An anthropologist leisurely shopping at a Florida thrift store on Saturday reportedly widened his eyes when he realized that a realistic human skull found in the Halloween section was in fact… well and truly real.
“According to the observations of detectives on site, the skull appears to be that of a human. The store owner said the skull was in a storage unit purchased years ago,” the Lee County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post on Sunday.
On Saturday, the anatomy expert was making some purchases at the North Fort Myers, Florida, thrift store when a realistic skull in the store’s Halloween section allegedly caught his eye.
Except that after examining it carefully, he realized that it was in fact a real human skull, which under the laws of the state of Florida, is prohibited from sale, reported CBS News.
“No person shall knowingly offer to buy or sell […] a human organ or tissue in exchange for a valid consideration,” the law would indicate, according to the American media.
Called to the scene, the investigators in turn confirmed the nature of the skull, before seizing it so that further tests could be carried out by a local forensic doctor.
But at first glance, the authorities considered that the case would not be of a suspicious nature, according to the publication of the police force. They did not specify whether charges will be laid in connection with the discovery of the human remains in the store.
This is not the first skull to hit the headlines in recent months: last September, a Goodwill donation center in Arizona came across an old human skull decorated with a plastic eye among the donations made to its center.