What was claimed
A picture shows a giant Nubian mummy found in North America.
Our verdict
The picture shows a normal sized mummy that was found in the Canary Islands.
Picture of ‘giant mummy’ is a case of forced perspective
1 December 2021
A post on Facebook claims to show “another giant Nubian mummy found in North America” adding “they have found to [sic] many to count”.
The photo is genuine, and shows a mummy being given a CT scan at Quirónsalud Madrid University Hospital in Spain in 2016.
Although the mummy does look very large compared to the hospital worker pressing a button, the photo is not of a ‘giant mummy’. Other pictures from different angles show the body is not that large at all. We’ve written before about forced perspective, where objects closer to the camera appear much bigger than those further away.
The mummy was also not found in North America as the post claims, but in Tenerife. The one pictured was one of four that were taken from the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid to be scanned at the hospital. The other three were exhumed in Egypt.
The post says the picture shows “another giant Nubian mummy”. We could find no record of multiple other “giant” mummies being found, although scientists in 2017 did suspect they’d found an early case of gigantism in one mummy, who at 6 ft 1 was extremely tall for his time.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because it is not a giant mummy and it was not found in North America.