In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with an old childhood friend of mine to talk about his life growing up on an Indian mound in Florida, how he ended up in Alaska, and how he became the man he is today. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed getting to know him and his story. - John Rocha Thanks for tuning in, John! If you like what you hear here, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share to stay up to date with what s going on in the world of podcasting and social media! Enjoy & spread the word to your friends about what's going on! Timestamps: 3:00 - How I acquired an Indian Mound in North Florida 8:30 - How John acquired Alaska 9:20 - How he dropped out of college 11:00 How he got to Alaska 13:00 -- How he became a mountain guide 16:15 - What he did to get there 17:30 What he s up to now 18:40 - What s going to do in Alaska 19:30 -- What s next? 22:40 -- How did he get to Alaska? 26:10 -- How does he get there? 27:15 -- Why he got here? 28:15 29:40 32:10 33: What s he s doing in Alaska ? 35: What is his favorite place in the most beautiful place in North America? 36:00 | What s his favorite part? 37:30 | How he s got into Alaska 39:20 38:40 | Can I do it? 40:00 // 39:00 What s your favorite place? 41:10 | How do I know I m going to Alaska?? 45:30 What s my favorite place to fish in the middle of the country? 47:20 | How much do you think I m gonna make it in the next episode? 48:30 // 45:00 How do you like it 51:00 My favorite part of my life? , 49:00 Can I have a mountain? & so much more? 6:00 I ll let you know what I m looking forward to getting back in the game?
00:00:15.000I've been admiring your Instagram page and all the social media stuff forever and it's crazy and perplexing and so I couldn't wait to get you in here and see.
00:00:23.000How the hell did you acquire this magical spot that you have in Alaska?
00:00:38.000Yeah, my parents moved this family down from Ohio and bought nine acres on the St. Johns River in 1962. It's where I grew up and it was on top of an Indian mound.
00:05:46.000They took me back to the University of Seattle.
00:05:48.000I told them I had been sleeping in the brush, you know, and there was a board there that said riders needed to Alaska must be mechanically unkind.
00:14:08.000It seems like the companies that were building it, they call them the Seven Sisters, you know, all the big oil companies were grouped together.
00:14:18.000And an operating company was called Aliasco Pipeline.
00:14:22.000And it was like somebody flew over Alaska and said, let's drop $9 billion on these guys and see what they do with it.
00:14:37.000And then at the end of the pipeline, I told my partner, you want to buy this company from me or you want me to buy it from you?
00:14:44.000Well, flip the coin, come over the fair price.
00:14:47.000Flipped the coin, he won, he bought me out.
00:14:49.000And I said, okay, now I had a little money.
00:14:52.000Went to work drilling for uranium for Exxon and Chevron up in the Seward Peninsula for a company called Resource Associates and was just a guy hauling the drill rig around.
00:15:05.000And from there I started getting more interested in the mining end of things.
00:15:10.000And keep in mind I'm still a young guy.
00:19:15.000It was a privately owned company all that time.
00:19:22.000At the time I bought that company, I became the largest private landowner in Alaska with 10,000 acres of patented land with proven reserves close to 800,000 ounces.
00:19:43.000I'm going to say over 8 million, but records indicate a little bit different.
00:19:48.000And in the process of that, I went down to Utah and got all their archive material, which included all the notes and the correspondence files, and exploration files, and stratigraphic files, and the researches.
00:20:02.000All the paperwork they had in Boston, because Boston was where U.S.S.R.N.M. was headquartered.
00:20:08.000So I had kind of an advantage in the gold mining business because now I have 10,000 acres of land, a lot of it already mined out by the dredges, but the dredges only took what they could make at $20 an ounce.
00:20:22.000And when they stopped, it was $35 an ounce.
00:20:26.000And I didn't check today, but I think it's close to $1,800 an ounce.
00:20:31.000And they only mined what was good at that time.
00:21:42.000But now we've morphed into a land management company because we've got a half a dozen mines that are on different pieces of our ground, mining.
00:23:12.000The company took out about 3,000 ounces out of this one little area.
