A body has been found at Sorrento on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula after police received a tip-off from the public.

The remains were located not far from a car park at Diamond Bay.

Detective Mick Hughes from the homicide squad said officers received information that a body may be in the area, after police last week called for help to find a woman missing in the region.

But he said it was unclear if the cases were linked.

“Since we did media recently in relation to a missing person we’ve had a variety of information coming in,” he said.

“Someone has said to us ‘we believe that there is someone here and you should have a look’, and within a very short time of starting the search we found the human remains.

“There’s nothing to connect this to any other high-profile missing person investigations. [But] we really don’t know.”

Detective Hughes said he was restricted in what he could say about where the initial tip-off came from.

He said it was difficult to say how long the remains had been there.

“We hope to determine a sex in the next couple of days, but it’s very early on in the investigation.”

He said it was found about 200 metres from the car park, and two or three metres in from the track.

“It’s really, really heavy scrub. So after we’ve done some initial photography and video at the scene we’ll get the SES to cut some of the scrub away and we’ll do a further search,” Detective Hughes said.

He called for anyone, particularly residents or those with holiday homes in the area, who had seen anything out of the ordinary or suspicious to contact police.