What he found in the limestone caves of the Lagoa Santa region was something that natural history alone could not adequately explain: the bones of animals that were extinct, mixed with the bones of people who appeared to have lived alongside them.

Lund’s excavations in the caves of Lagoa Santa between 1835 and 1844 produced a collection of skeletal material that was, for the mid-nineteenth century, remarkable in its scope and its implications.

He found hundreds of animal specimens representing dozens of species, many of them belonging to the extinct megafauna of the Pleistocene — the giant ground sloths, the glyptodonts, the horses, the mastodons that had vanished from the Americas at the end of the last Ice Age.

He also found human bones.