Long Mile Cave, sometimes known locally as Pick'ny Mama Cave or Hell's Gate Cave, is a

palaeontological Paleontology (), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossi ...

and palaeoanthropological site in the

Cockpit Country Cockpit Country is an area in Trelawny and Saint Elizabeth, Saint James, Saint Ann, Manchester and the northern tip of Clarendon parishes in Jamaica. The land is marked by steep-sided hollows, as much as deep in places, which are separated b ...

of north-western

Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ...

Description

The site is a small, largely collapsed,

limestone Limestone ( calcium carbonate ) is a type of carbonate sedimentary rock which is the main source of the material lime. It is composed mostly of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of . Limestone forms whe ...

chamber cave that is now a rock shelter with a depth of 3 m and a length of 6 m. It lies in the

Trelawny Parish Trelawny (Jamaican Patois: ''Trilaani'' or ''Chrilaani'') is a parish in the county of Cornwall in northwest Jamaica. Its capital is Falmouth. It is bordered by the parishes of Saint Ann in the east, Saint James in the west, and Saint Elizab ...

close to the Coxheath-Windsor Road on privately owned farmland and is an important Quaternary palaeontological site as well as containing a Taino midden. Extinct

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

animals discovered at the site include the Jamaican monkey (''Xenothrix mcgregori'') and the Jamaican flightless ibis (''Xenicibis xympithecus''), which were described from material excavated by Harold Anthony in 1919–1920.Olson & Steadman (1977).

References

Notes

Sources

* * Geography of Trelawny Parish Caves of Jamaica Paleontological sites of the Caribbean Paleoanthropological sites Rock shelters Caves of the Caribbean {{Jamaica-geo-stub