City: Tampa Bay, FL

Category: Getting Here, Getting Around

Telephone: (727) 824-824-7506

Description: As far as we know, there were no social columnists for the Dinosaur Daily Times reporting a gazillion years ago on which mammoth invited which glyptodon (think armadillo as big as a small car) over for a dinner of swamp grass last Tuesday. Clues to the Tampa Bay area’s prehistoric past, however, are still being discovered today. In 2007, for instance, a local high-school student out taking pictures at Boca Ciega Millennium Park in Pinellas County discovered what turned out to be a tooth and part of a jaw from a Columbian mammoth. That’s an elephant-like animal that hasn’t been around for at least 9,000 years.Volunteers helped researchers from the University of South Florida and Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) dig up even more bones and other fossils—30 boxes full—through which scientists are still sorting. Then there’s the Fossil Park neighborhood of St. Petersburg, so named for a shell pit of—yup!—fossils found in the early 1960s. In 1907, a mastodon skeleton was dug up near Lake Maggiore in St. Petersburg.And in the Four Corners area of Hillsborough, Polk, Hardee, and Manatee counties is Bone Valley, where phosphate mining has exposed skeletal relics from a time we can only imagine. Even today, visitors to the Mulberry Phosphate Museum in Polk County can sift through shovels full of dirt in search of fossilized shark teeth and other treasures.