Early this morning, lower Manhattan was rocked by a calcified mystery: a pile o’ bones lying in the middle of the street.

“Fun fact,” a tipster told us, setting off a chain of events no one saw coming. “Passed NYPD sectioning off a piece of 1st ave on my way to work this morning. Looked closer as they ushered me away. Just a pile of human leg bones (or horse bones?) scattered on 1st ave between 13th and 12th, closer to 13th.”

But by the time one Gawker reporter reached the scene, the bones had mysteriously disappeared, as had a tweet referencing them with this photo attached:

So I guess over night someone threw a bunch of bones in the street & they don’t know if it’s human or animal. Great.

But despite whatever scared @alexmalloyy off the story, other witnesses were less recalcitrant.

“The cops were there for an hour-and-a-half, two hours,” a group of men working beside a Rose Demolition and Carting truck said. “They took the bones away in a black bag.”

So whose bones were they? According to one brave Starbucks employee, “It just turned out to be animal. Nothing special”

An answer that, sadly, lead only to more questions: Are humans not animals? Are animal bones not deserving of a criminal investigation too? And who among us would gather up a pile of bones and then throw ‘em on the street? The plot thickened...

Still, a female officer at the NYPD’s Ninth Precinct says there’s nothing to worry about: “They were animal bones and they were removed.” She could offer no insight as to where the bones came from or why they were deposited on a street corner.

Street bones: a true New York mystery that will haunt me until the day I die.

Image via a tipster. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.