00:23:17.000And I was like, God damn, this stuff stinks.
00:23:19.000So one day, we were walking around the area after they had mined it, moved on to another place, and we saw all the smell.
00:23:28.000We walked around the side of this hill, and we got up in this little draw, and we were picking, my kids were with me too, we were picking bones off the ground, little shards, little leg bones and stuff.
00:23:40.000So we filled up a garbage bag with those.
00:23:43.000We went back again and again and again, and then I took an excavator back, built a little road around the side so we could get back to it with a machine, took a couple of digs out of the muck, found a mammoth tusk.
00:23:57.000I said, oh boy, let's get something going.
00:24:00.000So we got a big floating barge and put a pump on it, 471 Jimmy, with a giant.
00:24:06.000They're called giants, but they're actually hydraulic monitors.
00:24:09.000They look like big long pipes that you spray water out of.
00:24:13.000And our pump was an 8-inch intake, 6-inch outtake, and we nozzled it down to 2 inches, 2 1⁄2 inches.
00:24:21.000We could fire the water way out there and wash the overburden away.
00:24:24.000The overburden there is about 60 feet high.
00:26:01.000Well, you spray it, and then you walk up there, and you turn the nozzle off the side, and you'll pick up the bones, the little pieces, leg bones, back bones.
00:26:09.000Why is there so much in this one area?
00:26:16.000When I watched the documentary on your place, when you show this giant room where you have all these buckets, Of femurs and skulls and tusks and you have those paleontologists who are just like,
00:26:32.000they can't even believe what they're seeing.
00:28:32.000And the stuff that you're seeing there, and you saw in that video that you watched, the documentary, it's like nobody knows why any of that stuff is there.
00:28:46.000Is that the most unusual sight that they've ever discovered in terms of just the sheer quantity of bones?
00:30:25.000At first, I just thought, oh, you probably found a couple things on this place.
00:30:29.000And then as I'm going over your Instagram page and I'm seeing all the stuff that you're pulling out of there, I'm like, this doesn't even seem real.
00:30:38.000Like, how could this one area have so many bones and so many tusks?
00:31:53.000And so I'm kind of going along with them because...
00:31:57.000But that would make sense why they're all there.
00:31:59.000Well, you've got to remember that the world, Pleistocene started, what, two and a half million years ago and stopped about 11,800 years ago.
00:32:10.000So that whole area was ice, except for an ice-free corridor between Siberia and Alaska in the lower 48. They went right through where we're at.
00:32:19.000So there was migration happening, coming through there.
00:32:23.000And these animals lived there for tens of thousands of years.
00:36:26.000Between 12,800 years ago, and then Graham thinks it's probably happened multiple times since then, maybe not as big, but similar impacts, where we pass through this comet cloud.
00:36:40.000And the United States, which was covered in half a mile of ice, or as much as a mile high of ice, half the country, all that was wiped out almost instantaneously.
00:36:54.000And that these things hit all over the world, probably reset civilization, and probably caused the mass extinction of...
00:37:01.000In North America, it was like 65% of the megafauna died very quickly.
00:41:02.000You found some tissue, too, which is kind of crazy.
00:41:05.000Like a lot of these animals died, and you found little pieces of soft tissue and tendons and ligaments, which those paleontologists were thrilled by.
00:44:23.000We have found a lot over the years, and they all, you know, there was a deal with AMNH, and you might have heard me rant about that a little bit.
00:44:33.000What's AMNH? Alaska American Museum of Natural History.
00:44:38.000Back in the 1920s, when the company started hydraulicking, they started unearthing all these fossils.
00:44:46.000The company had eight bucket-line dredges running.
00:44:50.000So they were moving millions of yards.
00:44:52.000They moved 277 million yards of silt hydraulically, which was just 17 million more yards than they dug out of the Panama Canal.
00:45:07.000And so all those bones, there was a guy named Childs Frick in New York.
00:45:13.000His father was Henry Frick, the US steel magnet with Carnegie.
00:45:19.000They've decided to get a hold of the USS R&M company in Boston.
