It was on one of the last days of the 2024 field season that a group of researchers got a hunch that they’d found something unusual at the bottom of an 85-foot cave in northern Wyoming.

“We’d found a mammoth vertebra, just a centrum,” recalled Julie Meachen, a professor at Des Moines University Medicine and Health Sciences in Iowa.

Since 2014, when Meachen and other scientists got the green light to excavate Natural Trap Cave in the Bighorn Basin, they’ve unearthed the bones of prehistoric mammals, including the American cheetah and short-faced bear.

As the name implies, the cave acted as a deadly trap for animals traveling the plains, unaware of the pit until it was too late. Their fossils — dating from 20,000 years ago — are often found in good condition since the cave’s cool and hu

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