Saw this strange story mentioned on the Slow Travel Forum:
"Museum: Galileo's fingers, tooth are found
(AP) – 1 day ago
ROME — Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again and will soon be put on display, an Italian museum director said Friday.
Three fingers, a vertebra and a tooth were removed from the astronomer's body by admirers in 1737, 95 years after his death, as his corpse was being moved from a storage place to a monumental tomb — opposite that of Michelangelo, in Santa Croce Basilica in Florence.
One of the fingers was recovered soon afterward and is now part of the collection of the Museum of the History of Science, in Florence. The vertebra has been kept at the University of Padua, where Galileo taught for years."
The relics will be put on display at the Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze in the spring of 2010.