Why Is There a Rhino-Shaped Cave in Washington State?

Yes, there’s a cave shaped like a rhinoceros in Washington State. Learn how it was created and discovered in this episode of BrainStuff.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey, brain
Stuff laur in the focal bomb here. Not all fossils
are bones, or shells or teeth. Most of us would
agree that mammoth tusks and Stegosaurus spikes are pretty darn cool.
And yet the fossil record is not limited to old
body parts. Fossils are defined as any naturally preserved remains

(00:25):
or traces of life forms that existed in the geologic past,
and that covers a lot of ground. And that's sort
of a pun because a fossil can take the form
of a footprint, the leaf impression, or a filled in
tunnel left behind by prehistoric land beavers. One of the
strangest fossils ever discovered is actually a cave. About fifteen

(00:46):
million years ago and what's now eastern Washington State, a
volcanic fissure eruption sent lava streaming into a shallow river
or lake where a rhino happened to be wallowing. A
layer of basaltic rock formed around the beast, preserving the
outline of its well cooked body long after the flesh
rotted away, leaving only a few bones. For millions of years,

(01:07):
this rhino shaped hole in the earth lay hidden in
the cliffs of Washington's Grant County near Blue Lake, a
popular hiking destination. By the nineteen thirties, erosion had worn
a hole into one end of the subterranean creature mold,
exposing it to the open air. Here's the story of
how the Blue Lake Rhino Cave came to be and

(01:27):
how four Seattle RockHounds accidentally discovered it. Only five species
of rhino are alive today, and none of the living
five species are indigenous to North or South America. However,
from about forty to seventy million years ago, rhinos were
common in North America somewhere hippo like semi aquatic animals.
Others had wicked tusks instead of the nasal horns we

(01:50):
see in their modern day counterparts. Paleontologists think that the
Blue Lake rhino cave likely formed around the corps of
a Die sathereum. While female Di sah Aium were hornless,
each adult male had a pair of small horns sitting
side by side near the tip of his snout. The
dimensions of the Blue Lake cave tell us that the
disratherium who left it behind was about eight feet that's

(02:12):
two point four meters long from snout to rear, and
stood a little bit less than four feet that's one
point two meters tall at the shoulder. In life, the
animal probably weighed about a ton or so. Nobody knows
if the creature had already died when it became entombed. However,
judging by the contours of the mold, it seems the
body was rather bloated. This could indicate the decomposition was

(02:34):
already setting in. Also, the legs are pointed skyward, telling
us the rhino may have been floating on its back
in a state of rigor mortis. The cave's walls are
made of fifteen million year old pillow basalt, a kind
of igneous rock that normally forms when lava contacts cold
water and rapidly cools down. So dead or alive, the
diceratherium must have been hanging out in a body of

(02:56):
water during a volcanic eruption. Then the lava came pouring in.
Maybe it got knocked over anyway, a lava can hit
temperatures of more than one thousand, six hundred degrees fahrenheit
that's nine degrees celsius. Ordinarily, this ultra hot material would
have burned right through to be skin, flesh, and bone,
but instead, the cold water converted the molten rock into

(03:18):
a tightly packed layer of hardening pillow basalt. The corpse
eventually rotted away, and even most of its bones disappeared,
yet the mold that enveloped the body stayed largely intact,
largely but not entirely. When you think about it, the
fact that we even know this weird little cave exists
is pretty amazing. Millions of years after the thing formed,

(03:40):
flowing water carved and opening in the mold right about
where the rhino's hind quarters used to be, yet erosion
hasn't destroyed it completely. Today, the cave's entrance is big
enough for an adult person to enter, but getting inside
may prove difficult for some visitors. You see, the Blue
Lake Rhino Cave is located in the face of a
cliff about three hundred feet or ninety one above the

(04:02):
lake that shares its name. During the summer of nineteen
thirty five, two adventurous couples from Seattle were hiking around
the cliff in searge of petrified wood. On their trip,
the quartet happened to discover the cave, they had the
honor of becoming the first people in recorded history to
enter the prehistoric rhino mold. Inside, they noticed a handful
of fragmentary animal bone fossils, including a partial jaw. These

(04:26):
were sent to paleobotanist George F. Beck of Central Washington University,
who couldn't resist visiting the site for himself. Upon gathering
more bones, he enlisted California Institute of Technology paleontologist Chester
Stock to identify them. Stock determined that the bony bits
came from an extinct rhino. Soon scientific community realized that
the cave itself was a full bodied cast of that

(04:48):
very same animal, a beast who last drew breath fifteen
million years ago. In ninety eight, a team from the
University of California at Berkeley heroically scaled the cliff and
filled the cave with plaster, eating a three dimensional duplicate
of the interior. Also, an exact hollow replica of the
cave was put on display at Seattle's Work Museum, where
it still stands today. Today's episode was written by Mark

(05:16):
Vancini and produced by Tyler clayg. Brain Stuff is a
production of I Heeart Radio's how Stuff Works. For more
in this and lots of other well preserved topics, visit
our home planet how stuff Works dot com and for more.
Podcast for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows