286 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN" INSTITUTION, 1918. 



might at the same time be inhabited with a distinctly southern fauna. 

 A contributory cause for a more southern range of boreal forms may 

 be found also in the probable fact that the southern extremities of 

 the great pleistocene ice sheet were at the time not far distant from 

 this particular region. Under these conditions, had they prevailed, 

 a mixture of fossil remains of boreal and subtropic animals such as 

 is indicated in the Cumberland cave deposit is very readily under- 

 stood and may thus be satisfactorily explained. It might well be 

 that animals of widely varied life habits could inhabit contempo- 

 raneously the same general region — the austral species occupying 

 normally the lower, warmer levels, the boreal forms the colder re- 

 gions of the uplands and mountain tops — while certain animals of 

 each extreme might readily, during the course of seasonal changes, 

 occupy alternately and temporarily an intermediate locality. More- 

 over, the very nature and occurrence of the fossil remains found in 

 the cave mass suggests just such a possibility, while there was no 

 evidence whatever of a gradual succession or displacement of faunas 

 affecting the entire region which might have taken place during the 

 period of the cave-deposit accumulation. 



Nearly coincident with the Cumberland cave discovery, and quite 

 as accidentally, a similar deposit was reported to the National Mu- 

 seum from a locality in West Virginia. This find did not prove 

 nearly so rich as the former one, either in numbers of bones or kinds 

 of animals represented, but is nevertheless of interest since it differs 

 in some important respects from that of the Cumberland locality, 

 while the fossils it contained show it to be about equivalent in age. 

 The deposit was encountered in the course of developing a quarry 

 in the limestone ledge situated on the west side of the beautiful 

 valley of the Green Brier, near the little town of Renick. 



Here the rock strata are nearly in their original horizontal posi- 

 tion (see pi. 4) and the small cavern following the general 

 line of stratification extended backward some distance into the side 

 of the ledge with its original opening on the same level with the floor 

 of the cavern instead of directly above, as at the Cumberland locality. 

 This difference in physical structure is reflected, first, in the character 

 of the deposit covering the floor of the cavern, it being a soft, loose 

 cave-clay unmixed with broken stones; and, second, in the much 

 fewer numbers, and less variety of bones found there. The few bones 

 recovered for the National Museum, which include only one well- 

 preserved skull, represent but a single species, and that species, 

 strangely enough, closely related to or possibly identical with one 

 of the large extinct peccaries of the Cumberland cave. Unfortu- 

 nately, as in the case of the Cumberland find, the greater part of the 

 bone-bearing material had been removed before any steps were taken 

 to preserve the specimens it contained. It, therefore, is quite prob- 



