Word: webbe
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...addition to the remains of birds, fish, turtles and crocodiles, Webb's workers found seven species of tiny extinct horses. These are among many mammals, including the saber-toothed tiger, that mysteriously disappeared from' the Western Hemisphere at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Equines were not seen again in the New World until the Spanish reintroduced them in the 16th century. Yet other species located in the Love pit are still alive and well, even if not in Florida. The diggers, for example, identified the remains of tapirs, piglike animals that...
...years of digging into the ancient riverbed, Webb and his students sifted through more than 100 tons of clay, working thousands of hours in the sun. They also encountered other problems, like protecting the site from the curious and vandals. To drive them off, recalls Love, he would occasionally fire his bird gun. Says he: "I got the reputation for a while as a crazy farmer...
...digging and shooting have paid off handsomely. Webb considers the Love pit one of the richest U.S. fossil finds in years, unequaled anywhere in the Southeast. Some specimens turned up in almost wholesale quantities. His team, for example, dug up so many saber-toothed tiger bones that they may help shed a totally new light on the ferocious-looking cats. Some were so young they still had baby teeth, others were 25 to 30 years old. (In appreciation of the Loves, researchers even named one new sabertooth species after them: Barbourofelis lovei...
Many of the bones required a high order of scientific sleuthing. In 1978 one of Webb's students, Diderot Gicca, came up with a jawbone that totally baffled the team. Careful study showed it to be part of a hitherto unknown giant ancestor of the raccoon. Students also found a mastodon, an ancestral kin of the elephant, with two pairs of tusks, the lower ones resembling shovels. For a time, they were also puzzled by what seemed an unusually large (nearly 3 ft.) metacarpal bone. It belonged to a creature called Aepycamelus major, the giraffe camel. No less surprising...
...couple of weeks ago, Webb and his students finally folded up their blue-and-yellow awnings for the last time. They have collected so many barrels of bones that merely sorting and categorizing them will take many more years...