A finger thought to be the finger from the mysterious Yeti has been disproven as the cryptid's appendage by DNA analysis.

The finger was recently re-discovered in the vaults of the Royal College of Surgeons' Hunterian Museum in London after being overlooked in the museum for decades. The specimen labeled as "Yeti's finger" is 3.5 inches long and almost an inch thick. It caught the interest of scientists in 2008 when curators started cataloguing the museum's collection of items from primatologist William Charles Osman Hill. Among the items was the box containing the mysterious finger.

"It was labeled 'a Yeti finger from Pangboche hand,'" said Matthew Hill, the BBC reporter who researched and produced a documentary on the relic."What was the story behind this finger, I wondered, and how did it end up in London? Where was the rest of the 'Pangboche hand'? And what truth was there behind the label's claim that this finger belonged to the Yeti of ancient legend?"

The box also contained notes revealing that the digit was taken from the Pangboche Buddhist monastery in the 1950s by mountain climber Peter Byrne. The finger was either bought or stolen by Bryne from the temple. It was then supposedly smuggled out of the country by Hollywood actor James Stewart who hid in his wife's lingerie. The finger eventually came into the possession of Dr. William Osman Hill who later bequeathed it to the Royal College of Surgeons.

The finger has long been a subject of controversy as Yeti believers pointed to it as physical evidence that the legendary creature exists. The Yeti, also known as the Abominable Snowman is a tall, hairy ape-like creature that lives in the forests and mountains of the Himalayas.

Researchers at the Zoological Society of Scotland in Edinburgh finally settled the dispute when it was revealed through DNA analysis that the finger belonged to a human being and not a hominid creature.

"We found human DNA," the zoo's genetic expert Rob Ogden told the BBC. "It wasn't too surprising but it was obviously slightly disappointing that you hadn't discovered something brand new. Human was what we were expecting and human is what we got," he concluded.

Reports of the Yeti still fascinate both believers and non-believers alike. There have been numerous claims of Yeti evidence. In 1960 Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to scale Mount Everest, thought he had found a "scalp" of the creature. It was later discovered that the scalp was actually the skin of a serow, a Himalayan animal similar to a goat. Earlier this year an international team of researchers launched an expedition in Siberia to look for proof of the Yeti. So far the team hasn't produced indisputable proof of the legendary creature's existence.