N.C. DOCUMENTS 

 CLEARI SE 



The Mammals of the Ardis Igygal if&yy% 

 (Late Pleistocene), Harleyville, South Carolina 



N.C. STATE LIBRARY 



Curtis C. Bentley and James L. Kf$t£|GH 

 South Carolina State Museum, Natural History, 301 Gervais Street 

 P.O. Box 100107, Columbia, South Carolina 29202-3107 



AND 



Martin A. Knoll 



University of the South, Department of Forestry and Geology, 



Sewanee, Tennessee 37375-4003 



ABSTRACT — The Ardis local fauna is contained within sediment- 

 filled solution cavities of late Pleistocene age, located in the 

 Giant Cement Quarry near Harleyville, Dorchester County, South 

 Carolina. This paper, the second on the fossil remains collected 

 from the Ardis site, documents 43 taxa of mammals recovered 

 from a group of interconnected solution cavities, including 24 

 taxa of mammals not previously reported as fossils from the 

 state. Fossil remains from the lowermost layers and the extreme 

 upper layer of the deposit were C 14 dated at 18,940 ± 760 

 and 18,530 ± 725 y.b.p., respectively, and are considered 

 contemporaneous. Fossil remains were deposited near the height 

 of the Wisconsin glaciation and appear to reflect a mosaic edge 

 community, probably a patchwork of mixed hardwood and conifer 

 forest, interspersed with meadows, possibly associated with a marsh 

 or bog, located near a permanent stream or a river. The Ardis 

 local fauna is composed of a mammal community which has 

 no modern analogues ("disharmonious fauna"), and reflects a 

 more equitable climate, cooler summers and warmer winters, 

 than that presently occurring in the region. 



INTRODUCTION AND GEOLOGY 



As collections of fossils continue to be amassed from various 

 localities in South Carolina, the fossil record of the state likely will 

 be one of the richest in the eastern United States. Long known as a 

 source of marine mammal fossils of Eocene and Oligocene age, the 

 State has a large number of vertebrate faunas from various other time 

 periods. Although the Pleistocene epoch is one of the best represented 

 in South Carolina, only two assemblages (Allen 1926, Roth and Laerm 

 1980) have been reported in the literature to date. 



Our purpose is to present data on a collection of late Rancholabrean 

 mammals, the Ardis local fauna (Appendix 1), found in the Giant 



Brimleyana 21:1-35, December 1994 



