Remnants of a lion-sized armadillo dating back to the Ice Age have been discovered resting on the riverbed of a half-submerged cave 40 feet below the surface of Comal County.
It’s a sight straight out of a sci-fi thriller from the ’80s, but for University of Texas paleontologist John Moretti, the fossils themselves weren’t all too surprising.
“If you saw this thing alive, you would think, ‘Hey, that’s an armadillo,’” Moretti said. “The big difference would be this animal is about six to seven feet long and about three and a half feet tall at the back of its shell. Much larger than our living armadillos. They’re fairly common in fossil sites along the Gulf Coast of Texas and in Florida.”
What first caught Moretti off guard wasn’t the water, the limestone walls or the snorkel he found himself wearing before delving into the sinkhole’s opening — it was the abundance of fossils that they found.
“In most caves, we find fossils by excavating through layers of dirt, and it takes a long time to find a fossil,” Moretti said. “Here in this cave, all we had to do was put on our dive mask and our snorkel and put our head in the water, and it’s everywhere. The bed of this stream is just littered with fossils of Ice Age megafauna — things like mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, even saber-toothed cats — they’re just laying there, and we can pluck them up from the stream bed where they’ve been resting probably for millennia.”
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Just as shocking as the ease with which the dozens of fossils were found is that they were found in Central Texas at all.
“We know a lot about the Ice Age in Texas and here in Central Texas, specifically,” Moretti said. “Here on the Edwards Plateau of Central Texas, we’d never found these giant armadillo-like Pampatheres before. That always made sense, because these animals, we think, needed a relatively warm, humid, sort of tropical climate to live. And our understanding of the last (part) of the Ice Age here in Texas was that it was pretty cool, pretty dry, except along the Gulf Coast.”
But now, that understanding could be shifting. Moretti said the data that supports the previous understanding is reliable and consistent, but that this discovery may reflect subtler changes in the climate of the region and the animals that called it home 20,000 years ago.
“These animals that we’re finding in this cave, in this underground stream, they hint that the animal community from the Ice Age was actually changing alongside changes in the environment and changes in climate. They’re changing where they live in the United States, and they’re doing that prior to the end of the Ice Age animal community altogether — before these animals go extinct.”
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