His middle finger is on display in a museum.

His middle finger is on display in a museum.

Galileo’s middle finger on display in 2009. (Credit: Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

After Galileo died, he was buried in a side chapel at the church of Santa Croce in Florence. Nearly a century later, in 1737, as the scientist’s remains were being transferred to a burial place of honor in the Santa Croce basilica three of his fingers, along with a vertebra and a tooth, were removed from his corpse. Two of Galileo’s fingers, along with his tooth, were kept by one of his admirers and handed down through generations of his relatives. The items were thought to be lost sometime in the early 1900s. However, in 2009, the two fingers and tooth appeared at an auction and were snapped up by a private collector; using historical documentation, experts later concluded the items were Galileo’s. Meanwhile, the third finger taken from Galileo’s remains—the middle finger of his right hand—has been housed at various museums in Italy since at least the first half of the 1800s. The purloined vertebra ended up at the University of Padua, where Galileo taught from 1592 to 1610.