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Under the cover of darkness on Halloween, two sets of human leg bones believed to have been buried in the 1800s were stolen from an archeologist’s car in Hamilton, Ont. The bones had only just been excavated from a church construction site in the Toronto suburb of North York, and tucked away in a box with a dusting of dirt.

The thief may have been unaware of the box’s contents when they snatched it, along with a phone charger and a power tool, sometime between 5:30 p.m. and 8:30 a.m. “There’s been quite a search in the area, but we haven’t located it,” Constable Lorraine Edwards of the Hamilton Police Service said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “Chances are, it’s probably been thrown away, but we don’t know.”

For the investigators involved, the case is unusual. “Finding remains, or discovering remains? That happens – of course it does,” she said. “The piece that probably has never happened is the stolen part.” But the eerie theft didn’t come as a shock to Paul Racher, who has worked on archeological excavations in Ontario for more than three decades.

“There are some people who think there would be nothing more awesome than to have human remains as some sort of curio or souvenir,” said Mr. Racher, whose consulting firm has recently been involved in plans to relocate up to 400 bodies from under the parking lot of Hamilton’s Christ’s Church Cathedral. He’s heard anecdotal evidence from archaeological colleagues about thieves snatching what they see as an unusual bauble after human remains are found. But with the exception of a skull, he said most people would have a hard time distinguishing human bones from animal bones.

That lends weight to the police’s theory, that the thief may have had no idea what they’d stolen, when they snatched the white cardboard banker’s box inscribed with a church’s name, and the file numbers ST4, F287 and F296.

When bones are found in a construction site, the first call is made to the police. A coroner will determine whether the bones are part of a crime scene, or something more historic.

This is not the first case in Canada in which police believed human remains were stolen unknowingly. For example, the ashes of Heather and Douglas Stewart, a pair of siblings who died in an accident and from an illness, respectively, were stolen from their sister’s Burnaby, B.C., apartment when thieves ransacked the place for jewelry and electronics in 2005. The ashes had been in a pair of shoebox-sized cardboard boxes.

Although the bones in this case are believed to be much older, Constable Edwards says it would be a question for archeologists to determine the historical value in the bones being recovered. “As far as what we are concerned, they’re stolen property,” she said. “So that’s what we’re basically looking to the public for assistance [with], to help us in locating that box.”

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