Montbrook fossil site offers clues to Florida's past

GAINESVILLE, Fla. - Workers at the Montbrook Fossil Site, just two hours north of Tampa, are sifting through clues to Florida's past.

"The fossil record provides us a past record of how plants and animals respond to things like changing climate, changing sea levels, that kind of thing. So if we can study that, we can learn lessons that are interesting to us now and in the future," explained Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

It looks dry now, but five million years ago, an ancient river ran through the Montbrook site. That river attracted lots of elephant-like creatures named gomphotheres, relatives to mastodons and mammoths.

"These ones would have had four tusks, so tusks coming out of the bottom of their jaws, as well as the top part of their skull," said Bloch.

Over 79,000 fossils have been found at Montbrook so far. Many of them are new discoveries for the period, like flamingos, otters, swans, and sabretooth cats.

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"The reason we’re finding all these new things is because we’ve never had layers of sediment like this of this age from here before. So now we are getting a window into what that time looked like. That’s always exciting," shared Bloch.

Small fossils are brushed and bagged, and large ones are carefully wrapped in a plaster jacket. They’re brought back to the lab at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

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The site was discovered nine years ago by the landowner's five-year-old granddaughter. She climbed down a depression in the ground and came up with a handful of bones.

"The landowner recognized immediately that those bones were probably fossil and then contacted the University of Florida," said Bloch.

To see some of the fossils from the Montbrook site up close, you can visit the Florida Museum of Natural History. They have an exhibit dedicated to the excavation there, as well as loads of other cool stuff, all having to do with Florida's amazing history. 

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