Wakulla Springs: Bones at the Bottom of the World
Near Tallahassee, Florida
About fifteen miles south of Tallahassee, where the land flattens into longleaf pine forest and the light through the trees turns a particular shade of green, Wakulla Springs waits at the end of a state road. It is, by most scientific measures, one of the largest freshwater springs in the world.
The spring pool opens at the surface in a rough circle several hundred feet across, its water an improbable shade of blue-green. At its highest, the flow has been measured at eight hundred sixty thousand gallons per minute. The water is cold year-round, staying in the upper sixties Fahrenheit regardless of the Florida summer above it, because it rises from the Floridan Aquifer, one of the largest underground freshwater reserves in North America.
But what stops most visitors cold is not the flow rate. It is the bottom.
Staring down through the clear water, you can see the bones. In eighteen fifty, a woman named Sarah Smith reported seeing the skeleton of a massive creature on the spring floor. Scientists eventually brought up the remains of a mastodon, eleven feet high at the shoulder, dating to the last ice age. Since then, divers and researchers have identified the remains of at least nine other extinct species down in the caves below the spring bowl, including giant ground sloths, giant armadillos, and ancient horses and camels, none of them native to Florida as we know it today.
Paleo-Indian people lived at or near this spring more than thirteen thousand years ago, hunting those very animals. The bones of people and prey have since been found together in the sediment.
In the nineteen thirties, Wakulla Springs was acquired by Edward Ball, a powerful Florida financier, who maintained it as a private resort and nature preserve. Ball was famously eccentric and kept the springs in a remarkable state of conservation. The state acquired it after his death and it is now Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park, where glass-bottom boat tours still drift over those ancient bones.
