- So are you ever finding like animal bones
and things down here?
- Absolutely.
Barb Beasley, a paleontologist with the U.S. Forest Service,
is going to tell us more about studying fossils.
You all can watch this while I head back to work with
my team and I hear there's a wild caving group
coming through if you'd like to join up with them.
- Thanks a bunch Gretchen, I feel like I know so much more
about cave ecology now.
- What a great job you have.
_ I'm here today to tell you about
one of the very important things that
about animals that used to live in caves,
they've become preserved.
And unlike all the situations with typically,
when fossils are fossilized outside of a cave,
here, caves have such a constant temperature
and humidity that
they're preserved over a long period of time.
Some of the other animals that have been preserved
for over hundreds of thousands of years
have been mammoths and mastodons.
Those are elephants, and what I have here
is a mastodon tooth.
Of course elephants didn't live in caves
'cause they couldn't, they're too tall.
So they're drug into the caves by predators
after they were killed.
And then I have a mammoth tooth,
which is another elephant,
and then something that's unusual
would be a giant ground sloth.
This is just it's claw, and these ground
sloths live within these caves over thousands of years.
And why are fossils important?
Well they kind of tell us about what the climatic changes
are going on.
Small mammals, and small animals in particular,
were very persnickety about the kind of environment.
They like their home to be very comfortable,
and if things change, if the climate changes,
the temperature changes, or the food disappears,
they will actually move, and so their presence
or absence within these cave layers and within the sediments
that are deposited in these caves change,
that helps scientists know when the fossils are there,
and when the animals were there,
or when they left.
- Wow, it's exciting to think of all
the interesting discoveries and things that we can learn
about life long time ago, right here in caves.