500 Million Years at Weedon Island

Have you ever looked at a gopher tortoise or a roseate spoonbill and thought “Wow, they look like living dinosaurs!”? Have you ever seen fossils and realized they looked similar to creatures still around today? And what about Florida specifically - when did all of the animals and plants we observe in our state actually arrive here? This webinar will take a 500 million year journey through evolutionary history, looking at the origins of many of the creatures that call Weedon Island home. We will find out that dragonflies haven’t changed much since before the dinosaurs, but that just 15,000 years ago (the blink of an eye in geologic time) Florida was full of enormous mastodons and mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and giant ground sloths!
This webinar was hosted by the Weedon Island Preserve Cultural and Natural History Center and features guest speaker Brian Magnier. Magnier is a naturalist and wildlife photographer originally from Springfield, Massachusetts. He studied ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, where his passion for the natural world flourished. He has conducted research on birds in Borneo and Papua New Guinea, mammals in Alaska and New York, and lionfish in the Caribbean. Magnier has worked as an environmental educator in New Jersey, a kayak and hiking guide in Alaska, and a snorkel tour guide in Indonesia.