The remains of Salvador Dalí were exhumed Thursday night, pulled from their resting place by Spanish officials hoping to confirm whether the surrealist painter fathered a child in an affair. The closed procedure extracted some hair samples, nails, teeth and two long bones from the artist’s embalmed body, the DNA of which might offer the conclusive answer to a high-profile paternity lawsuit long underway.
For now, that answer remains elusive — but forensic experts did uncover at least one curious fact when they pulled him briefly from his tomb at the Dalí Museum Theater in Figueres: His iconic mustache remains perfectly intact.
“The mustache preserved its classic 10-past-10 position,” Lluís Peñuelas, secretary-general of the Dalí Foundation, told the Spanish newspaper El Pais. “Checking it was a very exciting moment.”
The paper notes the forensic doctor who embalmed Dalí in 1989 was also on hand for Thursday’s operation, which was conducted with a pulley and concluded just hours after it began.
It was “a miracle,” Narcís Bardalet told a local radio station, according to The New York Times. “Salvador Dalí is forever.”

He might also be a father. At least, that’s what 61-year-old tarot card reader Pilar Abel alleges, saying Dalí had an affair with her mother back in 1955 — one year before her birth.