Arkansas officials have seized a shipment of human heads destined for a Medtronic facility in Fort Worth, Texas, and continued to hold the body parts Thursday pending an investigation.

“We want to make sure everything is above board before we allow these human specimens to be shipped around the country,” Garland Camper, the coroner in Pulaski County, Ark., said in an interview.

The shipment included four heads and 40 temporal lobes that were to be used in Medtronic medical research, said Brian Henry, a spokesman for the Fridley-based medical device company. Such shipments are routine, Henry said, but “the supplier that we were working with in this instance had apparently mislabeled the package.”

“There’s something that was unclear with the paperwork,” he added.

Camper said his office was contacted about the heads June 9 after Transportation Security Administration workers questioned the shipment at the Little Rock National Airport. The coroner’s office took custody of the parts and requested documentation from the group responsible for the shipment.

Camper said discrepancies exist in the paperwork submitted by the supplier, but he declined to elaborate. “We don’t know if this is part of an illegal trade; we’re trying to make sure we can rule that out.”

Medtronic and other medical manufacturers routinely use human specimens to develop and improve medical products, Henry said. The Texas facility in question makes surgical tools for neurosurgery, and having access to human specimens is an important part of the medical research that goes on there, he said. Specimens come from people who have donated their bodies to science for this type of research.

“It’s a very common practice to ship these,” he said, “and it’s very uncommon that there would be questions.”

Christopher Snowbeck can be reached at 651-228-5479.