Ice Age Animals Found at Vero Beach

Most of what is known about Ice Age animals at Vero Beach comes from Stratum 2 of the Vero Canal Site, which the University of Florida logs as Vertebrate Fossil Locality IR005.

The Florida Museum of Natural History places the site within the City of Vero Beach, southeast of the municipal airport, and dates the layer to the late Rancholabrean land mammal age, about 20,000 to 12,000 years ago, an age it says radiocarbon dating and the mix of animals are both consistent with.

The Vero list is long. The Florida Museum states that the Stratum 2 fauna includes almost all of the extinct late Pleistocene megafauna known to have lived in Florida, among them the large extinct tortoise Hesperotestudo, three ground sloths, seven hoofed mammals and four carnivores. The museum's published list counts only animals confirmed from Stratum 2, the Pleistocene layer, rather than from the younger Stratum 3 above it, which is primarily a Holocene deposit.

The American mastodon and the Columbian mammoth head the Vero roster of giant plant eaters on the Florida Museum list.

Both Mammut americanum and Mammuthus columbi are marked extinct on the Stratum 2 list. Three ground sloths shared the Vero landscape, Megalonyx jeffersonii, Paramylodon harlani and Eremotherium laurillardi, along with three armored mammals, the glyptodont Glyptotherium floridanum, the pampathere Holmesina septentrionalis and the extinct beautiful armadillo, Dasypus bellus, which the museum also records from the Luther Locality at Winter Beach in Indian River County.

The hoofed animals at Vero include an extinct horse, Equus fraternus, the extinct llama Palaeolama mirifica, the extinct peccary Mylohyus fossilis, white-tailed deer, the extinct bison Bison antiquus and a tapir that carries the town's name. Sellards described Tapirus veroensis in 1918 from a skull found at the canal, and the Florida Geological Survey kept that holotype when other Vero specimens went to the Smithsonian. The Vero list also marks the rodent Neochoerus pinckneyi as extinct.

The Vero Stratum 2 list includes the dire wolf, the saber-tooth cat, the extinct Panthera atrox, the jaguar and two kinds of bear.

The dire wolf page of the Florida Museum shows a partial skull from the Vero Canal Site, UF/FGS 280, that is the holotype of Canis ayersi, a species Sellards named in 1916 and now considered a junior synonym of Canis dirus. That skull and the Vero tapir skull are, in the museum's words, the finest specimens found at the site, both recovered from Stratum 2 between 1916 and 1918.

The Florida Museum lists the Vero Canal Site among Indian River County records of the saber-tooth cat, Smilodon fatalis, and its jaguar page also lists the Vero Canal Site; the site list flags Panthera onca as a species no longer living in Florida. The bears are the American black bear and the extinct Florida spectacled bear, Tremarctos floridanus, which the museum records at both the Vero Canal Site and the Luther Locality at Winter Beach. Bobcat, red and gray foxes, raccoon, spotted skunk and river otter complete the Vero carnivores.

The small animals show that the Vero site was mainly a stream or pond deposit, in the Florida Museum's reading of Stratum 2.

The museum cites abundant remains of the aquatic salamanders Siren lacertina and Amphiuma means, water snakes of the genus Nerodia and the muskrat Neofiber alleni. Species pages for the greater siren and the round-tailed muskrat both list the Vero Canal Site. Freshwater and swamp dwellers make up a large share of the Vero fauna, though the museum adds that the lower sands of Stratum 2 were probably laid down by wind in a drier climate during a glacial interval.

Reptiles from the Vero layer include the snapping turtle Chelydra osceola, the box turtle Terrapene putnami, the gopher tortoise, the eastern diamondback rattlesnake, the coral snake, the indigo snake and the American alligator. Four bat species and a long run of rodents also appear, among them the extinct bog lemming Synaptomys australis, the pocket gopher Geomys pinetis and the Florida mouse Podomys floridanus. Birds include wild turkey, barred owl and the extinct asphalt stork, which the museum describes as over 4 feet tall with a wingspan up to 9 feet: the Ciconia maltha page records that Sellards described wing bones from the Vero Canal Site in 1916 and named them Jabiru weillsi, a name now treated as Ciconia maltha.

The Vero animal list was built from three collecting efforts between 1913 and the 1950s, before scientific digging resumed in 2014.

Weigel opened a 9 by 9 foot area on the north side of the canal, removed both strata in 6 inch levels and washed the sediment through 1/8 inch screens to recover small vertebrate remains for reading the site's ancient environment.

Naming the Vero animals took longer than finding them. The Florida Museum says much of the early taxonomic work on Vero fossils was not of very high quality and produced many invalid species, especially by Hay in 1916 and 1917 and by Shufeldt in 1917, and to a lesser degree by Sellards. Because most Vero megafauna survive only as isolated teeth or broken bones, later researchers turned to the small fauna, publishing studies of Vero bats in 1985 and of rodents in 1984 and 2000.

Modern digs since 2014 have tied the Vero animals to dated soil layers on the south side of the canal.

The Florida Museum reports that excavations resumed in 2014, when a Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute crew led by C. Andrew Hemmings ran a controlled, archaeological-style operation near Sellards' original area. Radiocarbon dating of ancient soil layers there gave ages of about 8, 12 and 19 thousand years before present, so the deposits span the Holocene and Pleistocene boundary. The museum adds that new geochemical analyses published in 2012 and the 2014 excavations showed Sellards was right that people lived at Vero alongside extinct megafauna.

In 2016, Florida Atlantic University archaeologists reported uncovering what they believe are bones of a 13,000 to 14,000 year old extinct bison at the Old Vero Man Site, identified from an upper molar thought to represent Bison antiquus, along with slivers of bone from large mammals that could have come from mammoth, mastodon, sloth or bison. The Florida Museum also notes that the Vero locality yielded fewer and poorer specimens than the Melbourne and Seminole Field sites, and that no collecting is allowed at the Vero Canal Site without City of Vero Beach authorization. Last verified: October 15, 2026, by re-reading the Florida Museum's Vero Canal Site and species pages and the FAU bison release for this account of Vero's Ice Age animals.