Alfonso Riley shows off one of the fossils he found in Redington Shores, the toe bone of a prehistoric horse.
REDINGTON SHORES – A county employee preparing a job site found bone fragments that an animal fossil expert believes could represent “a major discovery.”
Alfonso Riley, a county traffic control monitor, was working at the Redington Shores Yacht and Tennis Club on Gulf Boulevard recently when he noticed several unusual looking objects in the soil. Though other workers remarked the pieces looked like “just rocks,” Riley had a sense the oddly shaped fragments were something more.
“They looked like fossils to me,” he commented while showing his find to Mayor Bert Adams and others at town hall last week.
Riley contacted Randy V. Bellomo, an anthropologist at St. Petersburg College, who forwarded photos of the objects to the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.
There, Richard Hulbert, collections manager of the museum, confirmed Riley’s suspicions. The largest fragment he found is ancient, the toe bone of a prehistoric Ice Age horse thought to be 12,000 to 18,000 years old.
Another of the finds is from the shell of a giant armadillo, also from the Ice Age. There were also bone fragments that could not be definitely identified, Hulbert noted in an e-mail sent to Riley.
Though Hulbert said the exact age of the fossils cannot be determined until more species are recovered and the geology of the undisturbed fossils can be studied, he indicated an older age is possible. He mentioned a 1.3 million-year-old site found near Ruskin.
Thousands of fossilized bones were also found two years ago in nearby Boca Ciega Millennium Park. Included in that find were bones from Columbian mammoths and huge armadillos dating as far back as 100,000 years.
In fact, the bones found by Riley may be from a “secondary site,” meaning the dirt came from another location, Bellomo said. He noted that a large amount of fill dirt has been used in creating the Yacht and Tennis Club community from the old Parsley’s trailer park, and it is not known where that dirt came from. Prior to that, a dredging project around 1940 would have pulled sandy soil from the adjacent Boca Ciega Bay to create the land where Parsley’s stood.
Nonetheless, Riley’s find could be significant, Hulbert said. He concluded his letter by stating, “There is potential for a major discovery; only careful excavation can determine this.”
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