North Central Florida has been home to many creatures, modern and ancient alike. We are familiar with some, like our backyard eastern gray squirrels and gopher tortoises, but we won’t catch a glimpse of the extinct three-toed horses (Archaeohippus blackbergi, Parahippus leonensis) or giant salamander (Batrachosauroides dissimulans) that once explored the same land.
Each of these animals is part of the faunal history of the Thomas Farm site, an 18-million-year-old sinkhole filled with major fossil finds.
The Thomas Farm dig was a camping expedition, where volunteers set up tents, ate meals together at picnic tables, woke during the cooler morning hours to dig, and uncovered new fossil specimens—many of which helped define what we know of Miocene vertebrates. From the fossils underfoot to the modern animals roaming the landscape, the field crew was immersed in nature. These photographs feature two of the creatures around: the sandhill crane and the rat snake.
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Photographs: Vertebrate Paleontology Archives, items S7.10.1.1, S7.10.1.2, S7.10.1.3, S7.13.1.2, and S7.13.1.22