The Mystery of the Cave Cats
L ast year, cavers rappelled into Natural Bridges Caverns in Texas—a popular commercial tourist cave that reaches 230 feet into the ground—and picked up two small cat skeletons that were impeccably intact. Both looked like house cats, but researchers suspected they might have a larger story to tell.
Now, scientists at the University of Texas have discovered that the skeletons date back to the Ice Age—they’re 11,500 years old. The recovery of ancient DNA and protein from the specimens holds potential to reveal how Ice Age cats relate to living species today.
“Ancient DNA could provide us with a Rosetta Stone to associate the species with the skeletal form,” says John Moretti, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.
Moretti remembers getting a call from the ranching family that owns the cave—they had found some bones and wanted help studying them. He did some research and figured out other bones had been discovered in the cave back in the 1960s—an incomplete specimen that had been labeled as a bobcat. Moretti wondered if the new bones were related to that finding, but he soon realized the old bones didn’t belong to a bobcat at all—they likely belonged to a group of neotropical cats whose relatives live in Central America today. Moretti published his initial findings at a paleontological meeting earlier this year.
The story of the cats was likely one of an increasingly desperate struggle to escape. Fossilized pawprints in the floor and walls of the cave suggest the cats had tried to leave the cave system before wandering in the darkness and slipping into the deepest part of the chamber.
