Published: Apr 28, 2002
What would a UT professor see in
the flat south-central Florida wilderness of Hendry County? Bones, tusks and
teeth. For Dr. Mason Meers, assistant professor of biology, that’s more than
reason enough to dig Hendry County, which he and a team of volunteers have been
doing since last year.
When a farm manager expanding a watering hole found a large bone too big to
belong to the forebears of his cattle, he called the Florida Museum of Natural
History in Gainesville, which in turn contacted the paleontological society in
Lee County, which borders on Hendry County. The quest for info on the origin of
the discovered item led to the desk of Meers, then teaching at Florida Gulf
Coast University in Ft. Myers.
Since then, he and his team, which includes UT biology majors Samantha Wiley
and Betty Medina, have devoted spring break and a lot of weekends to unearthing
myriad natural treasures from the site, which has yielded the bones, teeth and
tusks of mastodons, mammoths, giant ground sloths, tapirs, llamas, camels, giant
tortoises and horses from the mid-Pleistocene era, 200,000-500,000 years
ago.
The spring-fed pond, continually pumped out during the short February-April
dig season, is was uncommonly productive, with a major find by one team member
or another every few minutes. The site also is significant, Meers says, in
terms of the time period being discovered. Both later and earlier eras have
been found in abundance, but this find bolsters a relative paucity of material
from its time.
“It’s exceptionally productive. I’d say right now it’s the most productive
site being worked in Florida,” Meers says. “The amount—just the volume of
material is tremendous, and species diversity is pretty high, also.”
“It falls in a time period when we don’t have a lot of fossil sites in
Florida,” agrees Dr. Richard Hulbert of the Florida Museum of Natural
History. “There are only two or three other sites known, and none them are this
far south, so we’re getting a picture of what southwest Florida looked like half
a million years ago.”
Pending funding and the land owners’ continued generosity, Meers and crew
plan to resume digging at the site next February. An exhibit containing several
specimens from last year’s digs opened April 20 at the Ft. Myers Historical
Museum.
For more information, contact the Office of Public Information at publicinfo@ut.edu.