Ancient Critters Page 3

Another inhabitant of the forest was the giant ground sloth. Those great claws provided it with serious protection.

No animal can afford to be mauled. Wounds take time to heal. It's our imagination which plays at the violence of the ancient world.

Injured hunters can't hunt. Every passing day without food for a wolf or a lion is a day on the edge of starvation in a very difficult environment.

To wander Florida's prehistoric woodlands would have offered an exciting variety of animals. It was into this world that the first people stepped.

Where do you look to find those ancient people? The environment itself whispers their story.

The tapir, like the capybara, is a still living species. It's a member of the horse family, but it's devoted to river environments. It may hide beneath the waters surface all day, using its trunk-like nose to snatch an occassional breath of air. In the late evening and throughout the night, cloaked by the forest shadows, it browses along the river banks and forest trails. It stops munching regularly to listen for danger. It, too, was hunted by the secretive jaguar.

Here, on the edge of freshwater marshes and rivers we can look for capybara. This giant rodent still lives in South America. It escapes into rivers when it's threatened.

Jaguars find capybara meat a real treat, so capybara live in watchful communities and are not easy to hunt.

So, to discover the variety of animal life that lived in prehistoric Florida, we have to visit the different ancient habitats they in which they lived.

The animals we have looked at so far, have mostly been animals that either lived in open prairie, or in mixed scrublands and pine woodlands.

Animals inhabit different environmental systems called habitats.

Mastodons, (above), may have lived along forest edges and swamps. Their diet was leafy, such as cattails, red maple, elderberry, coastal willow and gourd/squash. Their teeth were humped up to break up twigs mixed in with the leaves. James Dunbar, an archaeologist from north Florida, actually allowed us to touch some mastodon manure that was brought up from the Aucilla River site.

Mammoths grazed in grasslands, as well as, the bordering pinelands and scrublands. Their teeth were like scrub-boards about the size of a football. They were ground smooth by the sand that they took in with the grass. Mammoths wore out about eight sets of teeth during a lifetime.