There Are Claw Marks Inside the Tunnels Under the Ozarks — Whatever Made Them Was Taller Than a Man

September 11, 2001. The whole world is watching screens. In Springfield, Missouri, a road crew on the southern outskirts of the city is blasting a new route through a limestone ridge near the James River. Explosives have already been placed. When the order comes down to halt all detonation across the country, some of the charges are too far along to be retrieved safely. They are allowed to fire. The blast cracks open a twenty-foot-high fissure in the rock face and exposes something behind it that no human being has ever seen. A cave. Two thousand feet long. Sealed inside the limestone for at least fifty-five thousand years. Matt Forir, a geology student at what was then Southwest Missouri State University, was one of the first people through the opening. The air inside had not circulated since the Pleistocene. The floor was undisturbed clay, and pressed into that clay were tracks — hoofprints, pawprints, drag marks — left by animals that have been extinct for tens of thousands of years. But it was the walls that stopped him. Parallel grooves scored into the clay and stone, running in sets of five, reaching fourteen to fifteen feet above the floor.