i'm at one of my favorite fossil hunting locations today in florida and i have brought my fiance Kat
along with me and we have been looking for recently exposed ice age formation and we
have found a bunch we just had a hurricane come through and we are really hopeful that
these recent exposures of these ice age deposits will yield some cool fossils so we're going to
get our dive gear ready our masks on and we're going to start diving and I'm really hopeful
that we might find either mammoth tooth a mastodon tooth or some kind of extinct animal fossil today
so stay tuned as we get underwater now what kat doesn't know is i've actually brought her along as
gator bait so normally i'm out here by myself and i gotta worry about the alligators but i've got
someone smaller and cuter i think the gators will go after her instead of me
what are you scared now - something touched my foot
now of all the rivers i hunt this one seems to have the fewest gators but
that first time you get underwater and you get in to the unknown
you really don't know what's in there and hopefully it's fossils all right
how's it look? there's gravel, so there was a channel of gravel including this first piece
of bone Kat's about to join me and we'll find the start of this channel and this is a really
good sign there might be something here if not we got all day to crawl on the bottom of this river
i'm cold and i'm blind well you've got prescription goggles so you'll be just fine
come on you gotta find fossils you can't start you can't bail out now you got this
you're also like a foot taller than me just a little bit all right tag team in it let's do
three, two, one - I'm not ready
look a piece of a Meg oh look at how sharp the serrations are though
am i breathing too much no you're breathing fine
so i figured you guys would have a hard time telling what this was underwater
so i got out to film it this is an extinct chubutensis shark tooth this is the shark
that evolved into megalodon and if you look closely where my thumbnail is pointing at
you'll see a group of raised serrations that's a vestigial feature called a cusp or cusplet
and they had that to catch fish now that feature evolved away by the tame
megalodon was a species and that's because megalodon was so big that even its babies
did not need to hunt fish they were already able capable to cetaceans and mammals
so that's a really cool find typically you don't find it here because the river does not erode deep
enough to get this kind of geologic unit but i love finding them and that is a cool shark tooth
yeah i did not expect that to be fossilized but it is heavy that's a big bone
sweet so there is so much bone in this gravel bed here i'm literally just sticking my hand in
the water and picking up pieces of bone and i happen to pick up this cool horse incisor
it is unbelievable the amount of diversity that is in this bend
i have still have a little bit left to hunt but after that i'm gonna crawl to
the river and show you the cool fossils that we've already managed to find today
all right we are out of the water for the first time today and yeah we found a ton of bone
this spot was loaded with a bunch of different species we've got extinct horse we've got mastodon
we have gator vertebrae and gator teeth and kat even found our own extinct horse incisor we've got
giant bison bones like this spot was absolutely loaded with different animals though the coolest
have to be all of these remnants of extinct horse teeth unfortunately we did not get here
in time to save all of these teeth but we did get two very nice and very beautiful
incisors so these would have been those front teeth that the horse had this one's actually
unerupted and i love that orange coloration it's really beautiful so these are related to
the modern day horses but they're not in the same descent as the european horses they were kind of
halfway between a zebra and a modern horse but in the same genus Equus they went extinct at the end
of the ice age before we jump back in the water i did want to show you guys three more things
this is a deer antler a fossilized deer antler and this thing is solid rock now i'm not joking
ow this thing is solid like seriously this is solid rock then we have this heartbreaker
of a mastodon tooth that really could have been something special i saw it underwater from the
ivory side like this but i already knew what it was and i flipped it over and was so mad that
this thing wasn't whole but that's what happens out here most of the stuff you find is broken and
we've got to save these pieces before they get destroyed and then this we find a lot of modern
bones when we're hunting and i thought this would be a modern cow bone but it's well fossilized well
mineralized and it's probably bison but we'll have to do a bit of research on this one to figure out
what it is and these were a nice teaser and i am ready to get back underwater for sure are you
ready to start hiking again no you don't want to hike no why because sitting so much better
