An Interest Turned Passion

 It was a scorching hot summer day as my brother-in-law and I walked along the side of the river, traveling through the dense, swampy cypress and palmetto forest. We were making our way to a little creek a short hike from our parking spot. A couple months prior, we were enjoying some snorkeling in a crystal clear spring near Ocala Florida when we stumbled up on a few tiny shark teeth mixed in the sand and gravel. I had just turned 14 at the time and I was curious to see if shark teeth might also be in this creek closer to home.

 The water of the creek felt absolutely freezing compared to the hot, humid area we just walked through! I put my mask and snorkel on, knowing I wouldn’t be able to handle the cold for too long, and put my head in the water. I used my fingers to rake back some of the gravel and within no time, I saw something I had never seen before; a giant molar of some kind the size of my fist buried in the sand. As I pulled it out, I noticed that it had long roots all over it. I had no idea what it was at the time and assumed it was not a fossil, but I put it in my backpack and continued looking. A few hours passed with nothing else too interesting, so we left without a single shark tooth.

 Later that night, I tried searching for information about this tooth on the internet. Cow tooth? No, this was way too large. After a short time, I placed the tooth on the desk and forgot about it. A few weeks later, I realized that the tooth was very shiny and heavy even though it had dried out. It had to be some kind of fossil kind of like the shark teeth! I tried searching for large fossil teeth on the internet and then it happened: I saw a picture of something identical to what I had just found. My eyes darted from the photo down to the description that read “Woolly Mammoth Tooth, Siberia”. This was the moment that a recurring interest solidified into a passion. Tons of questions rushed into my head that I had to know the answers to. “Mammoth here?! How? Why was it in the creek? Was this area different when it was here? Is there more there? What else can be found around here?” Every answer led to more questions, and I couldn’t seem to stop trying to figure it all out.

Childhood

 Rewind quite a few years and you’d see a shy, quiet kid who loved fossils, rocks and nature. I’d tell my mother and anybody else who asked that I wanted to be “a paleontologist, a geologist and an archaeologist” in that order, but what I really wanted, even at the young age of 7 or 8, was to explore and discover things. My parents and older sisters occasionally setting up little scavenger hunts, taking me to a plowed field to look for arrowheads and dried rivers in the area to explore coupled with what I watched on TV played a huge role in this. 

 I was always hooked on the Discovery and National Geographic channels with stacks of Nat Geo magazines in my room. Articles about prehistoric animals, prehistoric cultures such as the Egyptians and Mayans and nature were my favorites. I’d occasionally change my mind and say I wanted to be a “wildlife photographer” when I grew up, even though I was thinking of those amazing video shots of Cheetahs and other animals I’d see on TV when I said that. I’d take my dad’s old 1970s 35mm Nikon film camera with full manual lenses outside and try to take photos of hummingbirds, lizards, flowers, bees and anything else on the 20 acre farm I grew up on. All the shots were terrible, of course. I had no idea how to operate the camera short of focusing and pushing the button, but I still have many of those terrible photos I took at such a young age.

 When I wasn’t trying to take photos at that age, I was looking for cool rocks. It wasn’t a passion at that age, but I did enjoy it. My great grandfather called me “Rocky” for a short time because he always saw me looking for rocks and I always seemed to have one in my pocket, something that my washing machine and dryer can tell you I have not outgrown to this day. This, along with some shell fossils and sea urchin fossils I found, became the start to my fossil collection.

Pursuing the Passion

 After my discovery of the mammoth tooth that sparked my insatiable curiosity, we went out on many trips to explore rivers and creeks, finding cool fossils here and there. We got vertebrate fossil permits from the museum and I donated my first scientifically significant find (a turtle jaw) at 16 years old. I eventually mentioned to my brother-in-law that we should start a website for sharing our finds with other people. This website eventually became The Fossil Forum (www.thefossilforum.com) and it exploded in growth within a short time. We didn’t realize, but there were tons of people just like us all over the world finding crazy things without a good way to link up.

With the growth of The Fossil Forum, my knowledge about paleontology and geology grew. I was in charge of managing the website, which meant I had to read what was being posted. Eventually we had tons of professional paleontologists joining and sharing info, info that I quickly absorbed whenever they posted, along with info from a bunch of other sources. It was strange to be a 17 year old managing thousands of people older than me in an online community, but I did my best to keep things running smoothly and eventually had some incredible people volunteer to help out, many of whom still help manage the site to this day.

I briefly considered pursuing a career in paleontology around this age, but the rarity of job openings and my unwillingness to relocate outside of Florida for a job made me reconsider. I figured if I wanted to pursue my passion and remain in the area I loved, I’d have to find my own way to do it. At 18, I got certified to scuba dive for the primary purpose of fossil hunting and borrowed some money to purchase a boat. I began scuba diving for fossils on a regular basis, sometimes up to 4 days a week. I donated many of the rare and scientifically significant finds to the Florida Museum of Natural History for study, kept many of my favorite finds for my collection and sold off excess finds as they piled up. This was enough to at least cover costs of any trips and pay some bills, which I made a point to keep as low as possible.

I was never too excited about selling fossils, but I believed it was the only way I would ever be able to support my passion. I refused to put ads on The Fossil Forum, which I owned fully (and still do). I felt like I owed the community a great deal because of all the things I learned from it and all the friends I made.

And Now

Fast forward through a decade or so of exploring Florida, scuba diving all over, hiking through thousands of creeks, donating hundreds of finds for study and reporting important sites to paleontologists…and that brings us to middle of 2018, when I was browsing YouTube, saw a cool video and decided I’d like to try my hand at sharing some adventures. I already had a ton of experience building online communities and was dabbling in photography frequently enough to be competent with a camera. I told myself I’d try to shoot for 1,000 subscribers in the first year. I had no idea it would be fifty times that many.

 I had no idea when I started making videos how much I would love it. It’s a perfect merger of all the things I love, and best of all, I have a community of viewers who are driven by many of the same things that drive me. If you made it this far and are one of those viewers, thank you for taking the time here to read this and thanks for watching the videos!