Published: July 02, 2009 09:31 am      

Hays Master Naturalists to discuss forgotten Texas cave

Dripping Springs — The Hays County Master Naturalists will hold their monthly meeting from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. July 30 at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit, 301 Hays County Acres Road in Dripping Springs.

The topic for discussion will be "Pleistocene Ecology and The Friesenhahn Cave,” and the Presenter is Dr. Laurence Meissner, Biology professor at Concordia University.

Most people in Central Texas, Meissner says, don't even know Friesenhahn Cave exists because it is on private property and its whereabouts was kept unpublicized because of security issues.  Just before the land on which the cave is located was sold by the previous owner a few years ago for three-plus acres so that this natural treasure is forever protected from activities that might compromise its integrity as a research and educational site.

For the past 13 years Meissner and his work teams have been removing and sifting sediments that were disturbed in previous excavations, cleaning and cataloging fossils that had been overlooked in the Friesenhahn Cave. 

The site has been called, "one of the most important paleontological sites in the United States" (The Caves of Bexar County, Veni, 1988).

Excavations conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin during the early 1950s and by Russell Graham from the University of Texas at Austin in the 1960s yielded fossils from more than 40 genera of ice age animals including bones and teeth of mammoths, mastodons, scimitar cats, lions, bears, several rodent species, a species of turtle that was never before known to exist and numerous other vertebrates.