00:45:24.000They said, hey, how about we finance to get these bones out of Alaska and bring them to AMNH. So they worked a three-way deal with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, President Bunnell up there.
00:45:38.000A guy named Otto Geist started going out with a bone wagon.
00:45:41.000They collected bones from 1928 until 1958. They were only supposed to collect scientifically important bones.
00:45:51.000For those, they were supposed to do research on them and write reports and submit them to my company.
00:45:59.000They collected the bones, sent them to New York City, Where they just languished in the basements of the AM&H. When I bought the company, I started going through my files and I found this deal.
00:46:14.000And I got a hold of the University of Alaska and I said, these are our company bones.
00:46:20.000Let's go find out what's going on with them.
00:46:22.000They haven't done the reporting they're supposed to.
00:46:35.000Dick Osborne, who was the author of this report, I'm going to give you this report, by the way, because I've told everybody that I'm going to start a bone rush.
00:48:55.000Imagine if you see a bunch of divers pulling woolly mammoth tusks out of the East River.
00:49:02.000The title of this draft report is Early Man in Eastern Beringia, Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, Artifacts and Associated Fauna Recovered from Fairbanks Mining District, Alaska.
00:49:16.000Authored by Richard Osborne, the Quaternary Center, University of Alaska Museum, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
00:49:25.000Robert E. Vander, Vertebrae Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, and a fellow named Robert Sattler, Tana Chiefs, Fairbanks, Alaska.
00:49:34.000They wrote the introduction, and the report, this associated draft, never released, goes through the history of the bone collecting in Alaska, at least off my ground.
00:49:50.000So, the part that I want to reveal to people, because I said I would, we'll see if anybody's out there got a sense of adventure.
00:50:00.000Because if I was, and I'm not going to tell people you're allowed to do this, but if I was listening to your podcast, and I happen to have a boat, and I happen to have a little scuba equipment, because I'm going to tell them, everybody,
00:54:16.000And a complete set of tusks, like the day, did you see that little video snippet I said about the day we found a full-grown woolly mammoth?
00:58:05.000I know a guy who was on a ranch in Montana, and I think the story was someone was elk hunting on the ranch, and they saw something in the ground, and they contacted the ranch owner, and it turned out there was a T-Rex skeleton,
00:58:21.000and someone purchased it for over a million dollars.
00:59:53.000I haven't asked him, but I'm going to find out.
00:59:57.000Well, there's a lot of those sites like Nature is Metal, you know, that website?
01:00:01.000I think they get their videos taken down.
01:00:03.000I think there's a lot of the faint-hearted amongst us that think that there's something wrong with watching videos of animals killing other animals, that somehow or another it's cruel.
01:00:15.000Well, I know I get accused of climate change and global warmth and stuff.
01:01:42.000But what you've discovered, what people should be concentrating on is...
01:01:46.000The immense magnitude of that discovery and how crazy it is that they're literally discovering that there's animals that are in there that they didn't think existed there.
01:02:31.000My son and I, Kinsey, were out there at the boneyard one day and we were hydraulicing and then shut the pump down and went up for the final walkthrough on the muck.
01:04:32.000They don't, but they're in a business.
01:04:34.000This happened 20,000 years ago, and I've got a doctorate in this field, so that's what happened.
01:04:40.000Right, but they're only basing it on evidence that's been discovered.
01:04:42.000And when you have a place like yours where you're discovering an insane amount of new evidence, you could literally rewrite paleontological history.
01:10:55.000It's like the biggest, scariest fucking thing in the woods.
01:10:58.000And it also, wildlife biologists say they have to be managed.
01:11:02.000If you don't manage their population, then they decimate the population of deer and elk and moose and And everything that lives up there.
01:11:09.000And so there's all these people that understand the balance of nature and these well-trained, well-educated wildlife biologists who make recommendations and then people vote on it, which is crazy because you're having people vote who are never even in the woods.
01:11:24.000You got people voting in Vancouver and they're like, don't kill the bear.
01:11:32.000But what they don't understand is that you're making life extremely difficult for all the people that live up there.
