[music] - What draws me to fossil hunting is definitely the sense of adventure.

- Knowing I'm the first person that laid eyes on this in 15,000, 100,000, 2 million years.

It's pretty cool.

- Fossils are always being uncovered in Florida, and you never know when you're going to make the next big discovery.

[music] - I think this is part of a scoop, but I didn't know what this other side was.

I'm not used to this side.

I think that's probably part of a mammoth tooth.

A mammoth tooth is this big.

The lower teeth that could be to a to a lemon or to a tiger shark or something like that.

[music] - The Peace River is a really fossil rich river.

It is extraordinarily rich with vertebrate fossils over 10-million-year time span.

- You can find fossils along almost the entire stretch of the Peace River and the tributaries leading into it.

- It cuts through a formation called the Bone Valley formation, which is literally named because there were so many bones in it.

A lot of people will go down to the Peace River with just an old spaghetti colander and stick it in there and sift and find stuff.

[music] - Beautiful.

Nice little guy.

- Florida is definitely the best state for collecting fossils in the country.

- It's relatively flat.

It's low, it's sand.

The rivers are cutting through geological time and wearing it down, wearing it down, wearing it down.

[music] - It preserves Ice Age all the way back through Miocene fossils.

So you get abundant shark's teeth from when Florida was underwater, including the famous Megalodon.

- And here's this..here's this Megalodon tooth.

- Because Florida was a large savannah during the last Ice Age, we had an enormous amount of animals that lived and died here over thousands of years, and their bones are preserved.

[music] - Florida is really important for animals that took part in the Great American Biotic Interchange when North and South America connected.

- If you go way, way, way, way back, you have Pangaea, which everything is one big, huge continent.

And then the continents start to split up and migrate.

After it separated long enough, each continent's animal started to evolve their own lineages of dinosaurs and other animals.

- And you have all of these South American animals that had been isolated for millions of years now moving up, they followed this gulf coastal corridor into Florida.

Since Florida was a shallow sea for so long, you're definitely going to find marine animals.

Dugongs are the most common mammal that you're gonna find.

You'll find elephant relatives and saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, all that iconic kind of taxa.

But we have no dinosaurs here in the state of Florida.

And that's because it was completely underwater when the dinosaurs lived.

[music] - All you need to look for fossils in the state of Florida is a $5 a year fossil permit from the University of Florida.

So we can act as essentially foot-soldiers for the academic paleontologists who don't have the manpower to go out and collect from every corner of the state.

- They're actually the boots on the ground, going out and finding these things, having this like group of people who are willing to go spend their resources and everything to find fossils in the field is really important.

- All right.

So we're going to drive to the spot here and we're going to dive today.

To me, the adventure of finding this stuff, knowing I'm the first person that laid eyes on this in 15,000, 100,000, 2 million years.

Nobody's seen it.

And it's pretty cool.

The desire to collect things goes way back.

I'm talking about maybe even in cave people.

We know that people like to collect things.

And I was one of those people that got bitten by the collecting bug.

[music] For all 35 years of my career, I worked with special needs students.

My PhD is in special education, exceptional child education.

So this is purely a hobby.

My wife says, by the time you've written four books, it's an obsession, which it probably is.

[music] Once I retired, my hobby became diving and collecting fossils.

[music] Since I've been diving for about 30 years, I've found a lot of neat stuff.

[music] This was one of the first.

- Mammoth bones I had found.

- It's an ulna, so it's a front leg bone and it was found in the Peace River.

The neck vertebrae here are very flat, so these would all stack one on top of the other, all the neck vertebrae.

[music] This is Fossil Diving.

That was the first book I came out with, "Fossil Diving in Florida's Waters, in 1998."

[music] There's a feeling you can reach when you're diving for fossils that you probably can't reach anywhere else in the world.

[music] So you get down there, you're in pitch blackness, and you're not hearing anything.

You're not seeing anything.

So you're just feeling stuff and you're just totally in tune to what you're doing.

[music] - Uh.

- I got a good one.

[music] - Unlike other hobbies, when you go out and fossil hunt, you never get to choose what you're going to find.

- Oh, yeah.

Look at this, Luke.

- When you find unique stuff, it really should go to the Natural History Museum in Florida, which is in Gainesville.

