00:00:02
Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conservative both big shout out to Annex Hunt for their support of this podcast. I’m your host, Lake Pickle, and on today’s episode, we’re going back, and I mean way back back to prehistoric times to learn about mammoths, giant marine lizards, dinosaurs, caribou and the moose. And guess what all of these were found in Mississippi.
00:00:31
Speaker 2: Let’s get into it.
00:00:42
Speaker 3: Yes, Crazy Volunteers is working on portions of a Macedon that is dug up at the Pittsburg Mall in the mid nineteen eighties. We had already prepped and preserved a portion of it, the tusks, which had been on display downstairs for a number of years. Now this looks very much out of place. You recognize it, of course, as a baby incubator.
00:01:09
Speaker 1: That is what that is.
00:01:10
Speaker 3: Okay, but we’ve repurposed it for a vacuum system.
00:01:16
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:01:16
Speaker 1: Allow me to go ahead and interject Mastodon’s at the mall in the nineteen eighty so baby incubator converted to a vacuum We’re coming out the gate hot with this one, to say the least, So allow me to quickly set the stage. I’m currently at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science. In fact, this is the same building where almost a year ago I kicked off the Fanny Cook episode. I came here to see some of her earliest collection work that they still had preserved. Well, if you go back and listen to that episode, you’ll hear me make mention of a paleontology room that I saw while there. It caught my eye with these one glance inside those doors, and I was looking at a mastodon and mammoth tusk, bison skulls, prehistoric fossils, and I knew right then and there I was going to be making a trip back here to dig in to this stack deck of stories that room had to offer at some point. And now I’m on a tour of that very space with a man named George Phillips, who’s the paleontology curator here at the museum.
00:02:12
Speaker 3: Here are some fossils that were found associated with the most complete dinosaur ever found in Mississippi. Oh No Kidding, which also is currently in the custody of the University of Southern Mississippi as they’re winding up student research on it. They actually finished. I just have yet to retrieve the specimen. But these are marine invertebrates and marine vertebrates that we’ve been processing, recording, organizing so that we can better understand the environment associated with this dinosaur discovery. Now, the skeleton was only about fifteen percent complete, but as dinosaur remains goes, especially in eastern North America, and still rather complete discovery. Really, yeah, fifteen percent, fifteen percent a lot of the skeleton. Usually our dinosaur remains a vast majority of them, if not the entirety of the rest of ours, or at least our holdings here at the museum. Natural science consists of isolated elements like a bone or a bone fragment or two, found here and there. Right now, this fifteen percent duckbilled dinosaur is still an incredible record for the state and it will soon be published.
00:03:30
Speaker 1: How many of y’all knew that a fifteen percent dinosaur skeleton was considered a relatively complete skeleton of the paleontology world, I share didn’t. We also got our first big context clue as to one of the functions or uses of paleontology when George made mention of the fossils found near the dinosaur skeleton and that they were using those to learn and understand more about the environment associated with that dinosaur. Think of it is almost like using these small fossils as puzzle to better understand the ecosystem and the environment all those years ago. The more puzzle pieces that are found and understood, the clearer the picture gets of what the world was like back then. Also, if you don’t catch the YouTube version of this episode, be sure to google duck Build.
00:04:16
Speaker 2: Dinosaur to get a look at one of these things.
00:04:18
Speaker 1: The skeleton that they have here at the museum would have been around a fourteen to sixteen foot long critter, And frankly, it is just wild to me when I think about something like that roaming around, wild and free right here in the southern United States and my home state. I’m just so fascinated by this stuff. He also showed me pieces of a mosasaur skeleton that they found over forty percent of And if you’re unaware of what a mosasaur is, don’t fret because I didn’t have a clue either. But they’re giant marine lizards. The skeleton at the museum would have belonged to a lizard over twenty feet long, and they.
00:04:51
Speaker 2: Found it in Mississippi. Too crazy, right.
00:04:54
Speaker 1: I want to dive into a deeper conversation about all this stuff with mister Phillips. But before we do, there two more parts of this paleotology lab that really stood out to me.
00:05:04
Speaker 3: This is our skeletal collection, at least a good portion of it. The mammals and the birds and the crocodilians. We’ve got a cougar skeleton in there. They no longer occur in Mississippi, although some people are skeptical.
00:05:16
Speaker 1: I was about to say, it’s like some people would say, they do.
00:05:19
Speaker 3: We got a jaguar from the zoo. We got a cheatera from the zoo. These are the types of things that used to live in Mississippi in the past. Most of this collection serves our comparative purposes for the ice age portion of the fossil collection, gotcha, one of the things we’re looking for is a taper skeleton. We have a peckery skeleton. These again, these are all creatures that lived during the last ice Age, actually lived in Mississippi at one time during the Ice Age. I’ve got to ask things. It was antlers.
00:05:53
Speaker 2: That was going to be my question.
00:05:54
Speaker 3: I can’t help but gravitate the handler up there, and there’s a large male cariboo antler up there, the caribou antler. We have one portion of a fossil cariboo antler in the collection. Well, we have a reproduction of it. The original is that the Smithsonian. It was found and donated before this collection even existed, so a little bit different, but it’s nice to have that moose on hand. Nevertheless, for comparison to other parts of the skeleton. So we also have a skeleton. We have portions of a caribou skeleton. We’re trying to as time goes by, to make our skeleton collection modern skeleton collection, more comprehensive, so we have a better chance of identifying anything we find in the fossil record.
00:06:44
Speaker 1: Have y’all found forgive me, have y’all found fossil caribou or moose here?
00:06:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have that reproduction that I just mentioned. What The Smithsonian has the original of the fossil, but we have a reproduction a cast that my predecessor made of a partial juvenile antler that was found in making a Mississippi no kidding, startful, Mississippi.
00:07:07
Speaker 1: I’ve done you know, I’ve covered like elk before, like you know, eastern elk, the ones that range, you know, because now elk is primarily known as a Western species.
00:07:16
Speaker 3: But I had no idea we had fossil record.
00:07:18
Speaker 2: Of moose and caribou here.
00:07:19
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, wow, yeah, during the glacial period they were all the way down here in northern Mississippi and northern Alabama.
00:07:27
Speaker 1: Remains of species of moose and cariboo found in the state of Mississippi and Alabama and probably other places that I’m unaware of as well. That, my friends, blows my southern mind. All right, I’m good and ready to take a deeper dive into all this stuff. We’re going to jump into this conversation right after. George told me that people often come to him at the museum or at one of his fossil road shows to show him fossils that they’ve brought in themselves and ask him to identify them. You ever had someone bring in something that you’re like, whoa Like that’s wasn’t expecting that.
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Speaker 3: Yeah. There’s different types of woe. Okay, some are shocking on different levels. There are stories, but the woe that you’re talking about, is that’s something really cool that hasn’t been documented before.
00:08:16
Speaker 2: Sure.
00:08:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we get those kind of things, and those are certainly exciting to see something that’s never been seen by at least another scientist before, and that happens probably once a year, maybe on a small level and occasionally on a large level. Of course, my measure of large and small is probably different from your average person’s perception of the fossil record. I think some of the tiniest things demand some of the biggest woe.
00:08:45
Speaker 2: Sure, Sure, but I can.
00:08:48
Speaker 3: Tell you were impressed with that mammoth tusk, which is a big woe.
00:08:52
Speaker 1: In the late summer of twenty twenty four, an avid fossil hunter in Mississippian by the name of Eddie Templeton discovered a fully intact mammoth tusk stuck in a creek bank in Madison County, Mississippi. Prior to Templeton’s find, only isolated teeth of Colombian mammoths have been unearthed in Mississippi, making it a true first of its kind discovery for this region. Colombian mammoths were large grassland grazers, and the tusk roughly measured seven foot long and was fully intact. The fossil could be anywhere from eleven thousand, five hundred to seventy five thousand years old, and I just found that to be pretty dad gum cool. I mean, a whole mammoth tusk found less than an hour from where I live. It’s just flat out wild man. And while we’re on the subject of first of its kind and significant discoveries, I want to ask mister George about a pretty important fossil discovery that he made not long ago that settled a long standing debate in the paleontology community.
