00:00divers have found something incredible in a Florida sinkhole and it was stop we
00:07need to leave a warning here you're about to hear some pretty unusual
00:10scientific information this knowledge will make you the smarty pants in your
00:15friend group but there's also a risk that they'll look at you as a nerd so
00:20perhaps it would be better for you to keep this knowledge a secret in any case
00:24it won't be superfluous so you know that scientists divide the history of our
00:31planet not only by time periods but also by which animals lived at a certain time
00:37for example 2,000 years ago Earth was inhabited by the blobfish and
00:43scientists call this time the blobfish period it's a joke there's never been
00:48such a period but you get the gist the period between about 419.2
00:54million and 358.9 million years ago is called the devonian period or the age
01:01of fish do you know why because the first fish began to appear on the planet the
01:09paleogene is the period of large mammals the famous Jurassic period marks the
01:14appearance of giant dinosaurs which we often see in the movies even now we live
01:20in a certain period called the quaternary period it began about 2.6 million years
01:26ago and continues to this day this is the time of humans and modern animals so the
01:33next time somebody asks you what time it is you can just answer it's the
01:37quaternary period in short the names of these periods depend more on what
01:43creatures inhabit the planet the longest period is the Precambrian period or age
01:49of early life the time when life on the planet started to form soft-bodied
01:54worms and jellyfish swam in the ocean while microorganisms lived on land this
02:00period occupies almost 90 percent of the Earth's total geological time it started
02:08about 4.5 billion years ago and ended 540 million years ago oh it's still a video
02:16about divers don't forget we'll get back to them soon considering all these periods do
02:22you know which one is of the most poorly studied a period about which scientists
02:28know almost nothing especially about the animals that lived at that time this is the
02:36Irvingtonian North American land mammal age it lasted from about 1.6 million to
02:44250,000 years ago scientists have very few fossils that belong to this time but
02:51recently everything has changed in the USA there's the Steinhatchee River which
02:58stretches for several tens of miles in the area of Big Bend Florida and just 500,000
03:04years ago there was a sinkhole instead of the river this is a hole in the ground
03:10that forms when water dissolves the upper rock this rock is often limestone sink
03:16holes appear in places with a lot of precipitation sometimes these pits can be
03:22invisible they look like ordinary ground but the soil in them is loose and can
03:26easily collapse if you accidentally get into a sinkhole people will hear your
03:31screams and help you but in the distant past about half a million years ago when
03:37animals got there they couldn't get out of the pit so it became their grave after
03:43many many years a river appeared here and then several fossil collectors decided to
03:49check out this place and discovered a real paleontological treasure in it they
03:55plunged into the river and reached the bottom there in the murky water they saw
04:00horse teeth sticking out of the sediment it'd be pretty scary to find for many of
04:05us but for these guys it was the jackpot after the teeth they found a hoof
04:11shaft and the skull of an unusual animal at that moment the collectors realized
04:17they had made a major discovery over the years the sinkhole at this place had been
04:23filled with sedimentary rocks then the river compacted all this mass which made
04:29it possible to keep everything inside the sinkhole in good condition many animals
04:35got trapped in this pit half a million years ago and only now have people managed
04:39to get them out more precisely what's left of them divers have found more than 500
04:46fossils belonging to ancient animals including unknown species they got well
04:52preserved bones of ancient horses giant armadillos sloths and a new species of tapir
05:00the Florida Museum examined the remains and determined that they belonged to the
05:05poorly studied Irvingtonian North American land mammal age most of all
05:10scientists were struck by two finds in this collection the first was the remains of a
05:16giant armadillo like creature and the second was the skull of an ancient tapir in case you
05:23didn't know this is a very cute pig like mammal that has a short trunk like an elephant divers in
05:30Florida found the remains of a distant ancestor of this animal which may be a new unknown species
05:36most of the fossils in the sinkhole belong to early cabaline horses a subgroup that includes modern
05:44domestic horses the remains of horses are so well preserved that scientists have seen signs of wear on
05:51their teeth this will allow experts to understand the diet of these ancient creatures we often hear news
05:59about people finding the remains of ancient animals or dinosaurs in caves ravines or at the bottom of
06:05lakes but imagine if they found such remains in a museum it all started in the early 2000s north of the
06:14Florida border in southwest Georgia there was a mine where workers mined clay one day they found the
06:21remains of some ancient animals and gave them to the Florida Museum of Natural History there these
06:28remains lay in storage waiting in the wings and then one day some guy started sorting them out and
06:35noticed a mysterious vertebra of an unknown animal this little grab caught the guy's attention so he returned
06:43to it over and over again he studied it trying to figure out what species the bone belong to one day
06:51he realized the bone belonged to an unknown extinct lizard species that looked like a tegu you've
06:59probably seen these predatory creatures that looked like monitor lizards so the age of the bone was
07:06about 15 to 17 million years old let's wrap up our video with something weird you see this piece of
07:15amber colored stone with stripes or is it not the stone it looks like an ancient seashell
07:21so right now you're looking at the oldest fossil in history it's a stromatolite and its ages you
07:28won't believe it make a guess a hundred million years five hundred million years one billion no this
07:37fossil is about 3.4 billion years old it represents one of the earliest forms of life on earth no not the
07:45stone itself stromatolite is just a playground the early form of life here is these thin strips
07:52they're called cyanobacteria tiny single-celled creatures
07:58okay what about the remains of something bigger some ancient animals for example meet the trilobites
08:06they lived here during the cambrian period which began about 500 million years ago this is the
08:13time when many invertebrates and fish began to appear their exoskeletons helped the trilobites stay
08:19remarkably well preserved considering their age they were arthropods that looked like something between
08:26a spider a scorpion and a mutant from another galaxy these animals lived for a very long time and people find
08:34their remains almost all over the world they appeared at the very beginning of the cambrian period
08:41survived it and became extinct at the end of the permian period during the permian mass extinction
08:47when about 90 percent of all living beings were wiped off the face of the earth these creatures
08:53swam in open water burrowed into the sea floor or crawled along it they lived like predators and
09:00scavengers the front of the animal was protected by a strong head shield it had crescent-shaped eyes
09:07and a calcified plate on its lower body this plate covered its esophagus and mouth it had several pairs
09:15of legs growing from its body the trilobite could also curl up into a ball like a wood louse
09:23that's it for today so hey if you pacified your curiosity then give the video a like and share it
09:28with your friends or if you want more just click on these videos and stay on the bright side
Comments