Florida: a Beastly Place

By Frederic Golden

Old bones in an okra patch lead to a prehistoric zoo

When a hired hand brought in some skeletal remains unearthed on their okra farm in Archer, Fla., Ron and Pat Love asked a scientist friend to identify them. Horse bones, he said, good for nothing more than paperweights. Dissatisfied, the Loves sought a second opinion from Paleontologist S. David Webb of the Florida State Museum in Gainesville. Webb quickly determined that the bones had come not from a horse but from a short-legged rhinoceros called Teleoceras. It was a creature that had lumbered across that area of Florida millions of years ago.

Since that chance discovery in the summer of 1974, the Love homestead has become a landmark in North American paleontology. In seven years of excavation, Webb and his students have dug up--from what has been dubbed the Love Bone Bed--bits and pieces of more than 100 species of animals, many of them long extinct. All date back to the late Miocene epoch, about 9 million years ago. Among the finds: saber-toothed tigers, four-tusked mastodons, a giant camel some 18 ft. high, an extinct raccoon as big as a bear, various ancient horses and dogs --and the Carcharodon megalodon, a relative of the great white shark. As Ron Love puts it, "They had one hell of a zoo here."

The vestiges of that prehistoric menagerie came out of a hole about 150 ft. long, 60 ft. wide and 25 ft. deep, abutting Florida's Route 241 outside of Gainesville. It was excavated at the site of what once was a fast-moving stream that flowed into a great salt marsh along the Gulf of Mexico. Bodies of dead animals collected in the water, and the remains sank to the bottom of the stream. As layer after layer of sediment piled up, the stream eventually vanished, but the bones of the fauna were fossilized and preserved.

In years of digging into the ancient riverbed, Webb and his students sifted through more than 100 tons of clay, working thousands of hours in the sun. They also encountered other problems, like protecting the site from the curious and vandals. To drive them off, recalls Love, he would occasionally fire his bird gun. Says he: "I got the reputation for a while as a crazy farmer."

All the digging and shooting have paid off handsomely. Webb considers the Love pit one of the richest U.S. fossil finds in years, unequaled anywhere in the Southeast. Some specimens turned up in almost wholesale quantities. His team, for example, dug up so many saber-toothed tiger bones that they may help shed a totally new light on the ferocious-looking cats. Some were so young they still had baby teeth, others were 25 to 30 years old. (In appreciation of the Loves, researchers even named one new sabertooth species after them: Barbourofelis lovei.)

In addition to the remains of birds, fish, turtles and crocodiles, Webb's workers found seven species of tiny extinct horses. These are among many mammals, including the saber-toothed tiger, that mysteriously disappeared from' the Western Hemisphere at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Equines were not seen again in the New World until the Spanish reintroduced them in the 16th century. Yet other species located in the Love pit are still alive and well, even if not in Florida. The diggers, for example, identified the remains of tapirs, piglike animals that still roam the rain forests of South America and Malaysia, ancient beavers and squirrels, and even relatives of the Andean llama.

Many of the bones required a high order of scientific sleuthing. In 1978 one of Webb's students, Diderot Gicca, came up with a jawbone that totally baffled the team. Careful study showed it to be part of a hitherto unknown giant ancestor of the raccoon. Students also found a mastodon, an ancestral kin of the elephant, with two pairs of tusks, the lower ones resembling shovels. For a time, they were also puzzled by what seemed an unusually large (nearly 3 ft.) metacarpal bone. It belonged to a creature called Aepycamelus major, the giraffe camel. No less surprising were the remains of a large triple-horned ruminant, or cud-chewing animal, called Yumaceras; fossils of one of these beasts were first uncovered in Colorado in the 1930s. Says Webb: "The bones add a great deal to our knowledge of this animal, which was heavy-footed and not unlike a moose." The diggers also found so many bones of the original rhino that they were able to assemble a virtually complete skeleton. It now proudly stands guard inside the entrance of the museum on the University of Florida campus.

A couple of weeks ago, Webb and his students finally folded up their blue-and-yellow awnings for the last time. They have collected so many barrels of bones that merely sorting and categorizing them will take many more years.

Says Webb: "We leave what is left to other generations. They may have different and more modern methods." Still, in spite of the work ahead, Webb is willing to take time out to listen to anyone who calls with word of another old-bone find.

After all, there is no telling what that next "horse" may turn out to be.

--By Frederic Golden.

Reported by Bernard Diederich/ Archer

With reporting by Bernard Diederich/Archer

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