Lost River - Karst Information Portal

2007 NSS Convention Guidebook
History of Cave Vertebrate
Paleobiology in Indiana
The first to record traces of ancient
vertebrates in Indiana caves was State
Geologist Willis S. Blatchley, who noted bear
wallows and claw marks in Eller and Saltpeter
caves, Monroe County, and in Conneleys
Cave, Lawrence County (Blatchley, 1897).
Banta (1907) later recorded bear wallows
in Mayfields Cave, Monroe County, just
about the time Hahn (1907) had turned
his attention to Donaldson Cave, Lawrence
County, identifying the skeletal remains of 11
200
extant mammals collected from the cave floor.
Indiana’s first late Pleistocene cave fossils were
some fragmented molar teeth of Leidy’s Peccary
(Platygonus vetus) and a fragmentary jaw and
teeth of what is perhaps the long-nosed peccary
(Mylohyus nasutus), embedded in flowstone in
Rock Cliff Quarry Cave, Lawrence County
(Hay, 1912, 1923). Those specimens cannot
now be located.
Engels (1932) described a second Indiana
specimen of Cope’s “extinct” deer (Odocoileus
dolichopsis), recovered by Lyon from a woodrat
den in the limestone bluffs at Tobacco