00:09:50
Speaker 2: And just a heads up, this.
00:09:51
Speaker 1: Is going to take us down a long and winding discussion about what George refers to as the paleontological history of Mississippi as well as other areas of the southeast and the entirety of North America. Really think about it as a history. Listen, except we’re looking way back. You’re gonna hear terms like Cretaceous Period and Pleistocene, which refer to different eras and epics back in time.
00:10:14
Speaker 2: This stuff is fascinating.
00:10:16
Speaker 1: You won’t believe, for one, how they figure this stuff out, and for two, how having this knowledge is of high importance to us today. I wasn’t even gonna go with the mammoth tusk first. I was going to go with one of the things that you showed me in there, tooth that you found.
00:10:31
Speaker 3: Talk to me about that. Yeah, the dinosaur tooth. Yeah, a dinosaur tooth. That sort of was a game changer when it came to understanding the distribution of this type of dinosaur, as well as what the continent North America looked like sixty six million years ago. So the idea was that for the longest time, according to many researchers, many experts, that the horned dinosaurs appeared rather late in the game, and they did. They had only been around for a few million years towards the end of the Cretaceous, and the dinosaur fossil record goes pretty deep back two hundred and ten, two hundred and fifteen million years ago. The first dinosaurs appear, and they persist until sixty six million years ago, at least, not what we call the non avian dinosaurs. It was believed that the seaway that separated the two halves of the continent, that it might have persisted until after the extinction of the non avian dinosaurs. Others had speculated that the land bridge formed or the seaway retreated by the end before the end of the Cretaceous period sixty six million years ago, but that tooth of a horned dinosaur found in northeast Mississippi in twenty sixteen is one of the things that pretty much settled the debate. It’s from a horned dinosaur, which are only known from eastern Asia and western North America, and here it is in northeast Mississippi, so that means that land bridge had to have been established, and that the seaway retreated sufficiently to form that land bridge before sixty six million years ago to allow horned dinosaurs from probably Texas to emigrate into what was called Appalachia is the name we give to eastern North America during the Cretaceous because it was basically the Appalachian backbone and all of its foothills.
00:12:39
Speaker 1: Number One, a multi year scientific debate about a land bridge and whether or not horned dinosaurs existed in the eastern United States was settled by the finding of a single tooth in northeast Mississippi.
00:12:51
Speaker 2: That’s pretty awesome. Number Two.
00:12:53
Speaker 1: If you’re unaware what a horned dinosaur is again for at not because I didn’t know either, but you could either google the term where you’ve also probably seen these dinosaurs depicted in movies like Jurassic Park or any of y’all happen to watch the Land Before Time cartoon as a kid, Sarah the Triceratops was depicting a horned dinosaur species as well.
00:13:13
Speaker 2: Number three.
00:13:14
Speaker 1: George told me that he found that tooth on a day when he wasn’t even expecting to find any dinosaur remains, and then out of nowhere he makes a groundbreaking discovery.
00:13:25
Speaker 3: Too cool, and it was almost surreal how it was found. So one interesting aspect about that spot, and I’m sure all the locals, the rock hounders and treasure hunters around New Albany are familiar with it. There’s a little waterfall north of New Albany, and that’s where I found it. And at the base of the waterfall in a little mound of gravel, just as a scenic a day and spot as you could find in Mississippi anyway. But it was a beautiful little spot and its place where fossils tend to concentrate. Okay, right at the base of that waterfall, and it was right on top of the gravel barkus, sitting right there waiting to be found.
