A small skeleton with a head strikingly similar to that of an alien was found in Chile's Atacama Desert a decade ago, and still remains a medical mystery.

According to NBC News, when the mummified body was located, there were people who suspected that it may be an alien "that had somehow landed on earth," although scientists haven't made that notion.

After the specimen was evaluated by DNA and various other forms of testing, it was found to be a human that was roughly 6 to 8 years of age upon death. Nonetheless, the body only measured 6 inches in length.

"While the jury is out regarding the mutations that cause the deformity, and there is a real discrepancy in how we account for the apparent age of the bones ... every nucleotide I've been able to look at is human. I've only scratched the surface in the analysis. But there is nothing that jumps out so far as to scream 'nonhuman,'" Gary Nolan, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine told Live Science.

The remains were analyzed in the fall of 2012, as the research team wanted to see whether a rare disorder could explain the unorthodox skeleton, which only had 10 ribs compared to the 12 usually found in a healthy person.

Although the findings are for the most part, conclusive, some of the oddities in the tiny skeletal structure still remain unexplainable.

"There is no known form of dwarfism that accounts for all of the anomalies seen in this specimen," said Ralph Lachman, a professor emeritus at the UCLA School of Medicine and a clinical professor at Stanford University.

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