Elephant-like tusks. A toe bone of an ancient condor. Even a snapping turtle with a smaller turtle coming out of its nose.

Some of the discoveries being made at the Florida Museum of Natural History’s new dig site in Williston, Florida, are odd and seemingly out of place, to say the least. Animals you’d expect to see in Africa, Asia or South America, like rhinoceros and llamas, are common finds. But that’s what makes the site so exciting, says vertebrate paleontologist Jon Bloch.

“This is not the kind of thing you can experience every day in just any place,” said Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum on the University of Florida campus.

To reach the new dig site where a plethora of ancient creatures are being pulled from North Florida’s prehistoric rock layers, UF photographer Hannah Pietrick and I traveled to a patch of dry earth in a clearing of forest outside of Williston, Florida. About 40 miles from the modern day coastline, it’s hard to believe the site was once an ancient river that flowed into the prehistoric Gulf of Mexico.

Over millions of years, sea levels fell and the coastline receded. The river dried up, leaving its bones covered in layers of sand.

At least, until a few were uncovered by a local Williston landowner, who then contacted paleontologists at the Florida Museum of Natural History. That’s when Bloch got involved.

For the past year, museum researchers have been digging against the clock. They need to remove as many fossils as they can, as quickly as possible. Dig sites are expensive to operate, prolonged exposure to sunlight and cycles of wetting and drying disintegrate the fossils, and eventually the property owner will need the land back for other uses.

“Concentrations of fossils like this are rare, especially from this age, and it is likely that a lot of finds go unreported when they are found. You have to have all the planets align to make this work,” Bloch said.

Volunteers are an essential part of making this happen. The museum scientists have opened the site to UF students and anyone else over 15 years old willing to get dirty and serve as a field volunteer through May 21 (sign up here).

The more sand and clay that’s moved, the more rare things will be found, Bloch said, standing on the edge of the crater-like dig site and pointing to some of the locations where the most fascinating fossils have been unearthed.

“If you want to set yourself up for exciting discoveries, you look in a place where nobody’s ever looked before. And that’s what we’ve got here, Bloch said.

“It’s a time and a place where nobody’s ever looked before. So that’s great for us but it’s also an opportunity to offer the community something we haven’t been able to offer in over a decade, and that’s the chance to come out here and make really new discoveries along with us,” he said.

In the lab

In the preparatory lab at the Florida Museum, the shelves are overflowing with plaster jackets holding mystery fossils from the Williston site waiting to be pieced back together and studied.

The lab is where thousands of 5.5 million-year-old fossils ranging from turtles and alligators to ancient versions of elephants and rhinoceros pulled from the dig site are brought to live their second life.

Jason Bourque, a fossil preparator in the Museum’s vertebrate paleontology division, sat at a table where he slowly removed dirt and rock from a large femur bone that once belonged to a gomphothere, an elephant-like creature that once roamed North Florida. Gomphotheres are one of the most common fossil animals found at the Williston site, Bourque said.

A section of the site, in fact, is almost entirely gomphothere bones — an elephant graveyard of sorts.

https://ufnews.atavist.com/searching-for-red-pandas