A group of Florida criminology students working a fake crime scene stumbled across a real corpse on a field trip to study forensics.

The St. Thomas Aquinas High School students were taken to a Fort Lauderdale park on Monday to look for clues at a mock crime scene where the instructor had planted phony "evidence."

"The students went up to this one area ... and found a man with his back against the wall and he looked dead. They thought it was part of the skit," Fort Lauderdale Police detective Kathy Collins said.

There was no sign of foul play and the 45-year-old homeless man appeared to have died of natural causes, she said.

It may not have been a murder, but the discovery of the dead man may have persuaded one teen-ager that crime-scene investigation is not his life's work.

"I don't really think I could take finding any more dead bodies, especially if it was rotting," Juan Cantor, 15, told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper.