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The Barn Owls of Homestead Cave
Scientists found Homestead Cave while studying the Great Basin desert
west of Salt Lake City, Utah. Homestead Cave is a cave where barn owls
roost. Inside the cave scientists found piles of owl pellets. They studied
the pellets for 3 years to find out what prey the owls had eaten.
The owl pellets in the cave were piled 2
meters (m) deep. The scientists dated the
bones and discovered that the owl pellets
had been piling up for the past 10,000 years!
Owls that had lived thousands of years ago
had roosted in the cave and spit up the oldest
of the pellets. The oldest pellets were at the
bottom layers of the pile. The darkness and
cool temperature in the cave had preserved
the pellets for thousands of years. No
humans had disturbed this protected cave.
Scientists identified the bones of 22 kinds of small mammals. They
found wood rats, mice, voles, rabbits, and shrews of many kinds.
Scientists figured out which animals lived in the area at different times.
They compared the bones in each layer of the pile to animals living there
now. They determined how the numbers and kinds of animals in the
community changed over time.
An owl pellet
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