‘Noah’s Ark’ Cache of Bones Offers Rare Peek Into Prehistory

Cheetah, camel and llama bones sealed in the deep freeze of a Nevada cave for tens of thousands of years are giving scientists a rare glimpse at the Africa-like grassland that covered much of the West before the last Ice Age.

The unusually well-preserved cache from about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago includes bones from a wide variety of creatures now extinct--from the giant short-faced bear to huge deer and bison species.

“This cave is kind of a Noah’s Ark collection of species,” said Tom Stafford, a Boulder, Colo.-based specialist who has been conducting the radiocarbon-dating tests on the bones.

“I can’t wait to get there,” he said. “I’m drooling.”

At 40 degrees, high humidity and 7,000-feet altitude, the conditions at the back of the dark cave are identical to those of a modern refrigerator.

An Ecosystem of Unmatched Diversity

Perhaps most intriguing to the scientists are the intact twigs, leaves, seeds and animal hair from which they believe they will be able to extract DNA to compare the genetic makeup of past and present species.

“We could see how much evolution there has been,” said Bryan Hockett, the Bureau of Land Management archeologist who discovered the find nearly three years ago and is leading the excavation.

“I kept saying to myself, ‘I can’t believe we are finding this,’ ” Hockett recalled. “It was just ‘Eureka!’ in terms of the scientific information.”

Hockett, 37, and fellow BLM archeologist Eric Dillingham, 37, have been dragging bones out of the cave for the last two summers and this month plan the largest expedition yet into the cavern.

They only realized recently how significant the bones were.

In January, they spent days comparing dozens of bones to their counterparts at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. They matched the cheetah bone to an African cheetah skeleton at the Los Angeles County Museum.

“There was no fanfare, no bells or whistles,” Hockett said. “I was just sitting in the mammal section with nobody around looking at the skeleton of a cheetah--just you and the bone.”

The bones are in the back of a 700-foot-deep cave where miners left their mark in the 1860s. Hockett suspects that the cave, in the Sulphur Spring Range about 300 miles east of Reno, was a den for cheetahs or other large carnivores that dragged back prey to feed their young.

The find is evidence of the wildly diverse ecosystem in the Western United States before the last big Ice Age 18,000 years ago. It was a vast grassland where large predators stalked grazing animals well before man is believed to have arrived on the scene 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

“Some say maybe it would be like the savannas of Africa, equatorial Africa,” Hockett said. “That’s one place where you’ve had a lot of big grazers and carnivores. But it would have had to have been a lot cooler and wetter. A lot of different trees,” like pine and spruce, he said.

“The real answer is, there is nothing left quite like this. There is nothing that is as diverse as this. It is unmatched in the world today.”

Some of the bones are from animals with unusual names, such as the “bigheaded llama” and “yesterday’s camel.” They come from the end of the Pleistocene Age. There are horses, mountain sheep, pronghorn antelope, wolves, weasels, badgers, coyotes, lizards, bats and birds.

The giant short-faced bear--among the rarer bones--had a short snout and longer legs than a typical bear. It was much larger than bears today and a fast runner.

The cheetah remains are only the second discovered in Nevada. Fewer than 10 have been recorded in North America.

Explaining the Pronghorn’s Speed

The cheetah remains may shed light on a question that has bothered scientists for decades: Why are pronghorn antelope so fast?

“There was always speculation that there must have been a faster-running predator during the Pleistocene than we know of today because the American pronghorn can run so much faster than anything living here now that might have been a predator,” said Robert J. Emry, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History in Washington.

“With the cheetah, some say it might explain the pronghorn’s adaptation for swiftness--what it was it adapted to escape from,” he said.

Part of the cave had been surveyed by a team of archeologists from UC Davis in 1975.

Researcher Kelly McGuire recorded the findings--including horse and bigheaded llama--in an article published in 1980.

But they didn’t radiocarbon-date the remains and apparently were unaware of four other sections of the cave, including the back section with the oldest bones.

“There are a lot of tight places where you have to crawl through on your stomach,” Dillingham said.

Hockett, who grew up watching National Geographic specials on television, read McGuire’s work in college and remembered it when he started working for the BLM in Elko in 1991.

“It just stuck in the back of my head. Llamas are pretty rare in Nevada. When I started working at the BLM, I heard a rumor it might be on BLM lands,” he said.

Hockett used a global positioning satellite unit to locate the cave. He found McGuire’s original test excavation site in the front of the cave as well as a more recently dug hole that “looked like a looter’s pit.”

He granted an interview on the condition that the exact location of the cave be kept secret to protect it against further damage. But he doubts anyone could find the bones even if they got inside.

“The cave is so dark, even with your lighting, that almost anytime I go in there I lose something,” Hockett said.

The unique combination of creatures may be surpassed only by the unique way in which the bones have been preserved.

“It is incredibly rare,” said Stafford, who runs Stafford Research Laboratories, one of the nation’s preeminent carbon-dating labs.

“It is just incredibly well preserved both physically and chemically. It’s really bound to have DNA,” he said.

Stafford is among those headed into the cave this month for a major study of the contents along with experts from the University of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute and the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona.

Hockett said he doesn’t know what to expect.

“We know quite a bit about the critters from 18,000 to 10,000 years ago because the last glacial surge was 18,000 years ago,” he said. “We know a lot less about 20,000 to 40,000 or 50,000 years ago.

“At most cave sites, at bedrock you are at 10,000 to 20,000 years ago and that’s it. These bones date to 40,000 to 50,000 years, and those bones are sitting on the surface.

“We’ve only made a pinprick.”