(Reuters) -Mastercard on Thursday reported a rise in third-quarter profit, as consumer spent on travel and entertainment. The company reported

The 'Silver Linings Playbook' star expressed his eagerness during an interview with 'The New Yorker Radio Hour'

Frankenstein’s monsters aren’t just for Halloween, as a team of US scientists have recently discovered. The experts at Northern Kentucky University (NKU) were tasked with analysing the remains of a supposed mummified “mermaid”, and what they found was pretty gruesome. The mummy was brought to America from Japan more than 100 years ago after being donated it to the Clark County Historical Society in Springfield, Ohio. It arrived at the society in 1906 but documents supplied alongside the strange specimen suggest it dates back to the mid-1800s. This means that for some 170 years, the true identity of the wisened, 29-cm-long creature remained a mystery. However, thanks to modern technology, the team at NKU has finally worked out that the sinister-looking “siren” is, in fact, a ghoulish hybrid of monkey, fish and lizard. Joseph Cress, who led the project, told Live Science that he and his colleagues used X-ray and CT scans to investigate the creepy cadaver. "This allowed us to see [the mummy] in almost every dimension in the hopes to see what was inside it," he explained. They determined that that the “mermaid” consists of the head and torso of a monkey sewed onto the body of a fish, and its “hands” are the clawed legs of a lizard – most likely a Komodo dragon. The scans also revealed a pair of wooden stakes hidden inside the chimeric corpse – one running from head to tail and another across the shoulder blades — which were presumably inserted to keep the monster in one piece. Cress and his colleagues are currently trying to reconstruct a more detailed model of the mermaid and its individual components, according to Live Science. Once these models are complete, they plan to send them to zoos and aquariums to help confirm the different parts on a species level. However, jaw-dropping this specimen may be, it's not the only “mermaid” to be debunked in recent times. In March 2022, researchers analysed a similar example that was found in a hidden box in a Japanese temple. They also expected the creature, which was 30.5 cm long and dated back to the mid-1700s, to be a monkey-fish hybrid. However, tests conducted in February this year revealed that it was, in fact, predominantly made of cloth, paper and cotton. It had been painted with sand and charcoal and held together by metal pins, while various animal parts, including fish skin and mammal hair, had been stuck to it. Experts believe that the two “mermaids” were made to resemble "ningyo" — hideous fish-like creatures with human heads and sharp claws from Japanese mythology. According to legend, a nun named Yaobikuni lived for 800 years and retained the youthful appearance of a young woman, after eating a ningyo. Her immortality made the creatures a symbol of longevity, so it’s likely that fraudsters tried to recreate the mermaids to sell them to wealthy seekers of immortality. Still, at least the owners of these two examples didn’t make the mistake of trying to eat them. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings

Slipknot rocker Corey Taylor has revealed the band are finally planning to release their 'long-lost' album Look Outside Your Window more than 15 years after it was recorded

The Yankees are going to go through an offseason roster purge after an awful 2023 campaign. These three players will be easy to walk away from.There's still a slim chance the Yankees make the playoffs in 2023. Realistically though, most fans are ready for the season to just end already. The...

Eurozone economic activity worsened in June to a five-month low, hit hard by a fall in industrial production, a keenly...

‘Today’ show recently announced a major change for its weekend coverage which has left fans disappointed

After a season that fell short of lofty expectations, the Hawks may be looking to trade away one of their core pieces, Dejounte Murray. What does this mean for the Hawks going forward?With the Atlanta Hawks coming up against the luxury tax, they may opt to move a player that they used a lot of d...

The Golden Lion in Venice was awarded Saturday to a hilarious and shockingly explicit reworking of Frankenstein, "Poor Things", starring Emma Stone as a sex-mad reanimated...

A man who was part of a group of teenagers wrongly accused and imprisoned for the rape of a woman in Central Park has taken a commanding lead in a Democratic primary for a New York City Council seat

VIDEO: Referee gets knocked out during kickboxing match.

VIDEO: Ron Rivera failed to challenge a game-changing play.