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In Florida, archaeologists are investigating a site that a century ago sparked a scientific controversy. Today, it's just a strip of land near an airport. But in 1915, it was a spot that became world-famous because of the work of Elias Sellards, Florida's state geologist. Sellards led a scientific excavation of the site, where workers digging a drainage canal found fossilized animal bones and then, human remains. Andy Hemmings of Mercyhurst University is the lead archaeologist on a project that has picked up where Sellards left off a century ago. "Quite literally, where we're standing, they found what they, at...

Researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Florida have announced the discovery of a bone fragment, approximately 13,000 years old, in Florida with an incised image of a mammoth or mastodon. This engraving is the oldest and only known example of Ice Age art to depict a proboscidean (the order of animals with trunks) in the Americas. The team's research is published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The bone was discovered in Vero Beach, Fla. by James Kennedy, an avocational fossil hunter, who collected the bone and later while cleaning the bone, discovered the engraving. Recognizing...

PALEONTOLOGICAL TESTIMONY -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Pleistocene Extinction Paleontologists the world over know that something catastrophic happened to the large mammals roaming the world during the Pleistocene Epoch. Woolly mammoths, mastodons, toxodons, sabre-toothed tigers, woolly rhinos, giant ground sloths, and many other large Pleistocene animals are simply no longer with us. In fact, well over 200 species of animals (involving millions of individuals) totally disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene some 10,000-12,000 years ago in what is known to Paleontologists as the Pleistocene Extinction (Click for table). Moreover, there is evidence of large geological changes which took place, such as massive...

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., has found no reason to dispute the authenticity of an one-of-a-kind archaeological discovery that might help confirm a human presence here up to 13,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. In early 2009, local fossil collector James Kennedy cleaned off an old bone he found two years earlier and noticed some lines on it -- lines that turned out to be a clear etching of a walking mammoth with tusks. The location where he found it hasn't been disclosed, except that it came from an area north of Vero Beach....

In what a top Florida anthropologist is calling “the oldest, most spectacular and rare work of art in the Americas,” an amateur Vero Beach fossil hunter has found an ancient bone etched with a clear image of a walking mammoth or mastodon. According to leading experts from the University of Florida, the remarkable find demonstrates with new and startling certainty that humans coexisted with prehistoric animals more than 12,000 years ago in this fossil- rich region of the state. No similar carved figure has ever been authenticated in the United States, or anywhere in this hemisphere. The brown, mineral-hardened bone...

In 1913 the Indian River Farms Company was dredging the Main Relief Canal in Vero Florida, in preparation to handle an expanding population. (It was not called Vero Beach until 1925.) The workers on this project kept seeing fossilized bones in the walls or banks of the freshly dredged canal. Some of these bones were presented to the state geologist, Dr E.H. Sellards. Dr. Sellards suggested that they also look for human bones during a visit to the site. In 1916 Dr Sellards, working with Frank Ayers, Isaac Wells, and others found more human bones in the strata known as...