Cumberland Bone Cave facts for kids
The Cumberland Bone Cave is a special cave in Cumberland, Maryland. It's famous for being full of ancient animal bones, called fossils. This cave is located on the side of Wills Mountain in Allegany County, Maryland.
Discovering the Ancient Bones
Imagine workers building a railway in 1912. They accidentally broke into a hidden cave! A local nature lover, Raymond Armbruster, saw old bones among the blasted rocks. He quickly told scientists at the Smithsonian Institution. A scientist named James W. Gidley started digging there that same year. This amazing place soon got its name: the Cumberland Bone Cave.
What Scientists Found Inside
From 1912 to 1916, James Gidley and his team explored the cave. They found bones from 41 different types of mammals! About 16% of these animals are now extinct, meaning they no longer live on Earth.
Scientists found many excellent skulls and enough bones to rebuild full skeletons. These skeletons included huge cave bears and fierce saber-toothed cats. You can see some of these incredible skeletons from the Cumberland Bone Cave today. They are on display at the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
Many of these fossilized bones are incredibly old, dating back about 200,000 years! The Cumberland Bone Cave is one of the best places in eastern North America to find fossils from the Pleistocene Ice Age.
The Cave Today
Today, not much of the original cave is left. Most of its connecting tunnels and rooms were removed during the railway construction. However, you can still see some parts of the cave's remains. They are visible on the walls of the railway cut. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources still does some digging there. The cave formed in a type of rock called Keyser Limestone.
