Recovery of Petra – Produced by Dave Socky, 2020. 14:13 minutes
Petra was a cat. A Pleistocene cat, probably at least 11,000 years old, living near the end of the most recent ice age. Petra, now a mere skeleton, got stranded in a cave, and remained frozen in time by the cave’s stable environment, and hadn’t seen light in millennia, until 2016, when a group of curious cavers discovered it. What is involved in recovering a large set of bones from the depths of Burja Cave? How do you get to the cave? What is the passage like to get to the bones? Are the bones fully articulated? Are they mush or solid? How should they be packed? How to get them out? That is what this program is about. The science – the steps – the process – what is required to recover the bones of an ancient cat with the least damage.