An art collector has found a tooth, thumb and finger of the famous renaissance astronomer Galileo that had been missing for more than a century.

The body parts, cut from his corpse when the Vatican finally allowed the controversial Italian scientist a church burial 95 years after his death in 1642, vanished in 1905.

But they appeared at a recent auction as unidentified artefacts contained in a 17th century wooden case. The unnamed collector who bought the relics suspected they might belong to Galileo.

Experts at Florence’s History of Science museum compared them with another finger and vertebrae also cut from the scientist and confirmed they were indeed Galileo's.

‘All the organic material extracted from the corpse has therefore now been identified and is conserved in responsible hands,’ a spokesman for the museum said.

‘On the basis of considerable historical documentation, there are no doubts about the authenticity of the items.’

The relics will be exhibited from early 2010, when the museum will re-open after current renovation work and will change its name to the Galileo museum.

Galileo, born Galilei Galileo at Pisa in Pisa in 1564, is considered one of the fathers of modern science.
His achievements include developing the telescope and observing that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

British physicist once said: ‘Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.’

But he became an enemy of the Catholic Church, of which he was a member, by challenging its teachings.

Clerics eventually denounced him to the Roman Inquisition in 1615 over his support of a heliocentric, or Sun-centered, view of the universe.

Although he was cleared of any offence at that time, the Church condemned his belief as ‘false and contrary to Scripture’ and Galileo promised to stop publicising it.

But in 1632, when he defended his views in his most famous work, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he was again tried by the Inquisition.

It found he was ‘vehemently suspect of heresy’ and Galileo was forced to recant and spend the rest of his life under house arrest.

However, following his death, evidence for a heliocentric universe became so overwhelming that the Vatican’s opposition gradually buckled.

In 1737 they finally allowed his body to be buried in consecrated ground and he now lies in Florence’s Santa Croce church, opposite the tomb of Michelangelo.

By now because he was so revered, it was decided that parts of his body should be removed and preserved for posterity.

Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, a science historian who cut away the parts and wrote about the ceremony, ‘confessed he had found it hard to resist the temptation to take away the skull which had housed such extraordinary genius’, the museum said.

The newly-found relics had passed from one collector to another until they went missing in 1905.