At first, János Balázs had no idea why the tiny hand he found in a storage box of bones was green and mummified.

It was around 2005 and he was examining remains from an earlier archaeological dig of a cemetery conducted at Nyárlőrinc, a village in southern Hungary. The excavations had yielded more than 500 graves that mostly dated from between the 12th and 16th centuries. But none of those burials was anything like the mummified green hand Dr. Balázs and his colleague, Zoltán Bölkei, had uncovered in that forgotten box.

More than a decade later, Dr. Balázs and his colleagues think they have solved the mystery, and in doing so uncovered a unique form of mummification. They published their results last month in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

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The bones Dr. Balázs found were so small they could have been confused with a rat’s. Several, including some vertebrae, a hip bone and the leg bones were stained green. Both forearms were green as well, but the right one was still covered in desiccated flesh. The skin near the back was also mummified and embedded with five vertebrae pieces. Most of the ribs, a shoulder bone and two humerus bones were not discolored.