It was discovered by workmen in 1821, and found to contain fossilized bones of a variety of mammals from the Eemian interglacial (globally known as the Last Interglacial, ~130-115,000 years ago), when temperatures were comparable to contemporary times, including animals currently absent from Britain or globally extinct, including hippopotamuses (amongst the farthest north any such remains have been found), straight-tusked elephants, the narrow-nosed rhinoceros, and cave hyenas.

William Buckland analyzed the cave and its contents in December 1821 and determined that the bones were the remains of animals brought in by hyenas who used it for a den, and not a result of the Biblical flood floating corpses in from distant lands, as he had first thought.

Some of the fossils were sent to William Clift the curator of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons; he identified some of the bones as the remains of hyenas larger than any of the modern species.

Upon further investigation, he realized the cave had never been open to the surface through its roof, and that the only entrance was too small for the carcasses of animals as large as elephants or hippos to have floated in.

[8] A few days before reading the formal paper, he gave the following colourful account at a dinner held by the Geological Society: The hyaenas, gentlemen, preferred the flesh of elephants, rhinoceros, deer, cows, horses, etc., but sometimes, unable to procure these, & half starved, they used to come out of the narrow entrance of their cave in the evening down to the water's edge of a lake which must once have been there, & so helped themselves to some of the innumerable water-rats in wh[ich] the lake abounded.

[6] At the presentation the society's president, Humphry Davy, said: by these inquiries, a distinct epoch has, as it were, been established in the history of the revolutions of our globe: a point fixed from which our researches may be pursued through the immensity of ages, and the records of animate nature, as it were, carried back to the time of the creation.