and we're heading to a different area to find more fossils this place is awesome and we will get lots
and lots of rocks to share with you guys so when we check new bends like this the first thing we
do is we check the bank and we see if any gators have left a slide gator slide going into the water
this spot doesn't have one so we're gonna get in here and see if we can't find some fossils
i had to show you guys a better look at that giant armadillo scoot i just found this is an osteodorm
meaning bony skin in latin and it's a protective plate to a giant armadillo so you don't find a lot
of these at least from this position and i think it's really cool to find these protective armor
but we got to get back underwater got to keep looking there's more fossils to find
this bend did not have nearly as much fossil bone as the last bend but i got lucky and
recovered this incredible example of an extinct llama or camel tooth it's a rearmost molar from
that individual and it is fully rooted which is so rare absolutely a really cool fossil but we have
to keep hiking and find new spots to find more fossils we've got some gear stashed with our lunches
and we'll eat that get back underwater and keep finding more cool stuff
river monsters on the prowl he's on the hunt for ancient animals long dead and almost lost to time
good luck break a leg don't get eaten by gator it's only happened once before
no rest for the wicked time to get back under water do some more fossil hunting
oh that's cool all right this is super cool these are all associated extinct horse teeth
from the same animal so like we were finding earlier these are
extinct ice age horses closely related to zebras and the european horse but from a
different lineage and we found seven teeth all from the same animal we got two small incisors
over here and then we had a large i'm sinking into the clay there are those incisors the preservation
on those teeth are really incredible they'll definitely stay in my personal collection for
a while because you do not find sets like that that often i still have a little bit more to hunt
and hopefully we'll be able to find something really cool before we have to go home today
all right guys right in front of those horse teeth was a giant mammoth tooth it's like 80
to 90 percent there i'm freaking out a little bit i haven't found a mammoth tooth in a really long
time and this looks to be a really nice one from a full-grown adult so i'm gonna set this camera
up on a fallen log get back under water fan it out and bring it to you guys and you won't believe how
large these animals teeth are so i'm excited to do this and i'm yeah i'm gonna get back underwater
all right i finished fanning the tooth out and it's time to pick it up
that's a mammoth tooth absolutely whoo
oh it's a little bit deep over here that is good that's so cool
now what's crazy is this thing was literally right in front of that associated set of horse teeth that
we found earlier this is an adult mammoth tooth full grown individual it's a shame that it's
missing this tiny portion up here though like that is killing me that is one awesome tooth now mammoths
are grazers and because of that they have these enamel plates cemented together with cementum
and dentine in between the enamel and this is the perfect surface for grinding down over 400
500 pounds of grass every single day you'll find that other grazers also have this kind of strategy
where having these squiggly enamel plates allow them to grind down grass and in the
mastodon teeth that we normally find the mastodon tooth chunk that we found earlier
they're lophodont teeth their teeth are like ours and that's because they were browsers so they were
very similar looking animals except for when it came down to their teeth and that told you a lot
about what these animals ate and it's funny how i found this thing is i've got this strategy when
it's a little bit dark and there's a bunch of of peat i poke my dive light into stuff and see if it
gives or not i'm poking i'm poking and clink got a mammoth tooth so that is really cool
i haven't found a nice one like this in a while i wonder if that piece that i found next to it where's my
dive bag here it is goes to it or it's from a different animal um no that is not
it's not the same tooth so there could be another tooth in there somewhere but it looks
like if there is it's been destroyed but that's really cool this is the stuff you come out to hunt
for this is the stuff you look for and it's the reason why we go out to these remote areas that
could have gators and all sorts of stuff this is what we do this is why we do it i'm pretty
excited we just got back to our gear and we have decided that there is no way that we are getting
back underwater and looking for more fossils and getting home in time so we're gonna give you guys
one last look at the best find from today and just so you know quick little thing that might be today's
best find but right there that's the life's best find that's my future wife y'all if you guys did
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