When fieldwork began at 10 in the morning, Sharon Lord didn’t expect much as she knelt in the sandy clay and settled in for another long day of careful digging at the Montbrook fossil site, about a 45-minute drive south of Gainesville in Levy County.
Hours later, at 3:20 in the afternoon, her persistence paid off. As she brushed away dirt, a gomphothere skull — an extinct relative of the modern elephant — stared back at her, two tusks intact. It was her biggest discovery since she began volunteering in January 2017.
“I worked on this little square all day,” said Lord, a retired special education teacher. “I had no idea I was going to find anything.”
Moments like these are what keep volunteers coming back year after year. Their dedication has contributed to a milestone: Last month, the Florida Museum of Natural History began celebrating a decade of digging at Montbrook.
Since excavations began on Nov. 12, 2015, more than 1,000 volunteers have unearthed fossils at Montbrook, according to Dr. Jonathan I. Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the museum.
The site was discovered by chance earlier that month, when the 5-year-old granddaughter of the property owner stumbled upon bones while walking the land with her family.
Through a series of connections, the find was reported to the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Florida. Once Bloch’s team visited, they contacted the landowner and soon recognized they had discovered something special.
“We realized pretty quickly it was an exciting place because we started seeing new things,” Bloch said. “That’s when we started a public dig.”
The dig runs every Saturday through Tuesday, weather permitting. This gives volunteers — many with no prior experience — the opportunity to dig and perhaps live out a childhood dream.
The goal isn’t simply to build collections for display. Fossils are collected so researchers can study them and learn more about the history of life.
“It’s an incredible opportunity to educate people about the usefulness of the fossil record for important contemporary issues,” Bloch said. “There’s just no setting like this to have a good conversation with people about that.”
Once the fossils are brought back, they are cleaned, curated and carefully stored so future scientists can easily access them for research.
“This isn’t a fake experience. Not only are they digging just like professional vertebrate paleontologists dig, but this also isn’t set up just for public consumption,” Bloch said. “We’re literally interested in the science coming out of here. There’s a lot of discovery happening — most of the new things we’ve found in the last ten years have been found by our volunteers.”
From saber-toothed cats to the lower jaw of a freshwater otter — the oldest record of its kind in North America by a couple of million years, Bloch said — the fossils at Montbrook have helped researchers trace how animals adapted before continents collided during the Great American Biotic Interchange — or, as Bloch puts it, the “calm before the storm.”
Proper, thorough collection today ensures future generations of scientists will have access to this vital record, because, he said, “they’re not going to be able to come back here.”
“We’re not just collecting for ourselves — we’re collecting for this generation, for future generations and for people all over the world,” Bloch said. “That’s what research is about… The reason it’s so critical at places like this is because we won’t have access to it forever. This is our only opportunity.”
What makes the site truly special, Bloch said, is its accessibility — a rare chance for volunteers to engage in real scientific research.
“You come out here and dig something up, put it in your bag, and it’s like, ‘I’m the first person in six million years to touch this,’” Lord said. “It doesn’t matter what it is — it’s that you found it. It makes an impact on you, like, ‘I’m really doing something important for scientific history.’”