00:14:11
Speaker 1: As they say, I mean, it seems like to me in the like in the world of fossils and paleontology, that seems like some pretty big news, you know, and especially if there’d been a debate as in like you know, timeline and so it almost reminded me of we were talking about projectiles earlier, but like the whole folsome debate and how how that put like a definitive timeline, like no humans were here then because they figured, you know, they found those remains. But that seems like a like a significant enough because like that was like put a kind of a stamp in time that settled a debate.
00:14:48
Speaker 3: It did.
00:14:49
Speaker 1: Okay, we’ve gone over some novel fossil discoveries that have taken place in Mississippi. But now I want to turn this conversation down a slightly different path by asking mister Phillips what the purposes of all this finding angent mammoth tusk and debates settling dino teeth. It’s cool no matter what you’re doing, but at the end of the day, we need to understand why this is important, Why it’s worth the effort going through that room, Like y’all spend a lot of time, like preserving them in such a way and organizing them, Like why is that so important that y’all have such a big backlog a collection that size? Why is that important?
00:15:23
Speaker 3: A collection of anything is particularly official collections that exist in this case by the state legislature. We are mandated to make collections of natural history objects that represent primarily Mississippi and tell a story about Mississippi’s natural history. Okay, and again no cultural history involved. And I think we made that point earlier that we don’t do archaeology here, but we do biology and paleontology and everything related to natural history. The collection is filled with vouchers, physical vouchers. So you’ve heard of paper vouchers that can have legal import and this is sort of These vouchers are not legal per se, but they are proof. Nevertheless, they are unquestionable proof of something. And whether it be a fossil, or it be any deer or other mammal or insect living or fossil in the collection, in the entirety of the collections, these things are proof of something having existed. At a location at a specific time. So, for an example, the biological collections have materials going back specimens going back to the nineteen thirties to the fact of the nineteen twenties to the WPA days. And you know, some of those species are not found in those areas today. They’ve been locally extirpated, or those habitats are completely missing, they’ve been otherwise purposed by humans. So it’s important to document changes over the landscape. And one of the importance of the biological collections for the patientological collection is very similar purposes. But these are vouchers for something existed at a certain time. Now, you could take pictures of the fossils and throw them away or give them away as gifts to kids at the door, but their utility goes beyond just a one time thing. A voucher exists over time in perpetuity. With the fossils, they can always and these biological specimens, they can always have the potential of saying something else down the road. They will always speak. And so long as there’s always funding to maintain these collections, we need to try and maintain them because they are part of our history. Many of them are books that have never been written, so we’ve only published on just a small part of the collection. It’s just me and my colleagues who are able to publish on this material. Soon, we hope to have the paeological collections online for everybody to look at, and at that time the collection will be more visible globally. But right now, the amount of inquiries I get without our collection on the internet is almost hard enough for me to keep out. Because this is by word of mouth. People learn that we have this these untold stories behind our research doors, and they want to look at fossil crabs for the from the Eocene, or fossil oysters from the Paleocene. And as I say, the inquiries come fast enough I can keep up with them. Once our database goes public, I will probably need to recruit volunteers to help keep up with the loan requests. Yeah, this material needs to be maintained ad infinitum for research now and down the road. As long as we are able to maintain a specimens that I found in the nineteen eighties and then that I donated as a private citizen to my predecessor when she was the curator here. Well, it wasn’t until about three or four years ago that one of my specimens that I donated in say the mid eighties, was used in a publication by a payaleontologists in Alabama. No kidding, Yeah, so yeah, I can tell lots of stories about that. And of course we also try to keep this, you know, a database, not just of the specimens, but of the publications that are produced on our material. We try to track all of it.
00:19:53
Speaker 1: So what’s the purpose of finding fossils and keeping them organized in a well maintained collection. The simple answer is, it’s our history, it’s our baseline, our reference point.
00:20:03
Speaker 2: In fact, I’m gonna once again refer back.