- So when things don't fit in the cabinets, we put them in here.

[music] I saw the movie Jurassic Park.

I was a big dinosaur kid.

And from there, I just always wanted to do paleontology.

[music] This museum is in the top five largest collections of vertebrate fossils.

I manage this huge collection of about 800,000 fossils now.

[music] This is Thecachampsa.

So it's a crocodile relative.

It is a cast that's been bronzed.

This is the lower jaw.

And then that's the upper jaw.

So it's an extinct type of crocodilian that used to live here in Florida.

[music] Fossils are always being uncovered in Florida.

And if people aren't going to go find them, then they're just going to continue washing away.

And you never know when you're gonna make the next big discovery.

[music] In 2018, I kind of jokingly said that I need a skull of the amphitheater.

Homozygous septentrionalis, a giant armadillo.

And then Bob Sinibaldi found one.

[music] [music] - So I was diving and was basically done for the day.

And I had a little bit of air left.

So instead of coming to the surface and coming back, I was coming back underwater.

And I looked over to the side of the river and there was a hoof core from a giant armadillo.

And I looked at it when I got it to the surface.

And I mean, it was so absolutely perfect, pristine.

So I when I get home, I log everything I need to check this spot again.

So the next time I went up, I went right to that spot.

I was probably in about 3.5 ft of clay down, feeling every bone and toe bone, leg bone, the jaws, everything was packed in these scutes, part of the big shell that covers the giant armadillo.

But the skull was just laying just off to the side, and it came out in one piece.

- I was in my office, and I actually just started like shouting to myself.

And because it was just completely unbelievable.

Usually you just find isolated elements of this species, which is Holmesina Septentrionalis, to find a three-dimensionally preserved skeleton that has been crushed.

That is just exceptionally rare.

This is the most complete of this species worldwide.

[music] As soon as I got "Bob's giant armadillo skull" CT scanned it.

This is the nicest CT scan of a skull that I have ever seen.

And I scanned every single skull in the Florida museum.

So this area right here, the brain in mammals, pushes up against the the cranial cavity so much that it actually leaves impressions.

So this is what the brain would have looked like.

It's just really exciting to be able to see a fossil brain of an extinct animal.

[music] So this is Bob's home.

And then I pulled these two out because these were the best that I had until this.

This just kind of goes to show like this is all broken up on the inside.

And I couldn't really get a good brain out of that to study.

And this one is almost completely missing the cavity where the brain would have sat.

So then this is just like perfect and unbelievable.

[music] Right now, our best estimate is that it's about 250,000 years old.

[music] A head shield had never been known.

So this is the plate of armor that would have sat atop the head.

Once you really start taking measurements and looking at these things that help distinguish the species.

[music] - We believe the giant armadillo, the one that I found was about 500 pounds.

It was very big.

Of course, a lot of that weight would have been in that shell.

It has this very thick shell on it for protection from saber cats and dire wolves, and whatever else would have possibly eaten it back then.

They believe it could have gone up on its haunches, and at six feet it would have looked me eye to eye.

[music] [music] Hey, how you doing?

Do you want to come in and take a closer look at what I got here?

I'd like to.

[music] Many people get self-educated, but if you join a club, you go to lectures, you meet people, you read books.

The Tampa Bay Fossil Club began in 1981.

We are still the largest, probably amateur organization in the world at over 500 members.

- I was about seven years old when I joined the Tampa Bay Fossil Club.

They have monthly field trips to go look for fossils.

They have annual shows like Fossil Fest that are community education based.

[music] - Fossil Fest is a big celebration of collecting fossils.

We have display cases that show what our members have found.

We try to educate people on what is in our state, what was in our state in the past, and why it's important to protect some of those things, why scientifically important items need to go to the university.

So Fossil Fest, to us and to the community is a way of us educating them.

And it's and it's a way of having a fun event for them too.

[music] - My hopes for the future is that more people get involved and interested in salvaging the history that remains beneath our feet before it's all, all lost to either time and erosion or to pavement.

- So to the next generation of fossil hunters, I would say keep fossil hunting because they are going to keep eroding out of the ground, especially here in Florida.

Preserving history is extremely important for future generations to be able to study these things and to understand paleoenvironments and how animals lived, and how what we are doing now might impact future animals and ourselves.

[music]