TWO halves of a lion's head sculpture have come face to face after almost 2,500 years apart.

The reunion follows an expert's search that led him on a trail from Newcastle to Zurich, in Switzerland, via Ohio, in the US.

The terracotta head has gone on display at Newcastle University's Shefton Museum of Greek Art and Archaeology.

The right half of the sculpture has been on display at Newcastle University since the 1970s, when it was purchased at Christie's by the late Lionel Jacobsen, a benefactor to the university's Greek collection, and loaned to the university's museum.

Twenty years ago, museum founder Professor Brian Shefton came across what appeared to be the other half of the head when looking at a catalogue of an exhibition of animals in ancient art.

Prof Shefton traced the second part of the sculpture to Switzerland, and the collection of Dr Leo Mildenberg, a collector of ancient art.

By the time Prof Shefton had discovered where the second part of the head was, the Mildenberg collection was on tour in the US.

Prof Shefton asked Dr Jennifer Neils, a museum curator in Ohio, to make a plaster cast of the broken edge of the Swiss lion, and it was sent to Newcastle University to check if the halves fitted.

The cast was an almost perfect fit, with the only discrepancy caused because the Newcastle piece had traces of soil on its broken edges.

That indicated the statue's pieces had been apart for hundreds of years.

Prof Shefton said: "I had a class on the day and got everybody together to see whether the two pieces would fit. It was like a jigsaw. I was not surprised because I had convinced myself they were one and the same piece."

On his death in 2001, Dr Mildenberg left his half of the lion to the Shefton Museum, but his estate has only just been wound up and the exhibit sent to Newcastle.

Prof Shefton, 85, Emeritus Professor of Classical Archaeology at Newcastle University, said: "I had been immensely pleased to get our half of the lion's head, and I thought there was absolutely no chance of the other half ever being found."

The head once formed the upper portion of a waterspout from the guttering of a small shrine or temple built by Greek colonists in southern Italy in the Fifth Century BC.

The Jacobson family have donated their half to the museum so the head can go on permanent display.