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- So are you ever
finding like animal bones

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and things down here?

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- Absolutely.

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Barb Beasley, a paleontologist
with the U.S. Forest Service,

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is going to tell us more
about studying fossils.

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You all can watch this while
I head back to work with

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my team and I hear there's
a wild caving group

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coming through if you'd
like to join up with them.

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- Thanks a bunch Gretchen, I
feel like I know so much more

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about cave ecology now.

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- What a great job you have.

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_ I'm here today to tell you about

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one of the very important things that

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about animals that used to live in caves,

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they've become preserved.

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And unlike all the
situations with typically,

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when fossils are fossilized
outside of a cave,

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here, caves have such
a constant temperature

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and humidity that

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they're preserved over
a long period of time.

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Some of the other animals
that have been preserved

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for over hundreds of thousands of years

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have been mammoths and mastodons.

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Those are elephants, and what I have here

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is a mastodon tooth.

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Of course elephants didn't live in caves

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'cause they couldn't, they're too tall.

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So they're drug into
the caves by predators

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after they were killed.

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And then I have a mammoth tooth,

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which is another elephant,

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and then something that's unusual

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would be a giant ground sloth.

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This is just it's claw, and these ground

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sloths live within these
caves over thousands of years.

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And why are fossils important?

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Well they kind of tell us
about what the climatic changes

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are going on.

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Small mammals, and small
animals in particular,

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were very persnickety about
the kind of environment.

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They like their home
to be very comfortable,

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and if things change,
if the climate changes,

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the temperature changes,
or the food disappears,

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they will actually move,
and so their presence

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or absence within these cave
layers and within the sediments

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that are deposited in these caves change,

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that helps scientists know
when the fossils are there,

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and when the animals were there,

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or when they left.

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- Wow, it's exciting to think of all

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the interesting discoveries
and things that we can learn

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about life long time
ago, right here in caves.