Update: Authorities say item that washed ashore Navarre Beach was sea life, not human hand

Looks can be deceiving.

At first glance, authorities believed a piece of sea debris found Sunday on Navarre Beach was a human hand, possibly severed from a human body and washed up onto the sand by local tides.

Santa Rosa County Sheriff Bob Johnson said Monday morning that his agency was investigating what they believed to be a severed human hand that was found on Navarre Beach. Once the sea debris was sent to the Medical Examiner's Office, however, authorities discovered the object was not a human body part.

Johnson told the News Journal that after the object was sent to the Medical Examiner's Office, technicians dissected it.

"They cut into it looking for bones to collect DNA," Johnson said. "But there were no bones."

The item is now believed to be some type of sea life.

A beachgoer first spotted the object at the water’s edge approximately 3:15 p.m. Sunday. The beachgoer picked the object up, put it in a bag and took it to the Navarre Beach Fire Department. Soon thereafter, the SRSO was contacted and became involved in the case.

Cases of mistaken identity involving sea debris are not uncommon, said Jeff Martin, director of the District 1 Medical Examiner's Office.

“We’ve had these types of cases before where a passerby sees something on the beach that they believe to be human,” Martin said. “Not long ago, someone found what they thought to be a thumb on the beach.”

Martin said that shortly after the piece of sea vegetation was found Sunday, an on-call Medical Examiner's Office investigator sent him photographs of it.

“Just by looking at the pictures, it appeared as if it could be a palmar surface, if you were to take away the digits of the hand and just had the palm and part of the wrist,” Martin said. “The color wasn’t too off from something that could be possibly be human that had been in the water for a long time.”

Colin Warren-Hicks can be reached at colinwarrenhicks@pnj.com or 850-435-8680.