Disabled dog finds remnants of Galapagos tortoise in Ruskin

Three years ago, Frank Garcia went fossil hunting with Webster, his faithful companion.

Although disabled after surgery for a herniated disc, the Chihuahua-dachshund mix often tagged and dragged himself along with the Ruskin-based paleontologist.

The pair headed to what is now called the Caloosa shell pit to check the latest pile of excavated shell.

While Garcia began sifting through the pile, he noticed Webster had dragged himself over to a long row of dirt.

"I kept calling him, but he just wouldn't listen," Garcia said. "He was interested in something in the dirt."

What had caught Webster's attention, Garcia said, were large pieces of fossilized giant tortoise shells, mixed in with elephant teeth and a woolly mammoth skull.

Garcia was amazed.

In all his years work, he had never seen so many pieces of giant tortoise fossils in one spot.

In 2006, he found a similar pile of fossils in another part of the same shell pit, but the find wasn't as large, he said. At the time, he thought it would be the last of its kind.

Garcia said other giant tortoise fossils have been found elsewhere in the country but not in mass quantities.

"What he found was one of the most important giant tortoise fossil sites in the world, right here in Hillsborough County," he said. "I decided to call the spot Webster's Site."

After gathering the find, Garcia asked Karen Chadwick of Interlachen, a woman known for reassembling fossils into their ancient forms, to piece together what he found.

The result was incredible, Garcia said. The shell built from the bones was 51 inches long, 42 inches wide and 21 inches high.

"This is the ancestor of the Galapagos tortoise," Garcia said. "It's much larger, though; probably weighed 700 to 800 pounds."

The reptile lived 500,000 years ago during the Pleistocene Epoch, a time when the Ruskin area was a vegetative paradise and home to an astonishing array of prehistoric creatures, including condors with 23-foot wing spans, 13-foot-long armadillos, 8-foot-long beavers, woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers.

"It would have made Busch Gardens look like a little pet store," Garcia said.

Garcia will show this prehistoric prize, which he has named Kong, at Camp Bayou's Paleo Preserve on Saturday during the preserve's spring open house.

"This is the best specimen I've ever seen, and I've been in paleontology since 1954," he said.

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