The skull may be able to help the explorers dig up the cat’s story, too.
John Moretti, a paleontologist and doctoral student at the University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences, prepares to rappel about 60-feet into a pit called the Inferno Room during a research trip inside Natural Bridge Caverns in San Antonio, Texas, Tuesday morning, Jan. 10, 2023. Moretti and a team of cavers planned a four-day expedition to extract ancient wildcat bones from the caverns and carefully bring them back to the modern world.
“Not every bone in the skeleton contains equal information, but the skull is a really important source of information because it’s so functional,” said Moretti, a Ph.D. candidate at UT-Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences. “Because of that, there’s a lot of difference between different species that you can pick on and use as evidence to identify what you are looking at.”
So far, all Moretti knows is that the wildcat was probably lost in the dark of the cave and took a tumble down a 60-foot hole into a room researchers now call The Inferno. Over time, the cat decomposed and its bones separated, falling into crevices and cracks throughout the cave. At first, the team of Natural Bridge Caverns cavers and Moretti found only a few pieces, but when they began to remove the bones, they noticed a whole other pile beneath.
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