Mice Casts from Pompeii!?

Tim Parkin posted (on Facebook) this potentially very interesting snippet of a documentary featuring casts of mice who were caught at Pompeii:

… but I’m trying to figure out how genuine this is … if you follow the link at the end, it takes you to an artist’s site which has these same mice in bronze … anyone know?

3 thoughts on “Mice Casts from Pompeii!?

  1. Not real. The casts from Pompeii don’t look like that and the pyroclastic surge doesn’t create ‘frozen in mid action’ casts like this. In fact, that’s a common enough misconception amongst the lay folk that it’s not surprising that’s what these fakes represent. It’s just this artist’s mice done in plaster and filmed on a bed of pumice (not even lapilli). It just looks like a marketing gimmick.

  2. I think these are way too detailed to be actual Pompeian casts. The human Pompeii casts are, in general, just broad outlines of a human body, they don’t capture intricate details of the shape of the face and so on like these ones show.

  3. on the artist’s website there is a tiny little comment above the video:

    “See what my bronze mice are trying to convince you of with their scary special effects makeup..”

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