Looking For Florida Page 2

Seminole Wars (under construction)

Site Design by

Elizabeth Neily

Hermann Trappman
for

Florida Frontiers
5409 21st Avenue S.

Gulfport, FL 33707

(727) 321-7845

For more info or problems with site,

please call or

CONTACT

All art and photos, unless otherwise indicated, are the exclusive property of

© Neily Trappman Studio

LAST REVISED MARCH 2008

LOOKING FOR FLORIDA

Pangaea

270 million years ago, the shallow oceans surrounding the great continent were teaming with life. Seashells littered the beaches as well as discarded exoskeleton's of trilobites and strange giant crab like creatures. Fish were common. Standing on a cliff above the sea, you could have seen the dark patterns made by schools of fish. Behind you the air was alive with flying insects.
Looking down at our earth, in the swamps below us, amphibians, salamander-like animals lived. Burly mammal-like reptiles swaggered along river courses. Here in the high dry mountains, you may have discovered some ancestral lizards, insects and a few hardy desert loving plants.

The cliffside on which we stand is green with a ground cover. The peaks in the distance are what remains of folded mountains and ancient volcanoes. Rains form streams heading east. They empty into lakes that are filled with a chemical brew welling up from within the earth.

These are the mountains folded up by the collision of continents. One day this will become the Florida we know.

Looking down on the earth 230 million years ago, the continents have already begun to break apart. The dinosaurs have started down the road which would make them the dominant critters on land.

By 190 million years ago, strong scars appear between some continents. We are standing on a cliff along the northern margin of Africa. A dinosaur is running across a rifting valley towards Florida. The ocean is still far enough away to keep the amount of rain low.

This is how our beautiful planet may have looked 270 million years ago. Florida is in that mountainous desert in the lower center. Forests covered a lot of landscape, but Florida was being born out of the collision between continents. Little rain fell in these high mountains.