The Subterranean World

by G. Hartwig

Besides their picturesque beauty or their solemn grandeur, some caves are extremely interesting as containing the bones of extinct quadrupeds or birds. Unrivalled in point of antiquity by the oldest tombs erected by man, they carry us back to times which, though of comparatively recent date, are still so far removed from the present day as almost to terrify the imagination—for how many ages must have elapsed, and what changes of climate must have taken place, since the hyena or the tiger inhabited the grottoes of northern Europe?

In many cases the bones found in ossiferous caves must have been washed into them by currents of water, or else they may be the remains of animals that accidentally dropped in through holes in the roof; but there can be no doubt that frequently the caves in which the bones of extinct carniverous animals have been found, served as their dens while they were living. The abundance of bony dung associated with the remains of the hyena, as well as the great number of bones all belonging to one species which are frequently found congregated in the same cave, is strongly confirmatory of this opinion, no less than the circumstance that the walls of several ossiferous caves, when deprived of their stalactital covering, have been found smoothed or rounded off from the frequent ingress and egress of their former inhabitants as they squeezed themselves or dragged their prey through a narrow passage. Besides, the hyenas and bears of the present day frequently live in caves, thus justifying the inference that their extinct predecessors had the same habit.

The antiquity of many of the animal remains found in caves is proved not only by their being dissimilar to existing species, but by the manner in which they are entombed. For ages they accumulated on the floor of the cave, often to a considerable depth, mixed with mud or sand or fragments of rock—then, when, from a change of level or some other cause, the cavern became uninhabited, a thick crust of stalagmite was slowly formed, and burying them all, as under solid stone, preserved them undisturbed, until some accident revealed their existence after a time the length of which escapes all calculation. The dim vista into the past appears still more shadowy in the case of the cavern discovered by Dr. Schmerling at Choquier about two leagues from Liège, where three distinct beds of stalagmite were found, and between each of them a mass of breccia and mud, mixed with quartz, pebbles, and in the three deposits the bones of extinct quadrupeds!

Ossiferous caves have been found and examined in many parts of the world: in France, in Belgium, chiefly in the valleys of the Meuse and its tributaries; in Austria and Hungary, in Germany and England.

It is remarkable that while the remains of a large and extinct species of bear, although found in our caves, are much more common on the Continent, the bones of the hyena form by far the largest proportion of those obtained from the English caverns. Thus under the incrustated floors of our rock-crevices and hollows, we And the proofs that our island was once inhabited by brutes which are now confined to Africa and the adjacent parts of Asia. But the extinct hyena of England was a much larger and more formidable animal than either the striped hyena of Abyssinia or the spotted hyena of the Cape, the latter of whom it most resembled. The abundance of these animals, and the length of the period during which they inhabited England, may be inferred from Dr. Buckland’s account of the opening of the celebrated cavern of Kirkdale.

‘The bottom of the cave, on first removing the mud, was found to be strewed all over, like a dog-kennel, from one end to the other, with hundreds of teeth and bones, and on some of the bones marks could be traced, which, on applying one to the other, appeared exactly to fit the form of the canine teeth of the hyena that occurred in the cave. Mr. Gibson alone collected more than three hundred canine teeth of the hyena, which must have belonged to at least seventy-five individuals, and adding to these the similar teeth I have seen in other collections, I cannot calculate the total number of hyenas, of which there is evidence, at less than two or three hundred.’

The grisly bear of the Rocky Mountains (Ursus ferox) is the most ferocious of its race at the present day. It is about nine feet long, and is said to attain the weight of 800 pounds. Its strength is so prodigious that even the bison contends with it in vain. But this huge and formidable animal was surpassed in size and strength by the extinct bear (Ursus spelaeus) which once inhabited the caverns of Europe, at a time when vast and interminable forests covered the land, and the Rhine and the Danube flowed through wastes like those through which the Mackenzie or the Yenissei now find their way to the ocean.

From the proportions of the molar teeth, and from some peculiarities of appearance and wearing, it has been inferred that this extinct species lived chiefly on vegetable food; but its prodigious strength, and the huge canines with which its jaws were armed, enabled it to cope with its contemporaries, the large Auerox and the teichorhine rhinoceros, and to defend itself successfully against the large lion or tiger whose remains have also been found in the caverns of western Europe, and which, if we may judge by the size of their canine teeth, must have been more than a match for the largest felides of the present day.

Besides the hyena and the bear, more than a hundred species of extinct animals have been discovered in our ossiferous caves. In those of Paviland, Glamorganshire, bones of a primeval elephant have been found; and in that of Wirksworth, Derbyshire, the almost entire skeleton of a rhinoceros lay buried in a considerable mass of gravel and osseous fragments. How the large creature came there is a question that may well exercise the ingenuity of a geologist.

Though in these and similar cases, the bone-caves have been found to contain the remains of animals very different from those now existing in the same region, yet in general they show a remarkable relationship, in the same land or continent, between the dead and the living. Thus in the caves of Brazil there are extinct species of all the thirty-two genera, excepting four, of the terrestrial quadrupeds now inhabiting the provinces in which the caves occur, such as fossil ant-eaters, armadilloes, tapirs, peccaries, guanacoes, opossums, and numerous South American gnawers, monkeys and other animals.