THE LATE PLEISTOCENE HUTIAS OF RED HILLS FISSURE, JAMAICA

Red Hills Fissure (RHF) is an infilled, karstic solutional feature exposed by a roadcut in southern Jamaica. The site was discovered in 1988 and immediately recognized as an unusually rich source of late Quaternary gastropods and vertebrate bone. Glenn Goodfriend, who worked on Jamaican Pleistocene and Holocene gastropods beginning in 1983, and who took a peripheral interest in Jamaican fossil vertebrates, undertook a set of amino acid racemization dates on Red Hills Fissure gastropods in 1994. Goodfriend’s estimate of “20,000 – 30,000” years BP proved to be in general agreement with a ¹⁴C date on RHF bone collagen of 31,960 ± 1220 obtained in 1995.

Recent work on RHF has focused on the abundant remains of the endemic, mid-sized rodent Geocapromys brownii. Morphological data on a collection of hemi-mandibles has facilitated the construction of a life table for the species in the late Pleistocene; the first for any West Indian Pleistocene vertebrate. Studies of fluorine update in the fossil bone have also defined the timespan of the RHF deposit, and further demonstrated the utility of the technique for relative dating of cave bone deposits.