WOMAN'S DONATED LEG MUMMIFIED USING ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PRACTISE.

Though using ancient methods to turn a 21st-century woman's leg into the leg of a mummy might sound like a scene from "The X-Files," the project was actually carried out by scientists in a lab at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The results of their experiment were published last week in The Anatomical Record.

If you're like me, on hearing this news, two questions naturally come to mind: why and how.

First for the "why" part.

Christina Papageorgopoulou, a physical anthropologist at the Democritus University of Thrace in Greece, who worked on the experiment, told Live Science that the researchers simply wanted to have an "evidence-based methodology" for seeing what ancient mummification processes looked like. "The only way you can do this is by [doing] the experiment yourself," she said.

OK, so they kind of did it because they could. And for the "how?"

First, the researchers got ahold of two legs that were removed from a recently deceased woman who had donated her body to science. The legs were amputated within 24 hours of her death. The scientists chose to work with legs only because using the whole body would have been too complicated. "If we used the whole body, we would have had to cut it up and take out the intestines [and other organs]," Papageorgopoulou told Live Science.

Next, they baked one leg in an oven kept at 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) with a humidity level of 10 percent to 20 percent to try to mimic the hot and dry conditions of Egypt. But, after seven days, that process was abandoned "due to unexpected lack of mummification progress" according to the research.

The other leg was placed in a substance called natron which is just what ancient Egyptians would have used to prevent bodies from rotting before entombment. It consists of of sodium carbonate (soda ash) and sodium bicarbonate -- both salts.

The salt-covered leg was placed under a ventilation hood and monitored for 208 days. During that time, tissue samples were taken a total of 18 different times and examined using a variety of scientific methods including microscopy and MRI and CAT scans.