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?
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.
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.
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..”