00:20:05
Speaker 1: To the Fanny Cook episode because it is one of my favorites. And if you remember, we kicked that episode off in this very building where I’m interviewing mister Phillips today, and we were looking at some of her first scientific specimens, and we talked about how her work, her collections helped establish a biological baseline for the state so we could better understand things like what type of wildlife species lived in the state, what type of plants and trees were in the state, wildlife populations, distributions, different habitats, You can’t establish knowledge of any of that kind of stuff if you don’t have a baseline a reference point. The same principles applies to this palaeontological collection. It establishes a baseline of knowledge of the environment from deep time.
00:20:51
Speaker 2: Fascinating, right.
00:20:58
Speaker 1: I want to ask mister Phillips about out the paleontological history of the southern US in Mississippi specifically you’ve made mentioned I heard you say, like kind of the paleontological history of Mississippi. Can we go into kind of some of.
00:21:11
Speaker 3: That Mississippi throughout most of its geologic past has been underwater. The fact that it’s high and dry today is sort of unique when it comes to geologic time and the process in exposing what we call the terrestrial parts of Mississippi today, because we also have aquatic and offshore parts. But for regards the land, which is most of Mississippi, that was a very gradual exposure or in this case, retreat of the sea southward that is the Gulf of Mexico southward from the Mississippi embayment over a course of about ninety million years eighty five ninety million years, and this retreated the sea gradually exposed Mississippi as we know today.
00:21:58
Speaker 1: Did y’all hear that if I had been born ninety million years earlier, Mississippi would have been completely underwater. I would have had to live in Arkansas.
00:22:07
Speaker 2: Can you imagine? But I digress.
00:22:09
Speaker 1: Be sure to listen up here, because I promise you this story is about to take a sharp turn that I bet y’all on sea coming.
00:22:16
Speaker 3: So we have a lot of records of marine life because of all these great thicknesses of marine settlements and the Meridian area. We have the Tuscahoma Estuary deposits that were studied in the late eighties and nineties and published on in the early two thousands, and they generated a lot of fossil mammal remains that were fifty five million years old, representing some of the earliest mammals known in North America or that have been documented in North America, including one of the oldest primates from North America.
00:22:52
Speaker 2: What were they?
00:22:53
Speaker 3: These types of primates were monkey like primates. There in this extinct group of primates called the omods, and I think that was a dead end group. I don’t know that it gave rise to anything else, but amami had primates were the principal type of primate during that time period, the latter part of the Paliocene or into the Paliocene and into the Eocene and up into the earlier Legosine throughout North America. Yeah, and then they were replaced briefly by other primates, and then eventually primates died off completely in North America. And we think it was due to competition from things like squirrels. Really yeah, really right, right?
00:23:36
Speaker 1: Competition squirrels, Right, that’s that seems wild. So the leading thought is that primates that once inhabited North America died out because they were out competed by squirrels. Did y’all see that one coming?
00:23:51
Speaker 2: Neither did I.
00:23:52
Speaker 1: But it does make me wonder if Brent reached dog Whalen could treat one of those primates that they were still around.
00:23:57
Speaker 2: Who knows.
00:23:58
Speaker 3: There’s a lot that you can relate the modern fauna in the Missippi landscape to the fossil landscape in the sense that say, for example, I mentioned Waynesboro, the estuaries in Rainsboro fossil estuaries have yielded and these are part of deltas. This was called the bucket ton of Delta in Wayne County. It was the eastern edge of the bucket ton of delta, which was centered where the Missippi River occurs today. But this eastern edge of the bucket ton of delta yielded a lot of mammal remains from an interval of time that’s about twenty eight thirty million years old. And the common animal that would have filled the ecological niche that whitetailed deer do today was nothing related to deer. Deer don’t appear in North America until just a few million years ago. Deer were absent, completely absent. Deer are of Asian extraction. They are new to North America, probably no older than four million years ago. The deer stock were again completely absent from North America until about that time, just a few million years ago. Prior to that, the deer niche was filled by other types of organisms. In fact, it wasn’t just one organism, it was several of them sort of sharing the deer niche. One of them was a hippo pig almost deer like. Animal wasn’t like deer, But if this thing looked like anything, if you crossed a hippo with a pig with a deer, it’s called an anthraca. Their unrelated to any of them, maybe distantly related to hippos. But these anthraka theias were the dominant, ruminant forest dwelling animal kid time period. And of course this is again long before deer. But there there was another part of the deer niche, the modern deer niche, that was filled by or occupied by these smaller, more deer like animals called hypertragulids. So you could say that the anthracic, the ears, and the hypertragulids. Then there’s this third group called the protoseratics. So you had three different, unrelated animals sort of doing a deer like thing during that time period. So deer working really hard today considering that three people shared their ecological job. Yeah, you know some twenty five thirty million years ago. It doesn’t work exactly like that, you know, ecosystems, but it’s similar to that, and in fact, that’s basically what a niche is in terms of ecology. It’s a job. It’s what that animal does there. But the deer job was shared by three different things twenty five million years ago.
