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>> What makes the Bay of Fundy a special place to hunt
for fossils is its huge tides.
They're the largest in the world.
In just six hours, 100 billion tons
of water drain half a mile out to sea.
These massive tides constantly erode the cliff face making it
the perfect place for exposing new fossils.
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Now we came to Nova Scotia to look at these orange rocks.
This area we were hit really hard.
We had our eyes to the rocks.
We had our collecting bags and our rock hammers.
And we were ready to fill them with bones.
The challenge is we didn't fill them with bones.
We didn't find much of anything.
And really our luck must have changed
because of events in town.
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So the breakthrough came when the president
of the local Lions Club invited us to be judges
for the town's beauty contest.
The problem was, in judging the contest,
and in the celebration afterwards,
we stayed up way too late in the evening.
And that late night reverie had consequences the next day.
So the next morning we got up too late.
It was high tide.
And the tides are just so huge here,
what happens is the tide will lap up against the rocks.
And what we found is we were stuck.
We were surrounded by dark volcanic rocks formed
from hot lava flows.
Nobody in their right mind would hunt
for fossils in a place like this.
It was a beautiful day so we skipped rocks.
Rocks weren't the best in the world for skipping.
My buddy Bill had disappeared, then I heard his voice.
He's like Neal, you might want to come over here
and take a look at this.
I'll never forget those words as long as I live.
What happened was Bill was at this point.
And what he had discovered was
that inside these soft boulders lie seams
of this brown stand stone.
And within this brown sand stone were bones.
As we chipped away at the rock, we uncovered countless fossils.
There were leg bones, teeth, even whole jaws.
This site yielded thousands of pieces of bone
from a momentous period in our history.
We found loads of things.
But the real gem is in here.
What you're seeing here is an upper jaw.
There's a canine tooth and a series
of other smaller tooth behind it.
These 200 million year old teeth belonged
to a creature called a tritheledont.
It may look like an insignificant little animal,
but it is unlike anything alive today.
What we have here is really a unique kind of animal
with a unique mix of features.
Part reptile, part mammal.
We see it in its skull, in its jaws, in its limb bones,
virtually every feature of its anatomy.
This is the kind of animal we dream
of finding in the fossil record.
Tritheledonts are on the cusp of the transition
between reptiles and mammals.
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