User:Gongoozler123/Rampart Cave

Rampart Cave is a cave located at 36.09889°N, -113.9325°W in Grand Canyon National Park (GRCA), Mohave County, Arizona, on the south bank of the Colorado River, 50 mi east of Boulder City, Nevada. . Together with the nearby Muav Caves, Rampart Cave was within the Lake Mead National Recreation Area but both caves were incorporated into the GRCA in January 1975.

It is an extensive and well-protected cave with a unique and rare repository of Late Pleistocene vertebrate remains, and no documented traces of man. The primary deposits in the cave are dry dung from Nothrotheriops shastensis (Shasta ground sloth) &mdash; the first, smelliest, and ornierest hermits of Grand Canyon &mdash; from which bones and soft tissue remnants have also been found, but remains of other extinct and extant mammals, reptiles, and birds have also been recovered. The cave was first discovered by Civilian Conservation Corps in 1936, [...] ...most of which was destroyed by a fire in 1976.

There are two other caves near Rampart Cave: Muav Caves and an unnamed cave.

dry caves of arid America have yielded unusual perishable remains of extinct Pleistocene animals such as hair dung soft tissue of ground sloths mammoths.

--other less well known collections-- six caves of the Grand Canyon


 * The earliest report of fossils from Grand Canyon caves dates back to 1936 when NPS employee Willis Evans located a rich cave deposit of late Pleistocene fossil bones and sloth dung in Rampart Cave.

11,000 years old dung deposits destroyed by a careless smoker in the 1970s.
 * Hooks : The first, smelliest and orneriest hermits of Grand Canyon were the Ground Sloth.

Geology
The cave was formed in ...

Middle Cambrian Muav Limestone of the Tonto Group
 * Dark-gray, light-gray, brown, and orangered, cliff-forming limestone, dolomite, and calcareous mudstone.
 * Includes, in descending order, unclassified dolomites, and Havasu, Gateway Canyon, Kanab Canyon, Peach Springs, Spencer Canyon, and Rampart Cave Members of McKee and Resser (1945). These members consist of fine- to medium-grained, thin to thick-bedded, mottled, fossiliferous, silty limestone, limestone, and dolomite.
 * Three unnamed slope-forming siltstone and shale units of Bright Angel Shale lithology are intertongued between cliff-forming members of Muav Limestone. These unnamed siltstone and shale units are green and purplish-red, micaceous siltstone, mudstone, and shale, and thin brown sandstone.
 * Contact with the underlying Bright Angel is gradational and lithology dependent. Contact is arbitrarily marked at base of lowest prominent cliff-forming limestone of Rampart Cave Member of the Muav in western half of map area, and of Peach Springs–Kanab Canyon Members of the Muav in eastern half of map area.
 * All members of the Muav thicken from east to west across map area. However, the Peach Springs, Spencer Canyon, and Rampart Cave change to purple-red and green siltstone/shale facies of the Bright Angel in eastern half of map area, where they are included as part of the Bright Angel.
 * Intertonguing and facies change relationships between the Muav and Bright Angel produce variable thickness trends. Overall, the Muav thickens from about 350 ft (107 m) in eastern part of map area to about 600 ft (183 m) in western part.


 * Tonto Group: Muav Limestone averages 505 million years old and is made of grey, thin-bedded limestone that was deposited farther offshore from calcium carbonate precipitates. It is fossil poor yet trilobites and brachiopods have been found in it. The western part of the canyon has a much thicker sequence of Muav than the eastern part.  The Muav is a cliff-former, 136 to 827 feet (41 to 252 m) thick.


 * On the basis of the stratigraphic positions of selected springs in the Grand Canyon and along the Grand Wash Cliffs, Twenter identified the Rampart Cave Member of the Muav Limestone (Figure 3) as the best potential aquifer under the Hualapai Plateau. He selected the three target drilling areas shown on Figure 1, which were located on the basis of (1) sufficient surrounding surface areas to insure recharge to the sites, and (2) drilling depths of less than 1,000 feet. Twenter recognized the importance of tectonic fracturing on the enhancement of permeabilities, but his site selections did not include known faulted or folded rocks.

