in the body are 'left unchecked by biological processes that keep them under control in living creatures'. They begin to eat the body, and then the microorganisms in the gut start the process of putrefaction.
"They grow, they reproduce, and they start taking over the body," Killgrove told Newsweek. "That's the disgusting part." The dead body decays, and bacteria, fungi, insects and other animals come to eat the remains.
But, the case with this dog which was later named 'Stuckie' is different. Chestnut oaks contain a material that absorbs moisture and dries out its surroundings – tannin. The natural "desiccant" prevented the decay of the canine for almost 60 years.
Stuckie now resides in a museum known as Southern Forest World. "He's a hunting dog, so we assumed that he was chasing something in the tree," said Bertha Sue Dixon, who runs a museum called Southern Forest World. Dixon believes that the position and shape of a tree, with air blowing upward, also helped the canine's body to be the way it was. "It had like a chimney effect," Dixon explained. "So anything that would eat dead flesh would never know he was in the tree."
Stuckie was possibly chasing a prey but never caught it and no one pulled him out. He perished in the accidental trap but the canine which is the main attraction of the Southern Forest World museum still looking at the living world he left behind with the eyeless sockets.
You can see Stuckie -- the mummified dog in person at the Southern Forest World Museum which is open from Tuesday to Saturday, from 9 am to 2 pm.
