Robotics Helps Revive Florida’s Not-So-Ice Age

When winter dawned in Florida during the Ice Age, glaciers were as far away as Illinois and snow only rarely dusted the peninsula.

Escaping the harsher weather to the north were the Paleo-Indians, who lived on Florida’s sand-dune prairies alongside giant sloths, camels and a less-hairy version of the woolly mammoth.

An armadillo called a glyptodont, which was the size of a small car, whacked predators with a tail resembling a spiked club. Saber-toothed cats sported 9-inch fangs -- the largest of any feline in Earth’s history. But beavers weighing up to 500 pounds could out-chomp them with teeth up to a foot long.

“Hard to believe that all of this was in our Sunshine State,” said Elizabeth Dashiell, spokeswoman for the South Florida Science Museum.

The museum recently developed an exhibit featuring Florida’s not-so-icy place in the Ice Age with life-size, robotic re-creations of giant sloths, cats, glyptodonts and other prehistoric species. The centerpiece, a towering mastodon skeleton unearthed in Palm Beach County in 1969, has been at the museum for years but so many people confused it with a dinosaur, the museum wanted to share more about its place in history, Dashiell said. The exhibition runs through May.

During the Ice Age, one-third of the planet was covered in glaciers, but Florida had temperatures only 5 to 10 degrees cooler than today’s, and an even bigger perk: virtually no humidity. The temperate climate and unfrozen water lured mammoths and mastodons, which were chased by the Paleo-Indians who needed food, said Bob Beatty, Orange County Regional History Center curator of education.

Beatty said Floridians who think the coastline is disappearing should look back to the Ice Age, when lower sea levels left most current-day coastal cities miles from the beach.

“If you were here 25,000 years ago, you could walk out now into the Gulf of Mexico almost half the distance to Louisiana,” said Bruce McFadden, associate director of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. The museum’s “Tusks!” exhibition showcases one of the largest fossil collections of prehistoric elephants in North America.

“Likewise, if you lived here 100,000 years ago during one of the warm stages of the Ice Age, Miami and Tampa would have been underwater,” he said.

When the first people arrived 12,000 years ago, they saw a state that would seem unrecognizable to today’s inhabitants, said Scott Mitchell, collections manager for Florida Archaeology.

“Tampa Bay was a valley with a little stream running down the middle of it, so it was a very different place,” he said.

Mitchell said the Paleo-Indians drifted throughout the state, moving with the seasons and following their food supplies. Using weapons made of stones, bones, antlers and ivory, they hunted giant mastodons and mammoths as well as smaller animals.

“They were pretty sophisticated. They were using spear throwers to launch big darts or spears,” Mitchell said. “But they also carried things like knives.”

The Paleo-Indians lived in groups of 10 to 30 people, and had about the same appearance and intellect as humans today, Mitchell said. Scientists hypothesize that they might have killed mastodons and mammoths to extinction. Either that, or climatic changes or illnesses caused the demise of the six-ton creatures, McFadden said.

The weather was so temperate that the woolly mammoths stayed farther north. In Florida, the lesser-known Columbian mammoths, which were probably much larger and much less hairy than the woolly mammoths, roamed the landscape.

“People think it’s the Ice Age so everything must have been frozen,” Dashiell said. “But actually people right now in Florida are feeling close to what it felt like back in the Ice Age.”