00:26:48
Speaker 1: Relating modern wildlife to the fossil wildlife was with out of doubt the most fascinating part of this discussion.
00:26:55
Speaker 2: For me.
00:26:55
Speaker 1: An ecological niche is a specific role in organism plays with in its ecosystem. Essentially, think of it as a job description within nature and in prehistoric times, the ecological niche of what we see deer take up now was taken up by three different organisms.
00:27:12
Speaker 2: It’s wild and it makes me wonder why to.
00:27:15
Speaker 1: Tell you what that reminds me of is like the first time I went to Africa, I was like over over here in North America now, like we we have a lot of have a lot of wildlife, but there’s like so much megafauna and after.
00:27:34
Speaker 2: So it’s like you go to in.
00:27:35
Speaker 1: In in Africa, if I like a if I’m looking across the plains, which you know.
00:27:40
Speaker 2: You’d see you might see uh.
00:27:43
Speaker 1: Impala, blessed buck, red heartebeast, uh uh sable, like all these things that are kind of they’re not doing the same thing, but they’re they’re you know, competing and using similar resources.
00:27:56
Speaker 3: Right. The niches just niches are just partitioned differently.
00:27:59
Speaker 1: Right where like I’m like, man, you just don’t have that many big game or megafauna at here at home, Like here you have, like they’re the white tilt deer, you know, and like that’s just what that made me think of, is when you’re describing like all these different species that are occupying this niche.
00:28:16
Speaker 3: Right, So that’s a tropical realm. Unfortunately, the temperate realms were greatly affected by global climate change and human hunters at the close of the last Ice Age. Yeah, so for the America’s in general, we were dealing with the first humans towards the end of the Ice Age, and so you had two different things that were both contributed to the cause happening at about the same time. So the human hunters probably arrived first, and they perhaps lived in some equilibrium with the megafauna for several thousand years, but at some point global climate change happened, and that’s hardest on the temperate regions, you know, above a certain lattitude, and so that made the animals particularly vulnerable. But also there were humans brought with them, dogs and dogs and humans also carry certain zoonotic diseases dismissible. And so when I’m in a wild state of imagination trying to look at all the mechanics and contributing factors that led to the extinction of the ice age animals. I kind of think something like distemper carried by the first dogs, domestic dogs interesting, may have been a factor contributing to the demise of the sabertooth cat or the American lion. You know, we had a lion here in the Americas as well, at least in North America. Now, epidemic disease is hard to model, but almost certainly it played a factor in that extinction too. A lot of things are in place. There’s never one causative agent for something. It was always on multiplicity of factors.
00:29:58
Speaker 1: Okay, we just took it and a whole lot of information there, so let’s quickly go back over it before we move on. This whole topic started off when mister Phillips was explaining that the ecological niche that deer take up in North America was once taken up by three different species. Well, one of the reasons for that is the ice Age. Its estimated that the ice age extinctions could have caused North America to lose upwards of seventy to seventy five.
00:30:25
Speaker 2: Percent of its megafauna.
