It was on one of the last days of the 2024 field season that a group of researchers got a hunch that they’d found something unusual at the bottom of an 85-foot cave in northern Wyoming.
“We’d found a mammoth vertebra, just a centrum,” recalled Julie Meachen, a professor at Des Moines University Medicine and Health Sciences in Iowa.
Since 2014, when Meachen and other scientists got the green light to excavate Natural Trap Cave in the Bighorn Basin, they’ve unearthed the bones of prehistoric mammals, including the American cheetah and short-faced bear.
As the name implies, the cave acted as a deadly trap for animals traveling the plains, unaware of the pit until it was too late. Their fossils — dating from 20,000 years ago — are often found in good condition since the cave’s cool and humid conditions act as a refrigerator.
But mammoth bones aren’t common in the cave, Meachen told WyoFile.
The remains of the ancient 18-month-old male child, who was the subject of the study, was accidentally unearthed near Wilsall in 1968.
“They’re not really running animals,” Meachen said. “They probably would have known the cave was there. They kind of look to where their feet go.”
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So it was all the more a delight on one of the first days of the 2025 season when Meachen’s team began to uncover most of the mammoth’s cervical vertebrae, some of the thoracic vertebrae, some ribs and most of the scapula.
“This is a pretty amazing find,” Meachen said.
Then came the logistics.
“We all kind of were like, ‘What are we going to do about this?’” she said. “Because the mammoth is a giant thing.”
The researchers can only access the cave by rappelling in, meaning any fossils found must exit by a pulley system. In the event a pesky reporter asks to shadow the group for a day of digging, they, too, are required to learn and use the ropes.
Little by little, Meachen said, the researchers dug through thick clay and got out as many fossils as they could before the 2025 season ended.
“For the people of Wyoming, I think it’s really cool for them to understand their prehistoric heritage and what animals were there before the end of the last Ice Age.”
This story was originally published by WyoFile.com.
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