Sampling fossils from cave

Last week, 1-7 July, our team (Ionuț, Luchiana and Marius) was in the field, working intensively and sampling Late Pleistocene fossils from a cave situated in northwestern Carpathians, Romania. This short fieldwork was supported by KARSTHIVES 2, INTEGRATE and PALEOTRACE projects.

Luckily, we added three more samples (right adult cave bear mandibles) to our collection that we are about to study within the project. During this time we documented the taphonomy, the topography and the stratigraphy of the fossil findings, to get as much information as possible about the samples.

Dr Laura Tîrlă, our colleague from the KARSTHIVES 2 project, and lecturer at the Faculty of Geography University of Bucharest, has brought an important contribution to the understanding of the geology of the area, and indirectly to the palaeoecology of the analysed Late Pleistocene palaeo-population.

Moreover, although outside INTEGRATE, it is worth mentioning that the sediment resulting from the excavation was carefully stored for wet sieving. Our colleague, Alex will look for micromammals, as additional data for palaeoenvironment and palaeofaunistic reconstruction.

We’re getting close to having all samples ready for the analyses.

More to come!