FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
DIVISION OF VERTEBRATE PALEONTOLOGY
THE TAPIR CHALLENGE – FALL 2006-SPRING 2007
The Tapir Challenge for 2006-2007 has finished. We are now working in the museum through the summer cleaning, repairing, sorting, and curating the thousands of specimens collected over the last year. Field work at the site will resume in October, 2007.Almost 320 volunteers answered the call of the challenge from September 18, 2006 to May 31, 2007. We recovered 215 skeletons of tapirs, sloths, giant armadillos, turtles, alligators, snakes and more. We had what is likely the most intense and productive vertebrate paleontology field season in Florida in the last 25 years. Much of this productivity is due to our volunteers, who contributed in excess of 4,100 hours of work at the site.
One of our primary goals of the dig, the one that it is named for, was a success. In April we passed the Gray Site of Tennessee
in having the most tapir skeletons ever collected at a single fossil site. By the end of May we had recovered a total of
72 tapirs from the site.
If you are interested in volunteering with us in the fall of 2007, a link will be found on our home page starting in late August or early
September, 2007 with specific dates and application information.
We especially want to thank those volunteers who helped make the dig so successful. Our top volunteers, as measured in number of hours worked at the site were:
Suzanne Conner
Bill Keeler
Sari Sanborn
John Helling
Rosemary McDaniel
Bill Sabis
Mary Lynch
Bonnie Ogle
Dean Warner
Jack Shaw
Lorraine McDowell
Carolyn Eastwood
Philippe Olivier
All of them worked more than 50 hours at the site.
See you in the Fall of 2007!
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