Mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, camels, bison, glyptodons and massive, five-ton sloths once roamed what is now Mexico.
The remarkable discovery of their remains in a little-known, treacherous cave is told in the award-winning, lighthearted documentary “Crypt of the Megafauna,” available on YouTube.
The story began in March 2019, when biologist Luis Espinasa from Marist University set out to study cavefish in an underground stream flowing through a remote cave in San Luis Potosí.
“I knew that both eyeless and eyed versions of the cave tetra fish had been spotted in a small cave near Ciudad Valles,” Espinasa explains. “It was a tiny cave, nothing more than a sinkhole leading to a pool where both morphs lived together. It looked like this cave would be an ideal place to study their behaviors and to witness the effects of natural selection.”
While exploring, Espinasa and his team discovered another entrance, leading to an unexplored passage. After descending a vertical pit, the group crawled through a narrow, uncomfortable passage, the ceiling barely 40 centimeters (16 inches) high.
Instead of a comfortable sandy floor, the ground was “a nightmare of rough, spiky rocks, each movement sending sharp jolts of pain through your body,” Espinasa says. “These rocks dug into our skin with relentless determination. They offered no respite, only an unyielding challenge to our endurance, and, unfortunately, for this first visit we had not bothered to bring along knee pads.”
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