Half a million years ago, a massive sinkhole opened up in Florida that swallowed dozens of animals. The sinkhole preserved 552 fossils until 2022 when amateur paleontologists Robert Sinibaldi and Joseph Branin found them while diving in Florida’s Steinhatchee River.
The well-preserved fossils are from a wide range of animals, including a tapir, armadillos, sloths, and horses—a few of the species are no longer naturally found in Florida anymore. The find offers a glimpse into Florida’s ancient past, specifically Florida as it existed in the middle Irvingtonian period of the Pleistocene ice ages.
Divers Find 500,000-Year-Old ‘Graveyard’ of Fossils in Florida Sinkhole
That’s a lot of big words that mean nothing to you, so let’s quickly define them.
The Pleistocene epoch was a geological time that included the last ice age when glaciers covered the world. It stretched from 2.58 million years up to nearly 12,000 years ago. It’s the era that gave us the greatest hits of extinct animals like mammoths, mastodons, and sabertoothed cats.
The Pleistocene ice age is broken up into three stages: early, middle, and late. The middle Irvingtonian stage is essentially a subsection within a subsection of the middle Pleistocene era. Not much is known about what was going on in Florida during the Irvingtonian stretch of the Pleistocene epoch, or anywhere else for that matter.
Sinibaldi and Branin’s sinkhole discovery represents only the second middle Irvingtonian site ever found in Florida. Sinibaldi described the dive in the river’s murky waters as like “diving in coffee.” The pair knew they were onto something when they found what appeared to be whore Steve, and then they found a hoof, and then a tape here skull, and then several more fossils that had been preserved in the ancient sediment for hundreds of thousands of years.
One of the site’s key discoveries is a set of fossils belonging to a relative of the modern-day armadillo that reveal an anatomical transition between today’s little armored roadside critter and its massive ancient ancestor.
The presence of bones belonging to caballines, an early type of horse, suggests that Florida once had a much more open landscape filled with open planes and less tress than today.
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