Journal of Cave and Karst Studies - ISSN 1090-6924
Volume 64 Number 2: 97-107 - August 2002

A publication of the National Speleological Society

A Pleistocene Tapir and Associated Mammals from the Southwestern Ozark Highland
Nicholas J. Czaplewski, William L. Puckette and Clayton Russell

Abstract

A mud deposit in Sassafras Cave near Stilwell, Oklahoma, produced a small assemblage of fossil vertebrates including an unidentified salamander and the mammals Myotis sp., Lasionycteris noctivagans, Pipistrellus subflavus, Tamias striatus, Peromyscus sp., Reithrodontomys sp., Microtus sp., and Tapirus veroensis. The fossiliferous mud deposit is a stream terrace containing abundant red clay accumulated behind roof fall and breakdown boulders that temporarily dammed the main stream-passage of the cave. The tapir fossils indicate a late Rancholabrean (late Pleistocene) age for the deposit. This is the first report of a tapir from the Oklahoma Ozark Highland and only the second report of Pleistocene megafauna from a cave in eastern Oklahoma. The tapir is represented by a partial skeleton with some of the distal leg bones articulated in life position in the deposit. The animal probably died while it was standing or laying in the mud, possibly after falling into the cave or walking in through an entrance that had a different configuration in the Pleistocene than the present sinkhole entrance.

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