Vranjača Cave ( pronounced [vraɲatʃa] ; Croatian : Špilja Vranjača ) is a karst cave in Croatia , on the northern slopes of the Mosor mountain near the village of Kotlenice, some 18 miles inland from Split . The cave is a Geomorphological Natural Monument of Croatia, and a significant site of Neolithic culture and post- diluvial fauna .
11-432: The cave was formed in rudist limestone as a ponor of an ancient stream. Vranjača cave consists of two large halls. The entrance hall, measuring about 65 by 20 meters, has no cave deposit formations. A narrow corridor leads to a 100 m long and 60 m wide hall with an abundance of stalagmites , stalactites and flowstone of many shapes and colors. The cave system starts at 450 m above sea-level, descends by 65 m, and
22-631: A coral would be. However, rudists were one of the most important constituents of reefs during the Cretaceous Period. During the Cretaceous, rudist reefs were so successful that they may have driven scleractinian corals out of many tropical environments, including shelves that are today the Caribbean and the Mediterranean . It is likely that their success as reef builders was at least partially due to
33-556: A few centimeters to well over a meter in length. Their "classic" morphology consisted of a lower, roughly conical valve that was attached to the seafloor or to neighboring rudists, and a smaller upper valve that served as a kind of lid for the organism. The small upper valve could take a variety of interesting forms, including: a simple flat lid, a low cone, a spiral, and even a star-shaped form. The oldest rudists are found in late Jurassic rocks in France. The rudists became extinct at
44-518: Is some 360 meters long. The temperature inside the cave is, at 15 °C, constant throughout the year. The entrance hall of the cave was known to the locals long before the second hall was discovered in 1903 by the land owner Stipe Punda. The first drawing of the cave by miner Luigi Miotto reaches Fritz von Kerner, a geologist from Viena who in 1905 publishes the first description of the cave alongside Miotto's sketch in his article Die Grotte von Kotlenice am Nordfuße der Mosor planina . The first mention of
55-568: The Cretaceous that they were major reef-building organisms in the Tethys Ocean , until their complete extinction at the close of the Cretaceous. The Late Jurassic forms were elongated, with both valves being similarly shaped, often pipe or stake-shaped, while the reef-building forms of the Cretaceous had one valve that became a flat lid, with the other valve becoming an inverted spike-like cone. The size of these conical forms ranged widely from just
66-549: The orders Hippuritida ( Hippuritoida ) or Rudistes (sometimes Rudista ). Order: †Hippuritida Bieler, Carter & Coan in 2010 also named the non-Hippuritid families Megalodontoidea and Chamoidea , of Megalodontida and Venerida respectively, as "Rudists", but this classification was not monophyletic . The classification of rudists as true reef-builders is controversial because they would catch and trap much sediment between their lower conical valves; thus, rudists were not completely composed of biogenic carbonates as
77-587: The Research of Karst Phenomena Section of the Mountaineering Association Mosor from Split, led by mining engineer Rade Mikačić, built an access road, cave stairway, and installed rope railings and electric lights. In 1934 and 1935, below the layers of clay, loam and ashes, Girometta excavates shards of early Neolithic unornamented earthenware and scorched bone fragments of post-diluvial animals. In deeper strata remains of Fallow deer (Cervus dama) and
88-564: The end of the Cretaceous, apparently as a result of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event . It had been thought that this group began a decline about 2.5 million years earlier which culminated in complete extinction half a million years before the end of the Cretaceous. The extinction of rudist bivalves was during the Maastrichtian (end of the Cretaceous ). The rudists are, according to different systematic schemes, placed in
99-456: The extinct species Cave bear (Ursus spealeus) were found. 43°33′44″N 16°38′55″E / 43.5622°N 16.6487°E / 43.5622; 16.6487 Rudists See text Rudists are a group of extinct box-, tube- or ring-shaped marine heterodont bivalves belonging to the order Hippuritida that arose during the Late Jurassic and became so diverse during
110-457: The extreme environment of the Cretaceous. During this period tropical waters were between 6°C and 14°C warmer than today and also more highly saline, and while this may have been a suitable environment for the rudists, it was not nearly so hospitable to corals and other contemporary reef builders. These rudist reefs were sometimes hundreds of meters tall and often ran for hundreds of kilometers on continental shelves; in fact at one point they fringed
121-490: The name Vranjača appeared in the 1905 publication of Prirodni zemljopis Hrvatske by Dragutin Hirc. Two high-school professors from Split, Umberto Girometta and Ramiro Bujas, conduct first scientific explorations of the cave and publish their findings in 1911–1914. Girometta discovers a new eyeless spider species, named after him Stalita Giromettai. The cave became available to the public in 1929 when local enthusiasts and members of
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