00:30:27
Speaker 3: That is a huge.
00:30:28
Speaker 1: Number, and that’s also part of the reason why a continent like Africa that is in a tropical realm, didn’t get hit with the ice age nearly like America did, and as a result, there’s such a vast diversity of megafauna or big game or large critters or whatever terminology you care to use. Of course, there are other factors that surely came into play. There’s always more than one. Some of those have been proposed that human hunters could have been a factor. Also, potential disease spread from things like dogs. Like I said, I know there was a lot there. Y’all got to admit this is some cool stuff. One of the things that you showed me in the room in there that I was like very surprised by was the moose.
00:31:11
Speaker 2: And cariboo antlers.
00:31:12
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:31:13
Speaker 1: I and because we’ve done episodes, I’ve done episodes on historic range of bison, I’ve done episodes on historic range of Elk. I didn’t have any idea that moose or cariboo of any anything related to them occupied not just Mississippi or any like the southeast.
00:31:32
Speaker 2: At one point I had no.
00:31:33
Speaker 3: Clue, Yeah, that there remains are not real common. We think what few cariboo remains we found in North Mississippi and North Alabama and North Georgia. Right across the northern stretch there were probably from migratory animals.
00:31:49
Speaker 2: Okay, so maybe just moving through right.
00:31:52
Speaker 3: They were probably wintering this far south. You know, maybe the the Highland rim central Tennessee might have been more frequented by the cariboo. Certainly more northern regions probably were as long as they were south of the ice sheet. The ice sheet at its maximum extent, maximum southern reach that is, would have been in northern Kentucky. So like they are today, the cariboo, we’re probably inhabiting tundra or woodland associated tundra.
00:32:30
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:32:32
Speaker 3: So yeah, Mississippi was probably just a winter vacation spot.
00:32:35
Speaker 2: Still.
00:32:36
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:32:36
Speaker 1: I mean today, if someone said they saw a cariboo down here, you need to go to the doctor. Brother, you didn’t see a cariboo.
00:32:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, Elk and the cariboo are encountered about the same amount, which is very infrequently. We do have a few more remains of the stagmas.
00:32:52
Speaker 1: I know, I’ve said this several times already in this episode. How wild I think it is to know that critters like duck billed dinosaurs, horned dinosaur or prehistoric primates were running around in my home state. But now let’s keep that same sentiment and fast forward some in time and think about species like cariboo and moose all the way down in the southern United States, all the way down in Mississippi, whether or not they were just down here for bits of time due to migration or not. The fact that a caribou and a moose freely and willingly made its way down this far south is absolutely crazy. And if that doesn’t indicate how much the world has changed and how different the environment is, I don’t.
00:33:31
Speaker 3: Know what will.
00:33:32
Speaker 2: It’s wild.
00:33:35
Speaker 1: We’ve got one more fun fact to find out today before we round this conversation up that it makes me wonder man like, how like just thinking about deer because they’re so prevalent.
00:33:44
Speaker 3: Now, Yeah, yeah, it’s interesting. And when I say the white tailed deer is abundant Misissippi’s fossil record, some of it could be mule deer they belonged to the same genus and aquelias. Yeah, and for northeast Mississippi based upon the antlers, and antlers are a sure way to distinguish between the two. Most of that looks like white tail deer. In fact, all of it may be in white tail deer, but in western Mississippi and a Lurse Hills and in the River Alluvium, we are finding mule deer, really black tail deer antlers, no kidding, And that’s one of the few ways you can truly distinguish between the two. There’s very little other in the skeleton that is really useful and distinguished unless you have a whole skull, and we almost never have a whole skull, and we have no skull of either. What few skull portions that we do have are connected to antlers, Yeah, of course, but they’re definitely a mix of white tail and mule In western Mississippi.
00:34:48
Speaker 2: I’m learning all kinds of stuff today.
00:34:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had no idea mule deer this far southeast. Again, I had no idea. Man, it really was a different world personally. On one hand, it makes me wish that I had a time machine so I could go back and see some of this stuff with.
