The Bones of Big Bones Cave, Tennessee (Speleodigest #2)

Thomas C. Barr, Jr., The Speleonews, June 1957

One of the earliest discoveries of fossils in a cave, and one that has had a long and varied career through the museums and scientific journals, is the skeleton of a Megalonyx jeffersonii from Big Bone Cave, in Van Buren County, Tennessee. This animal was an extinct giant ground sloth. Adult Megalonyx measured nine feet in length.

Big Bone Cave, near the eastern edge of the Highland Rim, in an outlier of the Cumberland Plateau, was the center of extensive saltpeter mining operations during the War of 1812, when as many as three hundred men at a time dragged sacks of nitrous earth from the depths of the cave out to the leaching vats located near the entrance. Vats, tramways, and ladders may be still seen, constructed during the Civil War, but in an excellent state of preservation. The whole cave, except at the entrance, is dry and dusty, and at least three and three-quarter miles of passages have been explored.

In 1811 workmen discovered a series of bones, some of which were sent to a Mr. Clifford of Lexington, Kentucky, to whom most of the saltpeter was sold, and some of which were acquired by Squire Moses Fisk, of Hilham (a small settlement north of the present site of Cookeville). The Squire presented a claw to Professor Benjamin Barton of Philadelphia, who exhibited the specimen to the American Philosophical Society, and eventually Fisk gave the remainder of his collection to Dr. Gerard Troost, State Geologist of Tennessee.

The bones Clifford had received were bought by Mr. Dorfeuille, proprietor of the Cincinnati Museum, who sold them to J. Price Wetherill. Wetherill gave them to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and they were soon thereafter described and figured by Dr. Richard Harlan, the first real vertebrate paleontologist in America.

Somehow or other the bones from Clifford's cabinet had gotten labelled "White Cave, Kentucky," and Harlan described them as having come from this cave in his paper. ,White Cave is a small cave a short distance southwest of the Mammoth Cave Hotel. Fortunately, Troost rectified this error and sent Harlan, his colleague and friend, the additional material Squire Fisk had preserved.

In 1884 a farmer, digging for bat guano for fertilizer, came across another series of bones, which were sent to a friend in Nashville, and sold to Mr. A. J. Denton, of Henderson. Denton sold the bones to Vanderbilt University, and James Safford, the State Geologist at that time, came to the conclusion that they had belonged to the same young animal that Harlan had described fifty years before. The dry atmosphere of the cave had preserved the cartilage and tendons of some of the articulating surfaces. The animal was apparently a young female.

The story of the Big Bone Megalonyx does not end here. In 1896 Henry Mercer, "while conducting thither an expedition for the Department of American and Prehistoric Archaeology of the University of Pennsylvania,” xcavated a half dozen vertebrae, a rib, and a few foot bones. He gives the location of the skeleton as 900 yards within the right hand, or Arch Cave, Branch. In the layer of earth where the Megalonyx bones were found he also collected the quills of porcupines, cave rats' jaws, bat's jaws, and some traces of a large herbivorous animal about as large as a bear.

References

Simpson, George Gaylord, 1942: The beginnings of vertegrate paleontology in North America; Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., vol. 86, pp. 130-188.

Troost, Gerrard, 1835: On the localities in Tennessee in which bones of the gigantic mastodon and 11egalonyx jeffersonii are found; Trans. Geolog. Soc. Penn., vol. 1, pp. 139-146; pp. 236-243.

Harlan, Richard, 1831: Description of the fossil bones of the Meealonyx discovered in "White Cave," in Kentucky; Jour. Acad. Nat. Sci. Phila., vol. 6, pp. 269-288, 3 pl.

Safford, James M., 1892: The pelvis of a Megalonyx, and other bones from Big Bone Cave, Tennessee; Bull. Geol. Soc. Am.,vol. 3, pp. 121-123. Mercer, Henry C., 1899: The fossil Megalonyx from Big Bone Cave, Tenn. Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., vol. 36, pp. 36-70.