Cumberland Bone Cave
Fossil-filled cave on the outskirts of Cumberland, Maryland, US
The Cumberland Bone Cave is a fossil-filled cave along the western slope of Wills Mountain on the outskirts of Cumberland, Maryland near Corriganville in Allegany County, Maryland.
History and paleontology
In 1912 workers excavating a cut for the Western Maryland Railway along Andy's Ridge broke into the partly filled cave. 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 cave later became known as the "Cumberland Bone Cave".
Between 1912 and 1916, Gidley excavated the Cumberland Bone Cave, where 41 genera of mammals were found, about 16 per cent of which are extinct. Numerous excellent skulls and enough bones to reconstruct skeletons for a number of the species were present. Skeletons of the short-faced bears and an extinct saber-toothed cat 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, DC. Many of the fossilized bones date from 200,000 years ago. The Cumberland Bone cave represents one of the finest Pleistocene-era faunas known from eastern North America.
Today very little of this cave is still in existence, though some excavations are still being performed by the Maryland DNR. The remains can be seen on the south wall of the cut, at the same level of the neighboring railbed, and at the top of the north wall.
The public source identifies “Cumberland Bone Cave” as fossil-filled cave on the outskirts of Cumberland, Maryland, US. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cumberland, Bone and Cave.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5193844. Authority coordinates are 39.691, -78.788. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1912 and 1916.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cumberland Bone Cave” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.