Prehistoric ric bones unearthed in n Springs By Alan Cherry Staff Writer CORAL SPRINGS - A fossil enthusiast has stumbled across the bones and teeth of huge creatures that may have died here 10,000 years ago. "I was jumping for joy," said Scott Stafford, 21. "When I was a kid, dinosaurs were my main interest." The find has drawn the interest of officials of the Science Museum and Planetarium of Palm Beach County, where Stafford took the bones for evaluation. Dr. Ed Sobey, director of the museum, classified the find as "fairly unusual." He estimated the age of the bones at 10,000 years. *What has gotten our attention,' Sobey said, "is that if [Stafford] found those samples casually, there could be something substantial there if we take a closer look." Stafford, an electronics technician, was walking his dog around a townhouse construction site in the 2600 block of Northwest 99th Avenue Sunday when he stepped over a round, fossilized bone fragment. He picked up the fragment, which appears to be the rounded end of part of a leg bone. The fossils, apparently from several different animals, had been' unearthed by a backhoe digging about 10 feet. deep in a murky pit filled with water. The townhouse developers, MAP Build- NW 35th ST SAMPLE ROAD -NW 31st ST DRIVE NW 29th ST BONES DRIVE FOUND BAV 24th n ST HILLS HERE ALISH3AINN ROYAL PALM BLVD. 99th CORAL CORAL SPRINGS Staff map by GALE ENGELKE Bones found at construction site. ers, have agreed to let museum representatives inspect the site to determine the significance of the find. Included in the find are two teeth weighing about 4 pounds each. The teeth are flat at one end and about the size of a desk-top tape dispenser. Sobey said the teeth are similar to those found in a mastodon, an ancestor of the elephant. But they are : about twice the size of the mastodon teeth on display at the museum. If the teeth don't belong to a mastodon, they could belong to a giant sloth or bear, Sobey said. The variety of bone fragments implies the site may have been a deep peat bog into which early mammals fell, Sobey said. The soft, black organic soil would have preserved the bones, he said. Stafford, who studied fossils and dinosaurs in college, said the teeth and bone fragments imply at least one of the creatures could have been about 20 feet tall. "But," Stafford cautioned, "at this point we really don't know what we've got." Stafford said other fossils could be destroyed if the digging doesn't stop soon. Stafford's girlfriend, Sherri Haas, and his father, Bob Stafford, have helped him look for more fossils. "There could be a whole skeleton down there," Stafford said. "All I really know is I found something, and it is pretty big." Dr. John E. Hall, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, said it would be "a litte uncommon" to find mastodon bones in Broward County. "Most of the times these materials are found in sinkholes like in North Florida. It would be relatively rare [to find such bones in Broward] but not impossible at all," Hall said. The fossils could have come from a mastodon, the ancestor of the modernday elephant. Staff illustration by LARRY GEYMAN