01:11:38.000If you don't manage those populations, you lower the amount of game that are there, the game animals, and also you make it very dangerous for those people because now those bears are no longer scared of people because they used to associate people with gunshots and fear and people will hunt them.
01:17:48.000I know he sent it to me recently, but it's pretty fucking cool.
01:17:51.000These wolves that are up there, they killed something, and they're all surrounding it, tearing it apart, and it just happened to be in front of one of his trail cameras.
01:18:02.000Because they have trail cameras set up on all these various roads to see what's walking in and walking out, and they killed something a few yards.
01:18:12.000Yeah, I let guys trap beaver on my ground.
01:18:16.000And beavers can fuck up a water system pretty quick.
01:18:21.000Especially if you have flowing water you need to keep flowing.
01:18:25.000And they'll dam it up and then you've got problems.
01:18:27.000So we have guys that go out and trap beavers in the winter.
01:19:34.000So when you're up there, you got wolves in that area, you have bears in that area, you got moose, you got all this wildlife, and then you have this piece of ground where all these animals from thousands of years ago died.
01:20:01.000Have you had a problem with people going up there and looking around?
01:20:05.000Well, one of the things that we do, my company has a, we're in a solid waste business.
01:20:12.000We have a construction debris landfill close by.
01:20:15.000So we have really good access control.
01:20:18.000At one point in my life when I had all this land, I was going, okay, I gotta somehow make a living with all this property if I'm not gonna mine it.
01:20:29.000And I had a piece that was all mined out.
01:20:30.000We got it permitted to be a construction debris landfill.
01:20:33.000I was looking around and going, who owns a solid waste business in this country?
01:21:19.000We just have the place where the guys that do the demolition can take them.
01:21:23.000So that's kind of how our company, even though we're a gold mining company, we're actually land managers.
01:21:29.000But when you're digging a hole like that, are you concerned that maybe they could dig a hole and there would be woolly mammoths in there too?
01:21:36.000Well, they're right next to where we're digging.
01:21:39.000Yeah, I mean, wouldn't you think that, unfortunately, that they could smash and destroy valuable bones?
01:21:45.000No, no, they're just delivering the refuse.
01:21:48.000Right, but I mean, to dig that hole, right?
01:23:38.000If you're a paleontologist and you're studying short-faced bears, or if you're studying, you know, these ancient deceased mammoths and all these...
01:24:04.000The most recent was Denali Film Contest last summer.
01:24:09.000It hasn't gotten really seen by anybody, but we went up to the Explorers Club in New York City for a screening of it several years ago when it was done.
01:24:20.000And those people were really interested in it.
01:24:32.000We're not looking for anybody to come out there.
01:24:36.000We're kind of like, I'll only tell Joe Rogan about this.
01:24:41.000He lasted three fucking years and now look what happened.
01:24:45.000I mean, I don't want to say you're obligated, but I think what you're sitting on is of immense historical significance.
01:24:56.000Not only that, but it's going to be very expensive for those guys, whoever does this kind of work, to do the proper research.
01:25:02.000Because it's a moving body of frozen ice and muck with trees that can topple down the size of your chunks of ice, the size of a pickup truck can fall out of no place.
01:25:15.000So that's why we don't want a bunch of people out there wandering around.
01:29:46.000Because after it was all restored and became a preeminent display at the university, and it's been in New York City too, with the AMNH on display.
01:29:57.000His mom was living in Palm Springs in California, came up to visit him.
01:31:45.000They all vary, but generally speaking, they're, let's say, 30 feet long and maybe 6 or 8 feet wide with riffles that stop the gravel and the gold goes over.
01:31:57.000Did this guy get in trouble for shooting that guy?
01:37:22.000I gotta go in there and swim a little bit.
01:37:24.000So I went back in, took a few strokes, hit a piece of ice with my hand like it was the end of the pool deck, swam back out, got out, put my pants on, put my shoes on, walked back to my rental car.
01:37:39.000Got up to my rental car, going back into Juneau, going too fast through the residential area, get pulled over by a cop.
