Chicago Sun-Times: Homestead Cave, at the north end of Utah’s Lakeside Mountains, has yielded a paleontological jackpot for scientists reconstructing ancient Great Basin environments, thanks to owls that spit up small-animal prey there for thousands of years. The piles of regurgitated pellets drew Dave Madsen in the early 1990s, hoping the bones would provide a record of plants and animals. Madsen and his colleagues found scientific pay dirt. Three years of excavation recovered undisturbed bones representing…