A medical training doll found along a darkened roadside was too realistic for an assistant medical examiner: He mistook it for an aborted, partially frozen fetus and declared it dead.

Police found the doll after a passer-by called Sunday. It was covered with sand and gravel and one of its arms was severed.

Assistant Medical Examiner Henry Minot was called to the scene, and sent the tiny body to the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Farmington for an autopsy.

Minot said both he and police were fooled.

“This was obviously something that had been at the side of the road through a snowstorm … and it looked enough like a fetus so that we thought it was,” Minot said Wednesday.

The state’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Wayne Carver, said the silicon rubber doll was a training manikin made to resemble an anatomically correct fetus.