photograph courtesy of the University of New Mexico. Caves in the Guadalupe Mountains in Texas and New Mexico – including Burnet Cave, pictured above – preserved the bones of now-vanished Ice Age animals, and abundant artifacts of ancient human life.

The Guadalupe Mountains are seductive for their wooded canyons and high forests. But they're as notable for what's hidden beneath and within them as they are for their peaks.

Carlsbad Caverns is famous, but there are caves and rockshelters throughout the Guadalupes, and these spaces have a distinctive significance for scientists. They've yielded a bonanza in paleontology – the bones of Ice Age mammoths and sloths, short-faced bears,... Hosted by for KRTS