“It’s missing a couple of fingers but it’s still a magnificent finding. You can see the beauty of this arm,” he said. “You see the muscles, you see the tendons, you see the fingers. You see all the details that you can admire on bare skin.”

Because the limbs appeared to have been fragments of statues, rather than individual parts being transported, the researchers believe that the rest of their bodies are waiting to be found.

A Disc for a ‘First Computer?’

During its most recent dives, the team also uncovered a small, bronze disc with four knobs. Each tab on the trinket had a hole in it which may have been used to screw the object into something to act as a cover. It was just as corroded as the arm.

When Brendan Foley, co-director for the project and an archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden, found the item he couldn’t believe his luck. He thought it may have been a missing piece to the Antikythera mechanism — perhaps the rarest needle in their underwater haystack.