Today, there is a group of larger visitors here, too. A herd of mastodons led by the matriarch have just returned from their annual migration hundreds of miles to the north. Now the winter drought is over and the spring water has been topped up by re...
This triggered other dramatic changes. As sea levels dropped, so did the inland water tables. Florida's fresh water drained away through the porous limestone rock. Pools dried up and springs diminished. Florida was on the brink of drought. And animal...
Could it be that drastic water shortage was the reason for the mastodons' epic migrations? Another big piece of this puzzle lies far out to sea. This is the ocean floor. But this isn't rock sprouting out at the bottom. It's wood. It's the remains of...
Some of this ice age dung was found beneath the skull in the Aucilla. The dung contained plant remains that tell us what the mastodon was browsing on 13,000 years ago or morea mixture of trees and grasses. This suggests that ice age Florida was drier...
But despite their name, the mighty Everglades did not exist during the ice age. So what did pre-historic Florida look like? There is one place in northern Florida that has revealed more ice age secrets than almost anywhere else, the dark slow-moving...
They can grow more than two metres long and weigh as much as three men. But the giant tortoises of ice age North America were even larger. Florida does have tortoises today, but on a much smaller scale. This is the gopher tortoise. Tortoises are cold...
It's likely giant ground sloths used their claws in a similiar way to hook branches and pull them within reach. Like tree sloths, they were vegetarians and probably not fussy about what they ate, chewing their way through leaves, fruits, twigs and al...
This is the Virginia opossum, a tree dweller found throughout many of the southern states. It's the only North American marsupial. The young are born premature and matured in the mother's pouch. And its only close relatives today are found in Central...
The cold climate conifer forests of the north displaced broadleaved woodlands. Plants and animals were gradually pushed south to find a warmer climate. Florida became a refuge from the cold. Down here is where the Ice Age north met the subtropical so...
