William Buckland and the British Bone Caves

 

William Buckland and the British Bone Caves

1821 Kirkdale, Yorkshire Quarrymen broke into a hidden cave containing numerous bones. At first these were used for road repairs. Reverant William Buckland, the first professor of Geology at Oxford, soon visited and carefully analysed the cave and its contents. After studying Kirdale Cave, Buckland came to the astounding conclusion that the bones were the remains of animals dragged into the cave by a clan of hyenas. The cave was an ancient hyena den! The animals once lived here in a warmer Yorkshire together with hippos, elephants, lions, rhinos,...
Still believing that the Noachian Flood was a historical event, Buckland concluded that the bones were antediluvian or older than the Deluge. Kirkdale Cave was a window into an unknown world lost in deep time...

 

Making of the props: a hyena jawbone and a woolly rhinoceros bone

We re-enacted the 1821 discovery of a hyena jawbone in Kirkdale Cave, in the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire, England. 

It was a pitty we did not have a 3D model of this jawbown available. Luckily, our artist Simon was willing to give it a try. Only based on a picture found on Wikipedia he molded the impressive teeth of the animal in clay. Afterwards, they were meticulously painted and mounted in an EVA foam jawbone. After texturing the model the result is astounding!

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Fossil poop

The geologist William Conybeare drew this cartoon of William Buckland sticking his head into a hyena den to honor Buckland's ground breaking analysis of fossils found at Kirkdale cave.

In Kirkdale Cave, Buckland found more than just bones from tropical species such as hyenas, hippos, rhinos and so on. He found strange white balls and on closer examination concluded they were fossil hyena excrement. Buckland was the first to analyse fossil poo and call it coprolites. To prove that the balls were indeed from hyenas, he even bred a hyena named Billy. He fed the animal carcasses and examined its poop and the gnarled bones it left behind. The teeth marks matched those found on the fossil bones at Kirkdale. This strengthened Buckland's theory that the cave was once a hyena den in a much warmer Britain.