by Stephen Parsons
Hundreds of footprints are left on Daytona Beach everyday, but imagine finding the trail of an ancient animal standing 10-feet tall with ivory tusks protruding eight feet from its skull.
The members of WISE, an adult continuing education program sponsored by Daytona State College, gathered at the News-Journal Center Nov. 6 to learn from Dr. James Zacharias of the Museum of Arts and Sciences about the prehistoric history of their beloved town and home state of Florida. As the curator of the museum began to illustrate the scene of prehistoric Florida to the crowd, he lifted the fossilized remains of a 120,000 year old Mastodon found just behind the Subaru Dealership on Nova Road.
Zacharias says, “Florida is a great place to find fossils of extinct mammals, but don’t expect to find a dinosaur here. The state was underwater during the time of the reptiles and the Ice Age caused water levels to fall, giving new animals territory to explore.”
The fossils Zacharias displayed for the crowd, however, almost weren’t recovered in time before excavators at the lot dug up the remains. The workers were hauling off the dirt to prepare the retention pond when they saw strange formations in the rock and placed a call to the museum just off Nova. The paleontologist rushed to the scene to find the scattered fossils of an American Mastodon in the dig site. To his dismay, most of the skeleton had been broken up by machinery but there was still hope. A collective effort by Zacharias and colleagues helped excavate the broken pieces of the skeleton, even a large section of a tusk was pulled from the rock bed.
“We may have found more of the skeleton if not for the work done on the retention pond, but hey it’s not the workers’ job to spot fossils in rock so no one is to blame. The fact a skeleton was found in our own town is a miracle in its self,” says Zacharias.
Daytona Beach is also home to another mammal that walked along the banks of Reed Canal Park. In 1975, 13 Giant Ground Sloth skeletons were found almost perfectly preserved in the muck. Zacharias remembers the find when he was a child and that inspired his passion for paleontology.
Among the other fossils on the table, mammoth teeth were found 50 miles off the coast by a pair of scuba divers. The teeth of a giant prehistoric shark three times the size of a Great White Shark called a Megalodon were found in the waters near St. Petersburg and Tampa. Numerous other extinct mammals such as the Saber Tooth Tiger, Giant Jaguar, and the Dire Wolf have been found in the Sunshine State.
Zacharias gave the crowd an opportunity to come and see firsthand the finds paleontology has found and he excitedly claims, “Paleontology has given us insight to how ancient creatures used to live where we are now and what else could be hiding under dirt and rock waiting to discovered.”