In its first Titanic expedition in over a decade, a Georgia-based company with salvaging rights to the historic shipwreck located a long-lost statue while documenting the ship’s natural decay this summer. The statue in question, an intact two-foot-tall (~61 cm) opulent bronze replica of the Roman marble “Diana of Versailles” on view at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, was last photographed by an explorer in 1986 and was feared to be lost forever until RMS Titanic Inc. researchers came across it on the final day of the expedition.

The statue of Diana, whose maker and origin are unknown, was once held in the Titanic’s First Class Lounge, which split as the ship began to sink. It was subsequently launched into a field of debris on the ocean floor, where it remained unseen for over seven decades until 1985, when two oceanographers discovered the shipwreck. One of them, Robert Ballard, returned to the site one year later to photograph the bronze statue.