An ancient bear skull sits on the floor of Hoyo Negro, a flooded cave on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.
Ice Age Predators Found Alongside Oldest Human in Americas
The well-preserved remains offer a glimpse into the rapidly shifting world that surrounded Naia, a girl who died around 13,000 years ago.
CALGARY, ALBERTA, CANADASome 13,000 years ago in what’s now the Yucatán Peninsula, a deep pit inside a cave became the final resting place for a menagerie of exotic animals.
Now, their exquisitely preserved bones, trapped for centuries under water, are offering some of the first solid clues to how large Ice Age beasts were mixing and migrating between North and South America after the Isthmus of Panama connected the two continents.
“We’re going to go from a place with no records to having the best records for a lot of megafauna from Mexico, Central America, and northern South America,” says East Tennessee State University’s Blaine Schubert, who presented the findings this week at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in Calgary.
The
