The Grand Canyon has caves and ... wow

 

I don't remember how I grabbed this link. But when I did, I was astonished. 

I've been to the Grand Canyon once. I had no idea it had any caves. I'm not sure how many people know it has caves like this.

Ancient Bats: Inside the Grand Canyon's Longest Known Cave

It appears that this cave doesn't have a name. What it does have, however, is really old bats. I'm not sure if they should be called fossils or not. But they are old.

" "When I first looked at the bats, I was totally amazed," [professor of wildlife ecology at Northern Arizona University Carol] Chambers said, during a recent interview. She was instantly sold on helping to determine the bats’ ages, but it wasn’t until 2018 that the initial funds for radiocarbon dating were secured. With the wheels in motion, she spent hours reviewing Thomas’s and Oswald’s photos, agonizing over which bats to sample.

"I was trying to figure out what looks old," she said, eventually deciding on nine bats representing five different species. "It turned out everything was old." The samples ranged in age from 3,700 to 31,000 years before present — shockingly ancient. "I thought, holy smokes, we are really on to something here," Chambers said. The ages were astonishing, and only the tip of the iceberg. Needless to say, all were eager to date more of these exceptionally rare bat remains found throughout the cave.

After false starts in 2019 and 2020 due to wildfires and the coronavirus epidemic, Thomas returned to the cave in 2021 and collected samples from a different set of bats. Chambers sent them off to a well-regarded lab for dating.

When her phone rang with the results, they asked her if she was sitting down.

The samples revealed ages beyond the limit of radiocarbon dating, which caps out around 50,000 years before present."

Below are a picture of one of the bats, and a second showing the profusion of gypsum "flowers" in the cave. They won't be opening this to the public anytime soon (and access is pretty tough, anyway).

Credit to Steven Eginoire for this pictures. And as the title of this post says,

Wow.