Alex Hastings, a paleontology graduate student at the Florida Museum of Natural History, talks about his research and the giant reptiles that inhabited rain forests in South America 60 million years ago. Conducting paleontology research at a coal mine in Colombia has provided a unique opportunity to uncover previously unknown fossils of large crocodile relatives.
Interview and videos produced by Tim Hall for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
Alex Hastings: My research here is on fossil crocodilians from 60 million years ago right after the age of the dinosaurs in South America, Columbia. At this site we have our really earliest glimpse into what the rainforests of South America were starting to form into.
This is really the base starting point for the rainforest and you have these crocodilians right from the very beginning. Fossils are virtually unknown for this time period right after the age of the dinosaurs in South America. This coal mine has preserved fossils from this unique time period in a place where it’s normally covered in forests. Having this coal mine provides a unique opportunity to actually see what the fossils were like for this part of South America’s history.
My research here has really uncovered that there is a very large wealth of diversity in these crocodiles back in time. This will help us really understand our current crocodiles as they have an important part in today’s ecosystem as well as into the future.
What we do when we get these out of the ground – they’re very dirty, they need a lot of what we call preparation, so we bring these into the lab where we have lots of microscopes, magnifying lenses, and other tools in order to see them as close as we need to in order to get them into a very clean state which then allows us to take our measurements and do other aspects of science in order to put this into context and really understand these extinct animals.
Learn more about the Vertebrate Paleontology collection at the Florida Museum.