(510 PROCEEDINGS OF THE WASHINGTON MEETING 



Session of the Cokdilleran Section, Saturday, December 30 



The following paper was read by J. 0. Merriam, in the absence of the 

 author: 



GOAT-ANTELOPE FROM THE CAVE FAUNA OF PIKES PEAK REGION* 



BY F. W. CRAG IN 



The two principal Manitou caves, the cave of the Winds and the Grand caverns, 

 are well known to all transcontinental tourists who have visited Manitou. They 

 are in the lowest Silurian formation, which, in the Pikes Peak Folio of the Geo- 

 logic Atlas of the United States, Mr Whitman Cross has named the " Manitou 

 limestone." Other and smaller caves are frequent in the same formation. 



From the cave of the Winds and the Grand caverns considerable cave-earth has 

 been taken in the process of restoring some of the galleries and chambers to original 

 or convenient dimensions, but no evidences of an extinct fauna have thus been 

 brought to light. 



In having the cave-earth removed from a cave in the Manitou limestone of his 

 Glen Eyrie estate a few years since, General William J. Palmer, with his usual 

 foresight, saved the organic remains, consisting of a number of bones thrown out 

 with the earth by the workman, and these he very kindly submitted to the writer 

 for determination. 



Two of the specimens were at once recognized as proximal phalanges of a slender- 

 limbed type of horse occurring elsewhere in the interior west, associated with the 

 remains of elephants, ground sloths, llamas of cameline, as well as of smaller, size, 

 large carnivores, and land tortoises of late Pliocene or Quaternary age, and thus 

 indicating for the cave at least a corresponding antiquity. 



The other remains found in the cave at Glen Eyrie were identified last summer, 

 when the writer was first able to compare them with extensive series of skeletons 

 in the United States National Museum. The smaller bones, a jaw and two femurs, 

 were soon found to belong to a species of woodchuck, different from the common 

 one of eastern North America, and not improbably so from the yellow-bellied 

 woodchuck which is the present species of the central Rocky mountains. The 

 larger bones pertained to the right forelimb of a young ruminant, or two-toed 

 ungulate, which some ancient beast of prey had doubtless dragged into the cave 

 as a choice morsel to feed on at leisure. They were humerus and cannon-bone, in 

 which part of the epiphyses were missing, not yet having united with the shaft. 

 It was at first thought that they might have pertained to a Rocky Mountain sheep, 

 or bighorn. From the skeleton of this, however, they widely differed, as they also 

 did from that of the mountain goat, mazama. From all other recent North Amer- 

 ican two-toed ungulates the departure was still wider. Reference was, however, 

 made to Asiatic forms, and it was soon found that the bones in question closely 

 agreed with those of the Capricorn or goat-antelope genus, Nemorhcedus, represented 

 today by several species living in the Himalayas and other mountains of Asia, 

 Japan, and Formosa. Of this genus there are two sections. One includes clumsier- 



*Owingto the unfortunate loss of the specimens it became necessary to use the rough draw- 

 ings made from them to illustrate this paper, instead of reproducing photographs as originally 

 intended.— Ed. 



