After weeks of careful examination and strategizing, the Old State House and the artist who’s restoring its Lion and Unicorn statues have determined a date to extract the 113-year old time capsule from the Lion’s head.

Bob Shure at Skylight Studios in Woburn, Mass. used a fiber optic camera to confirm the time capsule’s existence and through his assessments, discovered the best method of retrieval which he’ll put into practice on Thursday, October 9 at 11 a.m.

“We will remove the Lion’s crown and remove the box from the head,” explained Heather Leet, director for development at the Bostonian Society, stewards of the Old State House. “We know that the box is secured by a couple of bars to the the inside of the head, Bob Shure believes it will be easy to cut those and retrieve the box.”

Because the box is made of copper, Leet continued, it shouldn’t be difficult to crack it open.

The dual statues were hoisted down from the Old State House, Boston’s oldest continuously used public building, as part of a sweeping restoration project to both the building and the statues.

The current Lion and Unicorn statues, representative of the union between England and Scotland in the early 1600s, are the latest rendition of the two creatures to sit perched atop the historic building. They’ve been there since the 1901, undergoing a brief touch up in the 1970s, but prior to that they were made of wood, which the Bostonian Society installed after its formation in 1881.

They were first erected prior to the American Revolution and were subsequently torn down after the colonies achieved independence.