01:37:48.000License registration, I said it's a rental car, here's my license.
01:37:51.000He goes, how come you ain't got a shirt on?
01:43:48.000That's so funny that the hardiest of hardy people I had that woman, what is her name, Sue, what's her name from, Sue Akins, from Life Below Zero.
01:46:24.000Of the bones that were sent to AMNH. And it was on a shipping manifest, saber-toothed tiger skull.
01:46:34.000But somehow, when I went to visit AMNH, they didn't show it to me.
01:46:39.000And then, if you watched that, well you did, you watched the documentary today, and they said, Pat Druckenmiller said, to his knowledge, there's never been a saber-toothed tiger skull found in Alaska.
01:46:52.000So, the one I sent to England has never come back, and the one that AM&H apparently got but never wrote up a report on never made it anyplace.
01:58:00.000It was buried deep inside the hollow end of a 10-foot mammoth tusk that was under 65 feet of overburden in the gravels.
01:58:09.000And, you know, when you're cleaning out a tusk, when you get it out of the ground and the material starts to dry, we put clamps on those tusks so as they dry they don't split.
01:58:20.000And out of the end comes this blue feather.
01:59:27.000Forrest Galante, see if you can find this video.
01:59:30.000He thinks that dragons might have been a real thing.
01:59:33.000I think he could be onto something there.
01:59:35.000He says if you look at the same period of time throughout Europe and in Asia, they were all drawing the same thing.
01:59:44.000And there's people battling the same thing.
01:59:47.000And he said, if you had an animal that had very thin bones, because it could fly, the same as a bird does, and they died, and they weren't fossilized, there'd be no record of them.
02:00:10.000So when you break that down, you think about the fact that large birds had a hard time being fossilized because their bones are so porous, right?
02:00:17.000So because bones, they have like hollowish bones, they break down very easily and they don't fossilize.
02:00:26.000Basically, they're saying the evidence is the reason there's no fossils of dragons is because they had bird bones and they were actually very delicate animals.
02:00:33.000But a handful of these small population of these giant flying lizards existed and basically encompassed all these different countries where they all depicted fighting dragons in their own way and they were all killed off by knights or whatever it is and then didn't fossilize.
02:00:53.000So it's like the science is saying that if there were lizards big enough to fly around and eat people, they didn't have bones that could fossilize.
02:01:16.000The fossil record is a really fascinating thing because they're getting their understanding of what existed and didn't exist based on what was fossilized.
02:01:27.000Especially when you come into dinosaurs, they're always finding a new dinosaur.
02:01:30.000I mean, it's a regular thing that they find a new species of dinosaur.
02:01:35.000You know, every few years they find something.
02:01:38.000The university curator, Pat Druckenmiller, that was on the video you watched, he's got six or seven dinosaurs that he's discovered himself.
02:01:48.000And when you discover it, you get to name it.
02:09:03.000But don't you think, like, this is important for science, important for the human race and our understanding of the past, and this is not as simple as just a pile of bones?
02:09:16.000I mean, this is of great historical importance.
02:15:36.000Is there any speculation as to why they would all wind up there?
02:15:40.000The next creek up, which is a major tributary, it's where Gold Daughters is at, is another creek.
02:15:47.000And when they put the pipeline through there, they were digging down to bedrock and trying to find a firm base for their VSMs, which are the pipes that hold it up in the air.
02:20:23.000Going back to the crazy part of it, I've got 10,000 acres of really good mining property, and I haven't been mining that little piece, even though I know there's a lot of gold there because we have the drill logs.
02:20:36.000And right below it, the miner took out 3,000 ounces in about a 4-acre piece of land.
02:20:41.000So it kind of goes up, and for years I had a guy working with me going, Fuck these bones.
02:23:05.000I mean, I know you realize how fortunate you are, but I mean, amongst all the people that have ever lived, how many people have ever found a spot like this?
02:25:56.000It's just so fascinating when you look at the sheer scope of the land out there, and you think of this one five-acre patch that you've pulled all these bones from, and then you imagine how much more is out there.
