Episode 10: Calvert Marine Museum Paleontology - a podcast by Ayla Anderson

Part 2 of 3

For pictures from today's episode, click here.

Today we meet with Stephen Godfrey, the Curator of Paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum in Southern Maryland. This is the second installment of our three part series featuring the museum, and we are very happy to bring you something a little different! Instead of selecting two items in the museum’s paleontology wing, we talk to Stephen about what a paleontologist does at a museum and we go through an amazing collection of his favorite fossils and the unique stories they tell us! 

At one point, Maryland was a place of many different species of mammals such as primitive elephants, peccaries, camels, rhinos, tapirs, and a horse species. Their histories are told through the fossil remains found at the Calvert Cliffs.

The Calvert Cliffs in Maryland is a large contributing source of fossils from the Miocene Epoch (~23 million years ago to ~5 million years ago). The Cliffs are like a giant cake layer of organisms that once lived in the water, died, and sank to the ocean floor where they were covered in sediment. Possibly one of the most infamous creatures roaming the seas at that time was the megladon. It was the dominant marine predator during it’s time, and probably the largest shark that ever lived. 


Episode Links:

• The Clavert Marine Museum main webpage: http://www.calvertmarinemuseum.com/

• Article announcing the name of the newly discovered Cobia species: “Prehistoric Cobia Named for Local Amateur Paleontologists”: http://calvertmarinemuseum.org/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=373

• Free download of Stephen Godfrey’s book “The Geology and Vertebrate Paleontology of Calvert Cliffs, Maryland, USA: https://smithsonian.figshare.com/articles/book/The_Geology_and_Vertebrate_Paleontology_of_Calvert_Cliffs_Maryland_USA/9761762

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