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(WFLA) — A woman who spends time shelling on two Florida beaches found something in the sand that sent chills up her family’s spines.
Rebecca Dodds said she was searching for shells on Captiva Beach on Wednesday when she spotted something unusual.
“I thought I found a whalebone or something and I just threw it in my shell bag,” Dodds told WINK .
What Dodds thought was some kind of marine animal turned out to be a human jaw.
She told the news station that she wondered if the bone could be from a Hurricane Ian victim or from a missing person’s case. An archaeologist told WINK that it could also be centuries old and from an indigenous person.
“The number one concern is that it could be recent and associated with some kind of recent, potentially, a crime. And no one can make that determination except for law enforcement,” Sara Ayers-Rigsby, region director of the Florida Public Archaeology Network, told WINK.