Also known as Great Saltpetre Cave

Where: White County, Tennessee (36.1° N, 85.2° W: paleocoordinates 36.1° N, 85.0° W)

• coordinate based on nearby landmark

• small collection-level geographic resolution

When: Rancholabrean zone, Pleistocene (2.6 - 0.0 Ma)

• McDonald 2002: The cave is a solution feature in the St. Genevieve Member of the Mississippian Newman Limestone. A late Pleistocene age for the badger is indicated by its association with skeletal material of the extinct peccary, Platygonus compressus. Platygonus compressus is known only in faunas of Rancholabrean age (Wright, 1993). Repenning (1987) considered the Irvingtonian/Rancholabrean boundary to be at about 400,000 years before present (yrs BP). Most records of Platygonus compressus are late Pleistocene (Wisconsinan), with the youngest carbon-14 date for the species at 11,900±750 yrs BP (Ray et al., 1970). Until more work is done on the Saltpetre Cave material, nothing more precise than a Rancholabrean age for the fauna can be determined.

• bed-level stratigraphic resolution

Environment/lithology: cave; unlithified sandstone

Size class: macrofossils

Collected by E. McCrady, H. T. Kirby-Smith, H. Templeton in 1947

• University of the South collection

•McDonald 2002: The badger and associated fauna were recovered by mem- bers of the Greater Cincinnati Grotto during excavation of a side passage near the Pig Pen portion of Great Saltpetre Cave, Rockcastle County, Livingston Quadrangle, Kentucky. All of the recently discovered fossil material from Great Saltpetre Cave is housed in the vertebrate paleontology collections of the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History (CMNH).

Primary reference: E. McCrady, H. T. Kirby-Smith, and H. Templeton. 1954. New finds of Pleistocene jaguar skeletons from Tennessee caves. Proceedings of the United States National Museum 101:497-511 [J. Alroy/J. Alroy]more details

Purpose of describing collection: taxonomic analysis

PaleoDB collection 93373: authorized by John Alroy, entered by John Alroy on 15.01.2010, edited by Grace Varnham

Creative Commons license: CC BY (attribution)