URBANA - More than several dozen times a day, the imaging specialists at the University of Illinois Veterinary Teaching Hospital take high-tech X-rays of dogs, cats, horses, potbellied pigs, birds and other animals.

"I've seen a tiger,'' Sue Hartman, the senior imaging specialist at the hospital, said recently. "We've seen a pelican. We've seen snakes. We've seen large turtles.''

So a hawk coming in the door is no big deal.

But a 2,500-year-old hawk or more likely a kestrel, harrier or falcon that's potentially an ancient Egyptian mummy is another matter.

The mummified bird of prey recently imaged at the UI veterinary school may end up as a gift from an alumnus to the university's Spurlock Museum.

The museum routinely checks potential gifts for authenticity, although it doesn't normally use a veterinary hospital imaging lab to do so.

"We want to know what we're dealing with,'' said Spurlock Director Douglas Brewer, himself an anthropologist who specializes in Egypt's Predynastic to Old Kingdom periods.

In the case of the bird mummy, the images from the session will help establish its authenticity, but also may tell researchers things about its age, origin, purpose and more.

Brewer got one of his questions answered during the initial examination. From a microscope examination before the imaging session, he could tell there was a bird's head inside. But he wondered if the linen wrappings contained anything else, perhaps a mouse to feed the hawk in the afterlife.

He also wondered whether the wrappings contained a whole bird, or just the head with filler, a bundle of sticks or something else, below.

The images from the veterinary hospital, both digital X-rays and a CT scan, revealed a whole bird in stunning detail, but no other items.

It was an interesting test of the UI veterinary hospital's new digital imaging system, which just went on line. No more handling X-ray film, developing the pictures and waiting to see them.

"It's a big deal for us,'' Hartman said. "The image is there in seconds. You make the exposure, you look at the screen.''

Brewer said the bird mummy looks like the genuine item and may have been prepared as an offering for purchase by religious pilgrims looking for an in with Osiris, the Egyptian god who presided over the underworld and passed judgment on those wishing to enter the afterlife.

The mummy may have been a gift to Horus, the hawk god and the son of Osiris, who could intercede on the pilgrim's side with his father.

The specimen came from a location that was on a pilgrim route, Brewer said, along which a thriving business in "votives'' objects left in sacred spots for ritual purposes probably existed.

Fakes of such bird mummies aren't uncommon, from both more modern and ancient Egyptian forgers, one reason Brewer wondered whether there was really a whole bird inside.

The imaging session could even lead to a research paper.

In trying to identify the type of bird inside the wrappings, UI veterinarian Julia Whittington noticed differences between its beak and X-rays from the beak of Pistol, a live kestrel that lives at the UI's Wildlife Medical Clinic because its wings were too damaged to return it to the wild.

Brewer speculated that the difference might be evidence ancient Egyptians kept domestic bird stocks for making votives, birds whose beaks wouldn't show the same degree of wear as birds living rough in the wild, or birds whose beaks are manicured regularly by human tenders like those at the UI.