Red Hills Fissure is a palaeontological site at the Red Hills in Saint Andrew Parish

Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica

Saint Andrew is a parish, situated in the southeast of Jamaica in the county of Surrey. It lies north, west and east of Kingston, and stretches into the Blue Mountains and at the 2001 census had the highest population of all the parishes in Jamaica. The Right Excellent George William Gordon Saint...

 of south-eastern Jamaica

Jamaica

Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...

.

Description

The Red Hills Fissure is a karst

KARST

Kilometer-square Area Radio Synthesis Telescope is a Chinese telescope project to which FAST is a forerunner. KARST is a set of large spherical reflectors on karst landforms, which are bowlshaped limestone sinkholes named after the Kras region in Slovenia and Northern Italy. It will consist of...

ic solutional feature, with a vertical extent of about 8 m and a maximum width of 3 m, that was exposed by road construction in 1988. Originally a cleft or cave in the rock, it was infilled with sediments and debris that included the remains of animals that became trapped there. When it was discovered it was recognised as a rich source of vertebrate

Vertebrate

Vertebrates are animals that are members of the subphylum Vertebrata . Vertebrates are the largest group of chordates, with currently about 58,000 species described. Vertebrates include the jawless fishes, bony fishes, sharks and rays, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds...

, gastropod and well-preserved millipede

Millipede

Millipedes are arthropods that have two pairs of legs per segment . Each segment that has two pairs of legs is a result of two single segments fused together as one...

 fossil

Fossil

Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...

s dating from the late Pleistocene

Pleistocene

The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....

. The abundant fossil remains of the Jamaican Coney

Jamaican coney

The Jamaican Coney is a terrestrial land mammal found in the rocky, forested areas of Jamaica. It is also known as the Jamaican Hutia and is endemic to the Island....

 (Geocapromys brownii) found there have enabled the construction of a life table

Life table

In actuarial science, a life table is a table which shows, for each age, what the probability is that a person of that age will die before his or her next birthday...

 for that species. Analysis of fluorine

Fluorine

Fluorine is the chemical element with atomic number 9, represented by the symbol F. It is the lightest element of the halogen column of the periodic table and has a single stable isotope, fluorine-19. At standard pressure and temperature, fluorine is a pale yellow gas composed of diatomic...

 uptake in the fossil bone has allowed the time-span of the deposit to be dated to about 25–40 thousand years ago. Fossil remains of the extinct Jamaican Flightless Ibis

Jamaican Flightless Ibis

The Jamaican Ibis, Jamaican Flightless Ibis or Clubbed-wing Ibis is an extinct bird species of the ibis subfamily uniquely characterized by its club-like wings...

(Xenicibis xympithecus) have also been found there.