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Coolrox Limited P.O. Box 14591 Gainesville, FL 32604-2591 U.S.A. andrew@coolrox.com (352) 379-0440 |
The Hunt for the Most Dangerous Bird
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This past summer members of the Coolrox staff were asked to take part in a scientific expedition to find fossil evidence of Titanus walleri, a 2-million-year-old killer bird. |
Titanus
walleri
SETTING THE SCENE
Overview: Paleontologists from the Florida
Museum of Natural History asked us to join them in finding bones of an extinct man-eating
bird. These bones lie at the bottom of a local river, beneath about 4' of sand. With
SCUBA, I helped dredge (vacuum) the sand overburden from the bottom of the river
eventually exposing a thick bed of bone fragments where pieces of Titanus walleri were
expected to be.
BACKGROUND
"Like ostriches, this bird sacrificed
the ability to fly in order to become a more efficient killer... It was so fast, it could
run at least 40 miles an hour... Titanus was larger than its cousin Andalgalornis,
which was 5-foot-tall, 150-pounds and had a beak that could slice through bone."
-Bob Chandler in a University of Florida Digest article.
Bob, a now former University of Florida
paleontologist, was diving with Janis Brown when Brown found the fossil that Chandler
identified as a wing bone of Titanus walleri.
THE EXPERIENCE
Our day started early with a drive over to
Ginnie Springs located closest to the town of High
Springs, Florida. Deb, Paul and I soon met up with members of the Florida Museum of
Natural History, fellow geologists and others. The 10 or so of us set up base camp at a
bend in the Santa Fe River.
The bend was an important choice because of
depositional characteristics of rivers. When a river turns, it loses velocity, thus
dropping much of the sediment it was carrying. In our case, fossils have been piling up
here for hundreds (at least) of years.
We swam, dragging the portable dredge over
the dig site. After a very trying time starting the dredge engine, we began sucking the
sand overburden from the river bottom about 10' below the surface.
| After we donned our SCUBA gear, we swam the dredge into the bend of the river and anchored about 5 feet from the bank. |  |
Although the dredge kicked up a lot of
sediment giving me my first ever sense of vertigo, we were able to vacuum about 4' of
sediment from above the first bone layer. We knew we were in the fossil bone layer when
large pieces of turtle, manatee and other fossil bones were uncovered by the
handful. At first, I though these were pieces of pottery, because of the diffuse
light at the bottom of the river, the pieces looked orange.
As a rotation of three divers and I
directed the dredge, Paul, Deb and others screened the sediment we were vacuuming up.
Although they couldn't process the sediment fast enough, they were able to collect fossil
ivory, vertebrae, miscellaneous turtle, manatee and horse bones as well as bear teeth and,
we assume, some Titanus bones! Most of the stuff that we collected was put into
bags and taken back to the museum for closer investigations at a later time.
After this day of diving and dredging, we
laid most of our finds out on a picnic table (I have the photo coming soon). There were
lots of bones, most of them had turned black with age and from the minerals dissolved in
the water. As we drank Sam's Cola and snacked on Little Debbies, we enjoyed the wonderful
and productive day.
Information for this report
was collected from on-site observations and and article published in the Independent
Florida Alligator (August, 1996).
