kids encyclopedia robot

Shelter Cave facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

Shelter Cave is a special place in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. It's an important rock shelter where scientists have found amazing clues about ancient life. This site is both an archaeological site (meaning people studied old human history) and a paleontological site (meaning they studied ancient plants and animals, like fossils).

What is Shelter Cave?

Shelter Cave is a natural rock shelter high up on the western side of Bishop's Cap. This is a large hill near the Organ Mountains. The cave is about 450 feet below the top of Bishop's Cap, which means it's about 1500 meters above sea level.

Around 1929, the Los Angeles County Museum (LACM) started digging here. They carefully explored the cave in 5-foot sections. Scientists kept detailed notes about everything they found. Sometimes, things were found in piles of loose rock and dirt, called "talus" or "fill." Other times, they were found by a person named Conkling.

Layers of History

Scientists looked at the layers of dirt and rock inside the cave. These layers are like pages in a history book, each telling a story about the past. Here's what they found, from the bottom up:

  • The very bottom was the solid rock floor of the shelter.
  • Then came about 5 inches of sharp rock pieces.
  • Above that, there were 8 inches of smooth limestone rocks mixed with brown dust.
  • Next, 6 inches of ash (from fires) mixed with more rock pieces.
  • A layer of gray ash, possibly from a volcano, about 10 inches thick, which slowly turned into a brown layer.
  • Then, 4 inches of hard, burned guano (bat droppings).
  • Finally, 4 inches of loose bat guano at the very top.

Most of the animal bones they found were in the brown and gray ash layers. Another part of the cave had a different set of layers, including more broken limestone, brown ash, gray ash, and bat guano.

Amazing Discoveries

The original notes from the dig describe some exciting finds:

  • They found Sloth bones in the upper guano layer, right next to pieces of plants.
  • More sloth bones were found in a yellow layer.
  • They even found mummified rats and snakes on top of rocks in the bat guano!
  • Horse jaws were discovered in the brown ash.
  • A sloth skull piece was found in the gray ash, under a rock.
  • Right above that rock, they found an Indian grindstone, which people used to grind grains.
  • Beads and a sandal were found under the guano layer and also under a rock.
  • They also found badger and deer skulls in the gray ash.

How Old is Shelter Cave?

The things found in Shelter Cave come from two main time periods: the Rancholabrean (which was the late Pleistocene or Ice Age) and the Holocene (which is our current time period).

Scientists can figure out how old things are by using a method called carbon dating. They tested some dung (poop) from a sloth and found it was about 11,330 years old. Other tests on sloth dung showed dates of about 12,330 and 12,430 years old.

They also found desert tortoise shells and bones that were between 11,280 and 12,520 years old. Even older, they found nests (called "middens") made by packrats in the shelter, dating from 11,850 to 31,250 years ago! This shows that animals have been living in and around Shelter Cave for a very long time, right up to today.

More About the Cave

Scientists have identified many plants from the Shelter Cave deposits. These plants mostly came from the Holocene period. They also found coprolites, which are fossilized droppings, possibly from sloths or horses.

Interestingly, the plants found from the very oldest times in the cave (before the coldest part of the Ice Age) show that the area used to be wetter than it was later. For example, pinyon pine trees were rare in the later Ice Age layers.

Shelter Cave is also very important because it's the "type locality" for a special ancient animal called Stockoceros conklingi. This means the first time this type of pronghorn was ever discovered and described by scientists was right here at Shelter Cave!

Many of the animal remains found at Shelter Cave are kept at the UTEP in their collections at the Laboratory for Environmental Biology and the Centennial Museum and Chihuahuan Desert Gardens. The Los Angeles County Museum also has a huge collection from Shelter Cave, including the original Stockoceros conklingi specimen. Many of these amazing finds are still being studied by scientists today.

Animals Found in Shelter Cave

Scientists have identified many different kinds of animals from the remains found in Shelter Cave. Here are some of them:

Amphibians

Reptiles

Birds

Mammals

kids search engine
All content from Kiddle encyclopedia articles (including the article images and facts) can be freely used under Attribution-ShareAlike license, unless stated otherwise. Cite this article:
Shelter Cave Facts for Kids. Kiddle Encyclopedia.