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The Port Kennedy Bone Cave is a limestone cave in the Port Kennedy section of Valley Forge National Historical Park, Pennsylvania, USA. The Bone Cave "contained one of the most important middle Pleistocene (Irvingtonian, approximately 750,000 years ago) fossil deposits in North America".

History

The fossils in the cave were investigated by noted 19th-century paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope, Henry C. Mercer, and Charles M. Wheatley.

The cave was originally discovered by limestone miners in the 19th century. It was later filled in with asbestos-bearing industrial refuse and the cave's location was lost. The village of Port Kennedy was largely demolished in the 1960s during construction of the U.S. Route 422 Expressway. The tract containing the cave became part of the Valley Forge National Historical Park in 1978. In 2005, the National Park Service and geologists rediscovered the cave.

It has been rumored that the quarry near where the cave is located near holds a crashed locomotive, which was used in the shooting of a now lost silent film in 1915, The Valley of Lost Hope.

Remains found in the cave

Many fossils of prehistoric fauna are known from the site, including Ice Age taxa such as the saber-toothed cat, mastodon, short-faced bear, American cheetah, and Wheatley's ground sloth. Some extinct species are also exclusive to the site, many of them being described by Edward Drinker Cope during the late 19th century. In addition to the prehistoric animals, a myriad of early records of living mammals have been unearthed from the locale such as American black bears, North American river otters, and Gray foxes, giving more insight to their evolution. The age of the site falls within the Irvingtonian NALMA (North American Land Mammal Age), a period of terrestrial mammal evolution dating from 1.9 million to 250,000 BCE years ago. This accords with the global cooling and glaciation of the Lower to Middle Pleistocene, which preceded the final glacial age of the Upper Pleistocene in the Rancholabrean stage. Some of the species during the Irvingtonian present at Port Kennedy such as the saber-toothed cat and short-faced bear came from smaller forms of their respective genera, with sizes increasing during the Rancholabrean.

Fossils from Port Kennedy Bone Cave are not exclusively from mammals however, with many fossils from turkeys, snakes, turtles, and a unique giant tortoise reported. Notably, Port Kennedy bears a large menagerie of extinct beetles. All of the beetles were briefly described by George Horn in 1874, but little new insight into the remains has been made. Plant fossils too have been recovered, including mosses and a variety of trees.

References

1. Circa-1894 photo of the entrance to the Bone Cave Archived 2017-06-28 at the Wayback Machine, from Bucks County Historical Society.
2. Bechtel, Timothy D.; Jaime L. Hojdila; Samuel H. Baughman II; Toni DeMayo; Edward Doheny (2005). "Relost and refound: Detection of a paleontologically, historically, cinematically(?), and environmentally important solution feature in the carbonate belt of southeastern Pennsylvania". The Leading Edge. 24 (5): 537. doi:10.1190/1.1926813. ISSN 1070-485X.
3. "PORT KENNEDY BONE CAVE MONTGOMERY COUNTY" (PDF). DCNR. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 3, 2016. Retrieved 23 December 2014.
4. ^ Hojdila, Jamie; Toni DeMayo; Sam Baughman; Tim Bechtel; Margaret Carfioli (Fall 2005). "Sidebar--The long-lost cave has been found!". Park Science. 23 (2). National Park Service. ISSN 1090-9966. Archived from the original on October 16, 2011. Retrieved 17 February 2011.
5. Cope, Edw. D. (1895). "The Fossil Vertebrata from the Fissure at Port Kennedy, Pa". Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. 47: 446–450. ISSN 0097-3157. JSTOR 4061990.
6. Hall, E. R. (1936). Mustelid Mammals from the Pleistocene of North America: With Systematic Notes on Some Recent Members of the Gerera Mustela, Taxidea and Mephitis.
7. ^ Daeschler, E., Spamer, E. E., & Parris, D. C. (1993). Review and new data on the Port Kennedy local fauna and flora (Late Irvingtonian), Valley Forge National Historical Park, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. The Mosasaur, 5, 23-41.
8. ^ Cassiliano, Michael L. (1999-03-15). "Biostratigraphy of Blancan and Irvingtonian mammals in the Fish Creek-Vallecito section, southern California, and a review of the Blancan–Irvingtonian boundary". Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. 19 (1): 169–186. doi:10.1080/02724634.1999.10011131. ISSN 0272-4634.
9. Parris, David C.; Daeschler, Edward (1995). "Pleistocene turtles of Port Kennedy Cave (late Irvingtonian), Montgomery County, Pennsylvania". Journal of Paleontology. 69 (3): 563–568. doi:10.1017/S0022336000034934. ISSN 0022-3360. S2CID 132442762.
10. Schubert, B. W., Hulbert Jr, R. C., MacFadden, B. J., Searle, M., & Searle, S. (2010). Giant short-faced bears (Arctodus simus) in Pleistocene Florida USA, a substantial range extension. Journal of Paleontology, 84(1), 79-87.
11. Christiansen, Per; Harris, John M. (2005). "Body size of Smilodon (Mammalia: Felidae)". Journal of Morphology. 266 (3): 369–384. doi:10.1002/jmor.10384. ISSN 0362-2525. PMID 16235255. S2CID 27233870.
12. ^ Horn, George H. (1874). "Notes on Some Coleopterous Remains from the Bone Cave at Port Kennedy, Penna". Transactions of the American Entomological Society. 5: 241–245. doi:10.2307/25076311. ISSN 0886-1145. JSTOR 25076311.

External links

• "Relost and Refound". Retrieved 2009-11-09.

40°06′07″N 75°25′29″W / 40.10182°N 75.42462°W / 40.10182; -75.42462

• Caves of Pennsylvania
• Landforms of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania
• Upper Merion Township, Pennsylvania
• Valley Forge National Historical Park