Eugenia Karmalito
Staff correspondent, EcoTourism Expert 
The remains of a previously undescribed type of sabre-toothed cats as well as many bones of other prehistoric animals found in a solutional cave during the construction of the Taurida highway in the Crimea are at least one and a half million years old.
This conclusion was made by the scientists of the Vernadsky Crimean Federal University (CFU), who conducted a thorough analysis of the fossil bones collected in a huge 1-km long solutional cave.
A unique natural monument called the Taurida (also known as Tauris or Taurica) was opened in June 2018 thanks to a large-scale construction project. When heavy equipment was used on one of the sites near the village of Zuya, the ground sank. The builders told that at first, they wanted to fill the vertical 14-m well with concrete as well as and cavity pockets discovered during the analysis of the debris, but later they decided - just in case - to call specialists. Soon, the speleologists arrived and went down to the bottom of the well where they saw a vast solutional cave. It was very difficult to work in the cave - the air temperature was around 12°C, humidity was close to 100%, and it was difficult to breathe as the oxygen content was only 18%, and the carbon dioxide concentration was 100 times higher than the maximum allowable concentration (4%, and a MAC is 0.04%).
After analyzing, the experts determined that the age of the cave itself was about 5 mn years. The many remains of the ancient animals discovered there were its main value and were of scientific interest, and the paleontologists immediately began to study them. As scientists note, there are no more than a dozen such natural ‘exposures’ around the world. According to Gennady Samokhin, the Scientific Secretary of the Russian Geographical Society Branch in the Republic of Crimea, Chairman of the Council of the Russian Union of Speleologists, “the amount of the bone material that we found in the Tauris is not available in the Crimea or in Russia, according to paleontologists, quite possible, it is one of the largest finds in the world."
As for Dmitry Startsev, a leading methodologist at the CFU Zoological Museum, he called the Tauris one of the most important paleontological discoveries in the early 21st century. According to his report ‘Paleontological Studies of the Tauris Cave’, the age of the remains is from 80-100 thousand to 1.6 mn years. In total, only at the first exploration stage, the scientists unearthed 250 kg of bones.
Judging by the teeth marks and scratches from the claws on the walls of the cave, a significant part of the animals became prey of predators that dragged by them into the lairs. Experts suggest that the Tauris was inhabited by coyotes, wolves, bears, and sabre-toothed cats at different times. They hunted near the Tauris and dragged their prey here. In addition, scientists found that animals regularly fell in the Tauris through narrow vertical sink channels and died failing to find a way out of the cave.
The researchers were able to identify over three dozen animals that inhabited the peninsula in old times. According to Startsev, in the territory where the cave is located, there was earlier a hot savannah, because the first animals discovered immediately after descending to the Tauris were the southern elephants - the distant ancestors of mastodons, that is, even more ancient Proboscidea than mammoths. Other animals discovered in the cave include a markhor, a 3.5-m long Merk rhino, porcupines, bears, ostriches, black rats, even a camel and a giraffe. Their remains are practically not petrified, often they even keep their anatomical position.
But the felids were the biggest surprise. “We previously considered that the jaw of a sabre-toothed tiger with primary teeth – this ‘kitten’ got the facetious name Tauric - belonged to the cub of homotheria,” said Dmitry Startsev. “However, now, after a more in-depth study, we are inclined to believe that Tauric belonged to a different, undescribed species of sabre-toothed cats that extinct over 10,000 years ago.”
“The 1.5-mn year old fauna found in the Tauris Cave is unique to the Crimea, but there were already fossil animals of this age found outside the peninsula - in the Caucasus, Turkey, and Europe,” Startsev noted. “We study publications and museum materials, our colleagues have already compared our specimens with the French and Spanish fauna - the necessary materials are in the Taman, in the museums of Azov and Rostov-on-Don.” In future, the CFU scientists plan to do an in-depth study of the finds, for example, using the tomography of bone residues, and establish their age using isotope studies.
It is not yet possible to identify obvious traces of the human presence in the Tauris karst cavities, although, according to experts, there are many Stone Age monuments nearby, including very famous ones, so this area is promising for the search for new archaeological sites. Konstantin Gavrilov, senior researcher at the Stone Age Department at the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, suggests that people could have visited the cave in the Paleolithic times or during the Stone Age. “We need to focus on finding the ancient entrance to this cave, because, as our experience gained in our previous studies shows, people settled in front of the entrance,” he says. “If we are lucky, we will find such a site and traces of ancient encampments.”
Some bones that have been broken along the long axis - even the strongest predator cannot do this - are an indirect sign that the main discovery is still ahead. Another confirming artefact may be a small silicic flake - a technological fracture discovered during the initial examination of the cave. According to scientists, possibly, it is man-made and appeared about 50,000 years ago. If signs of a human activity are found in the Tauris, the cave will become the oldest ancient encampment in Eastern Europe that may unfix all established notions of how these territories were populated.
But now, the cave will help scientists understand what Crimea was like before the Ice Age, for example, how the climate on the peninsula changed. “I think, some interesting discoveries are in store - the Tauris can tell us a lot,” says Boris Vakhrushev, Chairman of the regional branch of the Russian Geographical Society in the Republic of Crimea, dean of the geographical faculty of the CFU Taurida Academy.
The immediate plans also include the setting-up of a speleo-tourist educational centre on the basis of this natural monument under the egis of the CFU, that - with the support of the Government of the Crimea, Russian Geographical Society and the Russian Union of Speleologists - will become a recreational cluster for the development of the Crimean economy. The centre will function as an open-air museum, its visitors will be able to admire the rare animals found in the cave, and even go down to the Tauris. And the scientists will continue to study their finds in the scientific laboratory.
