Ice Age Animals Found at Vero Beach — Vero Beach, Florida

Most of what is known about Ice Age animals at Vero Beach comes from one layer: Stratum 2 of the Vero Canal Site, logged by the University of Florida as Vertebrate Fossil Locality IR005. The Florida Museum of Natural History places the site within the City of Vero Beach, southeast of the municipal airport, and dates the layer to the late Rancholabrean land mammal age, about 20,000 to 12,000 years ago, an age it says radiocarbon dating and the mix of animals both support.

The Vero list is long. The Florida Museum states that the Stratum 2 fauna includes almost all of the extinct late Pleistocene megafauna known to have lived in Florida, among them the large extinct tortoise Hesperotestudo, three ground sloths, seven hoofed mammals and four carnivores. The museum's published list counts only animals confirmed from Stratum 2, the Pleistocene layer, rather than from the younger Stratum 3 above it, so every species named on this page lived at Vero during the late Ice Age.

Elephant relatives head the Vero roster: both the American mastodon, Mammut americanum, and the Columbian mammoth, Mammuthus columbi, appear on the Florida Museum list. Three ground sloths shared the Vero landscape, Megalonyx jeffersonii, Paramylodon harlani and Eremotherium laurillardi, along with three armored mammals, the glyptodont Glyptotherium floridanum, the pampathere Holmesina septentrionalis and the extinct beautiful armadillo, Dasypus bellus, which the museum also records from the Luther Locality at Winter Beach in Indian River County.

The hoofed animals at Vero include an extinct horse, Equus fraternus, the extinct llama Palaeolama mirifica, the peccary Mylohyus fossilis, white-tailed deer, the extinct bison Bison antiquus and a tapir that carries the town's name. Sellards described Tapirus veroensis in 1918 from a skull found at the canal, and the Florida Geological Survey kept that holotype when other Vero specimens went to the Smithsonian. The extinct giant capybara Neochoerus pinckneyi rounds out the large plant eaters. In 2016, Florida Atlantic University archaeologists added a fresh Vero record of the bison, an upper molar 13,000 to 14,000 years old, along with slivers of bone that could have come from mammoth, mastodon, sloth or bison.

Several large carnivores appear in the Vero Stratum 2 list. The dire wolf page of the Florida Museum shows a partial skull from the Vero Canal Site, UF/FGS 280, that is the holotype of Canis ayersi, a species Sellards named in 1916 and now considered a junior synonym of Canis dirus. That skull and the Vero tapir skull are, in the museum's words, the finest specimens found at the site, both recovered from Stratum 2 between 1916 and 1918.

The cats at Vero were formidable. The Florida Museum lists the Vero Canal Site among Indian River County records of the saber-tooth cat, Smilodon fatalis, and Stratum 2 also produced the extinct Panthera atrox and the jaguar, Panthera onca, which the site list flags as a species no longer living in Florida. Bears came in two kinds: the American black bear and the extinct Florida spectacled bear, Tremarctos floridanus, which the museum records at both the Vero Canal Site and the Luther Locality at Winter Beach. Bobcat, red and gray foxes, raccoon, spotted skunk and river otter complete the Vero predators.

Small animals tell how the Vero site looked. The Florida Museum reads Stratum 2 as primarily a stream or pond deposit, citing abundant remains of the aquatic salamanders Siren lacertina and Amphiuma means, water snakes of the genus Nerodia and the muskrat Neofiber alleni. Species pages for the greater siren and the round-tailed muskrat both list the Vero Canal Site. Freshwater and swamp dwellers make up a large share of the Vero fauna, though the museum adds that the lower sands of Stratum 2 were probably laid down by wind in a drier glacial climate.

Reptiles from the Vero layer include the extinct snapping turtle Chelydra osceola, the extinct box turtle Terrapene putnami, the gopher tortoise, the eastern diamondback rattlesnake, the coral snake, the indigo snake and the American alligator. Four bat species and a long run of rodents, among them the extinct bog lemming Synaptomys australis, the pocket gopher Geomys pinetis and the Florida mouse Podomys floridanus, came mostly from screened sediment. Birds include wild turkey, barred owl and a giant stork: the Ciconia maltha page records that Sellards described wing bones from the Vero Canal Site in 1916 and named them Jabiru weillsi, a name now folded into Ciconia maltha.

The Vero animal list was built in three campaigns. The Florida Museum counts about 350 identifiable specimens from the first phase at the canal, from 1913 to 1918. In 1956 and 1957 University of Florida graduate student Robert Weigel opened a 9 by 9 foot block on the north side of the canal, removed both strata in 6 inch levels and washed the sediment through 1/8 inch screens, recovering about 1,100 identifiable specimens, most of them small animals. Herbert Winters of the Florida Geological Survey collected another 122 identifiable specimens from Stratum 2 in the 1950s.

Naming the Vero animals took longer than finding them. The Florida Museum says much of the early taxonomic work on Vero fossils was of low quality and produced many invalid species, especially by Hay in 1916 and 1917 and by Shufeldt in 1917, and to a lesser degree by Sellards. Because most Vero megafauna survive only as isolated teeth or broken bones, later researchers turned to the small fauna, publishing studies of Vero bats in 1985 and of rodents in 1984 and 2000.

The 2014 to 2017 Old Vero excavations added new animal records from controlled layers. Vero Beach 32963 reported in March 2014 that the Vero crew had recovered small fragments of a mastodon or mammoth skull and a piece of ivory, and Hemmings attributed the unusual preservation at Vero to alkaline soil over an underlying shell layer. The Indian River Guardian reported in December 2014 that 170 species of plants and animals had been identified from the site across the new and earlier investigations, including a bone tentatively identified as a dire wolf.

NPR reported in February 2015 that a lower level at Vero held charred remains of a dire wolf and an extinct horse. Together with the FAU bison of 2016, those finds tie the old museum list to dated soils at the same canal bank. The Florida Museum also notes that the Vero locality, for all its fame, yielded fewer and poorer specimens than the Melbourne and Seminole Field sites, and that no collecting is allowed at the Vero Canal Site without City of Vero Beach authorization.