00:35:04
Speaker 2: My own eyes.
00:35:05
Speaker 1: And on the other hand, it makes me wonder, should the earth persist, how different will it look in another one thousand years, ten thousand years, or heck, one million years.
00:35:15
Speaker 2: Who knows?
00:35:17
Speaker 3: The closest thing we have to a time machine is pay theontology. True. Yeah, so that’s about as close as you can get. Yeah, And it’s fun. It’s a lot of detective work, yeah, involved, and it takes a lot of people to help paint the picture to understand the landscape twenty thousand years ago or twenty million years ago.
00:35:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:35:39
Speaker 1: It’s fascinating, man, And it’s fascinating to me how often some of this stuff becomes relevant to something in the present time.
00:35:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, a lot of it is. There are grants and other monies out there available to pay the onontologists who are doing research that is related to modern ecosystems or climate change, or just anything that might be beneficial to understanding where we are now or where we’re headed. There’s this old saying that the present is the key to the past, that everything that we know about the past we derive from our knowledge of the future of the present. But vice versa is true too. You can easily say that the evidence that we’re getting from the past, the story that the past is telling us in the sedimentary record or in the fossil record, may say something about the future, and can say something about the future. Many advocational types are contributing information, sometimes contributing specimens, contributing their time, and I depend upon them a lot with this job as a curator in the state can only employ one state paeontologist. I can’t do it all myself, and I’ve gotten so much assistance from the collector and avocational community that I could not have done without. I told you earlier there are over one hundred thousand specimens cataloged into the State Fossil Collection, vast majority of them found by people that do not work for the state, or at least they do not work for people who pay you to pick up fossils. Yeah, as I am paid, you know, sure, So yeah, I can pick up one fossil and then be kind of famous for it. But really the bulk of the hard work is done by all the people that contribute to the Museum of Natural Science in the State Fossil Collection.
00:37:44
Speaker 1: Which I find interesting, man, because we talk about so like on this show and then like a mediator entirely, we talk a lot about just in the whole outdoor landscape, talk a lot about hunting, talk a lot about fishing, and we talk a lot about it just a parallel because you like, we often talk about how I’ll often we’ll go back to Fanny Cook, right, Like we talked about how the Mississippi’s wildlife never would have worked if it just if it solely relied on the Game Commission. It needed the needed the private uh, the private citizen, the landowner, the just the average hunter to go along with it to make it work. And so I see a parallel there with being able to make this fossil collection work just with private citizens that find fossils and are willing to donate them.
00:38:26
Speaker 3: It’s another type of hunting. Yeah, these things don’t move as you’re pursuing them. Yeah. Yeah, I just encourage your listening audience to come and check out the Museum of Natural Science in Jackson, Mississippi, because we tell the story about Mississippi’s paytentological past and modern Mississippi that no one else really does in the state.
00:38:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, you’ll do a great job.
00:38:52
Speaker 3: Now, well, I appreciate that. Right now, it’s sort of a mess for undergoing renovation, but we hope to have all that completed the end of maybe by mid June is target date, maybe before that, but we’re open now. It doesn’t look pretty. But we’re open right now and you can certainly come check out our fossil wall that tells a story of the last four hundred million years of Mississippi’s pathological past, and all of our modern ecosystem exhibits. The aquaria downstairs tell the modern story as well.
00:39:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, people should come. Man, it’s a cool place.
00:39:32
Speaker 3: I tell you what, if I didn’t work here, I’d be here all the time in volunteering.
00:39:36
Speaker 2: There you go. One thing is for sure.
00:39:39
Speaker 1: You can’t fake passion and you can’t fake authenticity. And my friend mister George Phillips, he has a whole lot of both. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Greece in this country life. I can’t tell you how much it means to all of us over here. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend this week, and be sure to stick around because there’s a whole lot more on the way.
00:40:07
Speaker 2: We’ll see y’all next time.
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