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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
 Posted - 10/30/2006 : 19:01:47
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A 2,000-foot-long cave in Missouri, first unsealed in 2001, is beginning to yield a vast array of information about life between 830,000 and 55,000 years ago. "'It's a unique combination of traces and the quality of preservation that makes it such a phenomenal site,' McDonald said. 'It's probably going to become a major reference site that will help us better understand the remains we have at other sites.'"
So far, paleontologists are finding more new questions than answers -- a typical paradoxical sign that much progress will be made at the site.quote:
Cave an Ice Age time capsule
POSTED: 3:40 p.m. EST, October 30, 2006
SPRINGFIELD, Missouri (AP) -- The bear that left a 3-foot-long claw mark in an Ice Age clay bank was the largest bear species ever to walk the earth, about 6 feet tall at the shoulder and capable of moving its 1,800 pounds up to 45 miles per hour in a snarling dash for prey.
The claw mark by the extinct giant short-faced bear still looks fresh today in a southwest Missouri cave that some scientists are calling a national treasure -- an Ice Age time capsule sealed for thousands of years.
Discovered accidentally five years ago on the outskirts of Springfield, Riverbluff Cave is slowly yielding its fossil treasures as a small team of scientists and volunteers gingerly explores it while trying to preserve a rich bed of remains, from bones to tracks and dung.
. . .
Claw marks made at least 50,000
years ago by an extinct species
of bear are visible in the still-
soft mud walls of Riverbluff Cave
in Missouri.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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