Paleofauna
Fossils from many now extinct North American mammals:

Mammals

 * The youngest radiocarbon dates on Shasta ground sloths coincide in age with youngest dates on machairodont cat (Smilodon), horse (Equus), and bison (Bison antiquus) in Southern California. Harrington's goat vanished together with this group at a time when local plant communities were experiencing considerable turnover and when Clovis big game hunters were active in the Southwest.

Ground sloth
The first, smelliest and orneriest hermits of Grand Canyon were the Ground Sloth. The cave served as a convenient stop for Shasta ground sloths until 11,000 years ago when the cave sunk into the Muav Limestone Grand Wash Cliffs


 * Ground sloths
 * Nothrotheriops
 * Nothrotherium

ground sloth dung has "accumulated to a depth of over 20 ft in places and covered an area of 4700 ft2

Over 200 bones of N. shastensis have been found in Rampart Cave.

Sloth dung samples have radiocarbon dated to older than 40,000 BP to younger than 11,000 BP. 72 genera of plants have been found and pollen from these plants revealed seasonal variation in the sloth’s diet.

Harrington's goat

 * Harrington's mountain goat (Oreamnos harrington) occupied the Grand Canyon for at least 19,000 years before becoming extinct 11,160±125 BP concurrently with the ground sloth.

Compared to living mountain goats (Oreamnons americanus), Harrington's mountain goat was small, with a more robust mandible, a distinctive palate, and larger dung pellets. This extinct goat and the ground sloth once occupied the same region and the same cave, but it is hard to imagine two more divergent large herbivores: Notwithstanding these differences, they apparently went extinct at the same time and for the same reason. Conceivably, the mountain goat lingered to a slightly later time (~10,000 years BP) around Rampart Cave.

Mountain lion


Mountain lion (i.e. cougar (Puma concolor)

Packrat

 * Packrat deposits are well known from the cave. 
 * One such deposit is a 13 in unindurated (uncemented) “seam” separating the two major dung layers in the cave. The seam is made up of plant material such as twigs and other macrofossils that are “perfectly preserved”. 
 * Deposited by packrats between 24,000 and 14,000 years BP, the seam may constitute the largest Pleistocene packrat deposit ever found. 
 * Thirty additional indurated (cemented) middens were found both in and around Rampart Cave. 

California Condor

 * California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus)

bird remains at 30-57 inches down

Probably the first time a Condor has been reported from Arizona.

bird remains in fourteen small packets (fragment of a hawk pelvis, possibly Buteo jamaicensis), all other contain condor bones, adult bones equaled those of recent birds

most bones highly fragmented, probably because of trampling by ground sloths, ... some nibbling by rodents.
 * carpometacarpus, phalanges, pollex, a claw, innominate with acetabulum, synsacrum, fragment of ulna, coracoid of nestling bird.

Other birds

 * egg shell fragments "seemingly" from Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura)
 * tibiotarsus of a nestling Barn Owl (Tyto alba)
 * right coracoid Aplomado Falcon (Falco femoralis)

Colorado Pinyon

 * Colorado Pinyon (Pinus edulis)
 * nearly all populations are in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah [...] north of the range of Texas Pinyon (P. remota
 * ...was a dominant woodland component before 38 000 to 10 975 BP; became occasional to rare 10,040 to 9,515 BP.


 * Several studies have been undertaken of natural hybridization and introgression involving P. edulis and P. monophylla. Materials similar to those found in extant zones of hybridization have been found in middens at Rampart Cave in Arizona dated at 12 650 BP, and at Desert Almond Canyon, a lower Grand Canyon site dated at 12 600 BP.


 * Sixty types of plants were identified from within packrat middens, aiding in paleoecological reconstruction of the Rampart Cave area. Additional plant material from packrat middens yielded dates ranging from 18,890 (Fraxinus anomala twigs) to 9,520 years B.P. (Agave utahensis).