The lake is gone.

The wetlands are largely gone.

What remains is desert — the accumulated result of thousands of years of climatic drying that slowly stripped the landscape of the water that had once made it rich.

But in the cave, sealed from the environmental changes that had transformed everything around it, something from that ancient wet world had been kept safe.

The Burial That Time Preserved

Among all the remarkable things about the Spirit Cave discovery, perhaps the most immediately striking is the quality of the preservation.