26,000-year-old red fox skeleton finds new home after being removed from Utah cave

VERNAL, Utah (KSL.com) — A “nearly complete” skeleton of a red fox dating back to the last ice age found in northeast Utah over a decade ago is about to get a cushy new home in a much warmer place.

Researchers learned about the red fox skeleton, located about a half-mile inside Whiterocks Cave north of Roosevelt in the Uinta Mountains, at least 15 years ago. However, it wasn’t until August that a team of scientists ultimately decided to recover the bones, said John Foster, curator of the museum at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park, and leader of the project.

The team of nine, including members of the Utah Division of State Parks and the U.S. Forest Service, spent 16 hours completing the expedition. They found that the creature’s bones were still mostly there.

“It was pretty much just lying there in the cave — way, way, way in the back of the cave,” he said, explaining the scene on KSL NewsRadio’s “Jeff Caplan’s Afternoon News” on Monday. “It was lying there more or less on top of the mud. … It was pretty impressive.”

The skeleton — affectionately named Roxy through a museum poll — is believed to be about 26,400 years old, based on radiocarbon testing that had been conducted over a decade ago. That means it roamed the land during the Pleistocene Epoch, an ice age lasting from about 2.6 million years ago to 11,000 years ago. Experts also determined it was a red fox through an examination of the skeleton’s lower jaw years ago.

Utah Division of State Parks officials note that red foxes began appearing in North America about 130,000 to 300,000 years ago, wandering onto the continent from Eurasia. They became fairly common on the northern and western edges of North America.

Greg McDonald, a retired National Park Service paleontologist who specializes in ice age mammals, said Roxy is the oldest “directly dated” red fox in Utah and “among the oldest” in North America.

Experts still don’t know how the fox ended up so far in the cave, but it remained there for over a decade after its discovery because researchers feared its bones wouldn’t survive the journey out of the cave.

Foster said the focus in August was finding a way to delicately remove the skeleton from the cave before the remains could be disturbed. Once that was done, through a well-planned process, the bones went through another process to dry, clean and stabilize them.

Roxy will continue to have a home in northeast Utah, though. Foster said he hopes that the skeleton will be ready to be at least temporarily displayed at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal sometime during the first half of 2025.

“Roxy has finally seen the light of day again after 26,000 years in total darkness,” he added, in a statement. “We look forward to sharing her with visitors soon.”