Beware of dirt piles that blow in front of your car.
A few years ago, I was driving from my home in Lehigh Acres, Florida to the small town of LaBelle 15-20 miles away. Just before I entered the city limits, a swirl of soft sand momentarily clouded my vision as it whipped across the road. Instinctively I followed the sand’s source and saw that it came from a tall mound of dirt a hundred feet off the roadway.
I make my living sifting through dirt for signs of Florida’s past, so I quickly pulled over and dove into the pile. Reddish brown fragments of fossilized bones were scattered about like fresh clumps of chocolate in a huge scoop of rocky road ice cream. It was every fossil hunter's dream.
Adjacent to the pile was a retention pond that the Florida Department of Transportation had just dug out for road-water run-off. I knew the pond produced the pile so I bellied my way down to the soupy clay bottom and with my hands began to imitate a raccoon foraging for a meal. Soon the gooey stuff began giving up it’s ancient bounty: partial skeletons of lumbering mammoth and mastodon elephants, bull-size ground sloths, humpless camels, old-world horses, pig-like peccaries, dire wolves and deer.
I invited paleontologists at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville to take a closer look. They suspected that the animals might have collectively drowned while crossing a narrow river during a major storm 300,000 to 500,000 years ago.
Over the next 15 months, volunteers and I excavated the site, recovering hundreds of bones, donating them to the Museum. As each bone was exposed, I had an over-whelming sense of awe realizing that these animals had lived and died nearly a half million years before I was born. When I think of time, it is with a wrist-watch, a parking meter, a yearly calendar, or the passing of an older relative. I cannot fathom 500,000 years, let alone the time it took to create our planet and our universe.
Mammoth skull resting upside down with one tooth showing.
But what I spent most of my time thinking about while digging up these primitive creatures was the time before their death. I thought about the years, the months, the weeks, the days and the hours before they died. How did they perish? Was it a major catastrophe or do the bones represent a gradual build up of one animal dying every 10 years over a period of a thousand years? Why couldn’t they save themselves?
I wondered what their world was like 500,000 years ago. How much ice blanketed our Polar caps? Were sea levels lower or higher than today and how was Florida affected? What were the grazing conditions for these animals? Did grassy savannahs dominate the landscape or was it a wooded environment?
Humans would not inhabit Florida for another 485,000 years. What was it like to live free of human contact, with only heat, mosquitoes, saber-toothed cats, wolves, hurricanes and quicksand-like mud to worry about?
To relax one evening after a long day behind a shovel, my wife Marisa and I rented the movie, “Adaptation”, starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. As a screen-writer in the movie, Cage’s character was hired to write a film adaptation of the book “The Orchid Thief”. But as one reviewer puts it, he “suffers from acute mental constipation and turns himself into his writing dilemma.”
As the credits rolled afterwards, a dung beetle scurried across our living room floor, probably lured by the aroma of alligator coprolite I found a day earlier that wasn’t as fossilized as I first thought. Divinely touched, I hopped off our couch and bolted for my electronic pen, shouting to my wife, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!”
I had been writing a nonfiction book about the site I discovered and like Cage‘s character, was struggling with a severe mental block. It lacked life and excitement. But what if I backed up to the summer before these animals died and stuck a camera into their world? And what if I tweaked things just a little? What if I gave those old characters that extra “oomph” we call intelligence, then stepped back to see how they responded? Would they behave as we do? How would they work out their differences? How would they react to love, hate, racism (specie-ism actually), or religion? Would they argue about evolution? Is intelligence a blessing or a curse?
This is their story.
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