272 BONE CAVE AT PORT KENNEDY. 



beyond all doubt., we labored at the place for three sucessive autumns. We dug 

 away the exposed front of clay, stones and bones, working into it horizontally, until 

 the interior water-worn walls of the cavern appeared. We pried off overhanging 

 masses of rubbish and carted away the downfall to make safe the undermining of the 

 bank. We cut down below the quarry floor and its water level into the soft earth 

 under foot, laying bare depths of the fissure never seen before, until the inrush- 

 ing of water drowned our pumps. But to the last we failed to exhaust the bones 

 or fathom the depth or width of their tomb. 



Our work continued during the autumns of 1894, 1895 and 1896, involving 

 the removal of over 300 cubic yards of fossil bearing earth and quarry refuse, 

 and resulted in a series of discoveries and observations of which an account is given 

 in the following pages. 



Condition of the Remains. 



While it was easily noted that the bones divested of animal matter were fossil- 

 ized, we soon saw that the depositing agency had so dislocated, crushed and scattered 

 them that little hope was left of recovering an entire skeleton, a fact continually in 

 evidence, as at B, 5-9, 1 where a long tusk ran into the bank just under the upper and 

 lower jaws of a bear, or at B, 3, 11, where the jaw of a carnivore and the leg bone of a 

 large animal lay in contact. At C, 4, 8, the mandible of a sloth pressed upon that of a 

 bear, and at B, 6, 7; B. 8, 7, and B, 3, 7, isolated teeth and tusks of the mastodon had 

 been scattered close around the well-worn molars of a tapir. A part of the jaw of 

 a peccary was recovered at B, 7, 11, where again, as in the case of most jaws found, 

 the lower mandible had been separated from the skull in reaching its position. At 

 B, 4, 11, several incisor teeth lay near two large fragments of a jaw of the tapir, 

 and close to several dislocated teeth of a sloth. 



When jaws were found the skulls were generally missing, just as teeth were 

 encountered alone, just as claws lay separated from metacarpals, or as fragments of 

 a tree had been cut away from the parent stem, while generally the ingredients of 

 the deposit had been scattered, broken, crushed and distorted by the well-betokened 

 power of the transporting agency, aided by the grinding of stones and the down 

 settling of clay and sand. 



As skeletons deposited in the flesh must have lain together, this scattering of 

 the remains warranted the inference that the flesh had decomposed from the bones, 

 leaving the latter to soften and break in many instances before their final entombment. 



Such prior dislocation and decomposition of fleshless skeletons was otherwise 

 continually demonstrated, as at B, 3-3 and B, 3-6, where a yellow stripe, several 

 inches thick, consisting of much rotted fragments still showing the grain of the bone, 



exhausted at a horizontal depth of 3 feet (6 feet in the case of the last series C) from its start. Thus each specimen 

 was further labelled with a letter of the alphabet to signify its relation to each successive three and six feet of 

 horizontal progress. A specimen removed from the third row of rectangles at the depth of a seventh rectangle 

 downward and within the first 3 feet of inward advance, would be labelled A, 3, 7 ; from the eighth rectangle at 

 a depth of the fourth, would be labelled A, 8, 4, etc., while a specimen from the ninth rectangle, at a depth of 

 eleven feet (or of the eleventh rectangle downward), in the second three, or third, six feet of inward advance, 

 would be labelled B, 9, 11, or C, 9, 11, etc. 



1 These numbered letters, as designating (within 36 or 72 horizontal and 12 vertical inches) the position 

 in the deposit of each labelled object found, are explained in the companion footnote to page 3. 



