Volunteers uncovering Sittingbourne’s Saxon past found themselves looking into the eyes of a giant wasp-like creature.
But there was no need to reach for the bug spray - this one was well and truly dead.
The 1,400-year-old, as yet unidentified insect was discovered at CSI: Sittingbourne in The Forum shopping centre, where finds from the Meads cemetery graves are being worked on.
It had been preserved in a corroded belt buckle but it was only when a powerful digital microscope - usually used by engineering companies to find faults in machinery - was brought in for the day that the team could see it in detail.
Conservation manager Dana Goodburn-Brown said: "In 30 years of work I had never seen anything like it.
"The fact that we have an insect preserved is evidence that the Anglo-Saxons in Sittingbourne, about 1,400 years ago, probably laid their dead out for a few days, as part of the burial rites, presumably for friends and family to pay their last respects.
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