At the British Museum, one of the strangest objects is a so-called mermaid: not a creature from the deep, but a carefully made hoax. The figure appears to combine animal parts, with the lower body formed from a fish tail and the head constructed without a skull, probably using fish jaw and teeth. Objects like this were popular curiosities in Europe from at least the seventeenth century, often presented as evidence that mythical creatures might be real. This one seems to have come from Japan, probably in the eighteenth century.
