The Cumberland Bone Cave

by Arnold Norden


In 1912 workers excavating a cut for the Western Maryland Railway broke into a partly filled cave along the western slope of Wills Mountain near Corriganville in Allegany County, Maryland. A local naturalist, Raymond Armbruster, observed fossil bones among the rocks that had been blasted loose and were being removed from the cut. Armbruster notified paleontologists at the Smithsonian Institution, and James W. Gidley began excavating that same year.

The Wills Mountain railway cut encountered a cave system that originally extending at least a hundred feet straight down from an open sink hole in a ravine, and wound horizontally several hundred feet to another opening on the slope. Several chambers were present, and local residents claimed that the cave had been used by early settlers during Indian raids. A considerable amount of the lower levels had filled long before human inhabitants arrived, and mixed in the solidified fill were the remains of thousands of animals ranging from snails and millipedes to saber-tooth cats and extinct elephants. Unfortunately, much of this material was lost during the quarrying operation, but what remained represents one of the finest Pleistocene faunas known from eastern North America.

Gidley excavated at the Cumberland Bone Cave from 1912 to 1916. The subsequent monograph published by Gidley and C. Lewis Gazin in 1938 discussed the cave and excavation, and proceeded to describe 41 genera of mammals, about 16 per cent of which are extinct. More recent research has dealt with a variety of small mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles. The latter groups were treated by John Holman in a paper that described thirty herptiles from the cave, including a new species of hellbender (Cryptobranchus guildayi). Holman also noted the presence of species that do not range into the Cumberland area today, such as the fox snake, tiger salamander and bog turtle.

Much of the material from the cave is in superb condition. In fact, there are numerous excellent skulls and enough bones to reconstruct skeletons for a number of the species present. Skeletons of the Pleistocene cave bear and an extinct wolverine from the Bone Cave are on permanent exhibit in the Ice Age Mammal exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Fossil bones were quite numerous, as evidenced by photographs of the matrix that were published by Gidley and Gazin, and the amount of fossil material that they recovered. For instance, they estimated that the remains of at least 25 bears (belonging to two genera) were present in the cave.

In recent years additional excavation has been conducted by field parties from the Carnegie Institute and at least one local amateur paleontologist. New finds continue to be made and the final chapter on the Cumberland Bone Cave is yet to be written. At the present time this site is generally closed to the public. However, it appears that the cut containing the remnants of the cave may soon be acquired by the State of Maryland.