Welcome to brain Stuff, production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Bobibam Here. Winding through the South Carolina low Country, the Cooper River is a redlined haven for sport fish and shorebirds. The waterway originates in Berkeley County's Lake Moultrie. From there it proceeds all the way down to Charleston, where it merges with two other waterways to
form the world famous Charleston Harbor. The Cooper River took its name from Anthony Ashley Cooper Bayed, seventeenth century English lord. As time wore on, it became a lifeline in the region's burgeoning rice trade. But the Cooper also bears the hallmarks of a far more ancient chapter in South Carolina history. If you know where to look, and you've got some scuba gear handy, you might just find a mammoth tusk
lurking beneath the water's surface. Before the article. This episode is based on how Stuff Work, spoke by email with Matthew Whees. He and his father, Joe Harvey, are experienced local divers who patrol a Cooper for fossils, many of which end up on display at the Berkeley County Museum in monks corner South Carolina, and not all the giants they encounter are prehistoric. To hear we'se tell it. Run ins with living modern day river beasts aren't uncommon, he said.
I've had a catfish swallow my hand in a log jam underwater, manatee break the surface while I was swimming back to the boat, and alligators swim towards me. But once, he reports, he came nose to nose with the gator and measuring about ten feet or three meters long. Underwater fossil hunting is a global pastime outside the US, divers have encounted paleo treasures in such places as Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and the Bahamas. Back in a Bona Fide Lemur Graveyard
was discovered in the submerged caves of Madagascar. The big find was made possible by an international collaborative effort between anthropologists, paleontologists and scuba divers. Hundreds of bones appeared in the underwater sediments, and some came from contemporary species like the invasive black rat. Other remains were left behind by animals that when extinct within the past millennia. The site quickly established itself as the world's biggest cache of pacu lemur fossils.
An ancient relative of the rofed lemur, this creature was about twice as heavy, weighing an estimated twenty two pounds that's ten kilos, but even it would have been utterly dwarfed by the guerrilla sized mesopropath Fecus, a gargantuoud lemur also represented in these caves. Pygmy hippo, elephant, bird, and horned crocodile material was also recovered by the dive team, along with the rare, virtually complete skull of yet another bigone lemur species. Getting access to the bounty wasn't easy.
The caves in question were likely dry at some point, but today they're part of a flooded sinkhole right now. The system's most fossil laden cave runs eighty two ft that's twenty five deep. It's a dark environment with a complex layout full of horizontal passageways and murky waters. In short, this is no place for novice divers, and cave diving in general is a high risk sport if you wander. Of course, you can't always ascend straight up to the surface.
And so to avoid getting lost, the scuba specialists on that team tracked their pathways with about eight hundred and eighty feet that's two hundred and seventy meters of safety lines. There's another site in the North Sea. Great Britain was connected to the rest of mainland Europe as recently as eight thousand, two hundred years ago. For this reason, mammoth bones are periodically dredged up out of the North Sea, which separates the UK from its continental neighbors. Another precious
sinkhole is the Page Ladson site in northwestern Florida. Hidden below a river, it's yielded some of the oldest known human artifacts in North America, along with masted on bones, including some fourteen thousand, five hundred and fifty year old fossils bearing scars that suggest the animals were butchered by ancient people there. Here, tannins are a real nuisance, a vital component in leather making a Tannins are chemical compounds
released by various plants. When these seep into ponds or rivers, they can turn the water blackish brown, which can definitely impair a diver's visibility. In some corners of the river, the tannins help block out sunlight, shrouding everything deeper than about ten feet or three meters beneath the surface in inky darkness. To see clearly, the divers make good use of high wattage underwater lights. Back north, in the Cooper River, divers face the same problem. Buieze explained that he and
his father wear cave lights attached to their helmets. The rest of the duo's equipment would look pretty familiar to other recreational divers. Since the Cooper gets strong tidal currents, the waters speed at any given moment affects their schedule. A faster currents make for shorter excursions. So why do people go through all this trouble when there are loads of fossils hanging out on dry land. Well, for one thing,
immersion in water has some preservation benefits. Deep in the bowels of a sunken cave, bones are less likely to be disturbed either by scavengers or the ravages of open air climates, And whereas land fossils are often caked in rock, some of the bones and flowing rivers get polished clean by the currents. Most of the material wee's discovered out in the Cooper River comes from two different points in
geologic time. The river's most sought after fossils are probably shark teeth from the Miocene epoch, which lasted from twenty three million to five point three million years ago. Some of these chompers get quite large. A tooth from the extinct Megalodon shark can be over seven and a half inches that's nineteen centimeters long. We said sharks teeth are the most common fines, though whale earbones come in a
close second. Other Cooper River fossils were laid down during the more recent Pleistocene epoch, and that began just two point six million years ago and ended a mere eleven thousand, seven hundred years before the present. Back then, sea levels were lower and the Carolina coastline lay farther to the east.
Over the years, we'se and Harvey have extricated the bones of Pleistocene mammoths, cappa bears, hoofed herbivores, and giant beavers, which we've done a whole episode on a but to summarize, During the Last Ice Age, North American wetlands were occupied by casterroides, which were eight foot or two and a half meter beavers that likely weighed two hundred and twenty pounds.
That's a hundred kilos or more. Today's episode is based on the article river Bottom Bones The Strange world of underwater fossil hunting on how stuffworks dot Com, written by Mark Mancini. Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio, the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H