02:26:16.000How much more of that land has a similar situation going on in it?
02:26:20.000The only land there that's been excavated is land that has gold on it.
02:26:26.000There's no point in excavating the rest of it.
02:26:28.000But if someone found a similar sort of scenario and they started blowing water into the mountainside, they might be able to pull things out of there, too.
02:28:44.000Do you feel like you almost have like a bounty of riches with this stuff where it's like so much that you're not even appreciating it for what it is?
02:29:26.000Not only that, but that area to the next creek down, the entire area from where we're at down to the next creek down is going to have incredible amounts too.
02:29:42.000How much money have you spent doing this?
02:29:45.000Mona, I haven't spent a shit, I haven't spent anything.
02:29:48.000Talking to my wife there, because she thinks it's my hobby.
02:30:19.000If you weren't there, if you didn't discover dire wolf skulls, saber-toothed tiger skulls, elk skulls, moose skulls, If you didn't discover all these animals, they wouldn't even think those animals were there.
02:30:33.000They would confidently state those animals did not exist during that time in that area.
02:32:49.000And this promontory where this was found is an incredible story, because if what I hadn't done prior to that didn't happen, I would have never found it.
02:33:00.000And that was, there's a letter I posted from a brigadier general that the last line is really good.
02:33:07.000Your contribution to the safety of America cannot be overestimated.
02:36:47.000The Department of the Air Force, Brigadier General John Mark Jouas, I want to personally thank you for your cooperation and assistance during a recent Air Force-funded research project conducted north of Fairbanks,
02:37:04.000The data from this field experiment conducted on your land will be critically important to improving the United States capability to monitor nuclear weapons development around the world.
02:37:19.000This experiment would not have been possible.
02:37:22.000On behalf of the United States Air Force, I express our most sincere appreciation to you.
02:37:27.000Your contribution to the national security of the United States of America cannot be overestimated.
02:39:26.000It's archaeology is different they can shut the fuck down right now oh yeah that's why a building project and you know you stumble across something yeah New York City doesn't matter LA you're done you're done until there's been a proper excavation and documentation what if you find a whole village oh boy oh boy so you've already found tools you found evidence of humans We don't have to talk any further
02:44:50.000What is exactly the regulation behind Title 42?
02:44:54.000But there was a big thing in the news about all the people that are camped out waiting for this Title 42 thing to be overturned so they can make their way into the United States.
02:45:40.000Because I've heard Governor Abbott talk about it.
02:45:43.000The drawn-out saga of Title 42, the set of emergency powers that allows border officials to quietly turn away migrants, Has been chaotic at the US-Mexico border.
02:45:57.000In Washington, it hasn't unfolded much better.
02:45:59.000The Supreme Court is weighing whether to keep the powers in place following the months of legal battles brought on by Republican We're good to go.
02:46:28.000And a bipartisan immigration bill in Congress has been buried just as Republicans are set to take control of the House.
02:46:35.000In short, America is right back where it has been.
02:46:38.000A divided nation is unable to agree on what a long-term fix to the immigration system should look like.
02:46:44.000Basic questions, for example, should more immigrants be allowed in or fewer, are unanswered.
02:46:51.000Meantime, the asylum system continues to strain under increasing numbers of migrants.
02:46:57.000So people can just kind of show up and say they're seeking asylum, and they just let them go.
02:47:03.000And so, I mean, I don't know what kind of background checks they're doing.
02:47:07.000I don't know if they know if these people are coming from who knows fucking where.
02:47:13.000And I don't blame them for wanting them to come here.
02:47:19.000You've got half the people that go to work every day and pay their taxes and do what they think they're supposed to do, and then you've got the other half that are making $100,000 a year doing nothing but collecting the largesse of the other half that's providing it.
02:47:34.000And then when you print $10 trillion and you throw it on top of that, now you're starting to see why a pipeline was supposed to cost $800 million, cost $9 billion.
02:53:01.000So that's the company I bought years later.
02:53:04.000It's always been privately held, never been public.
02:53:07.000So when I bought it, it was assets only, including leases, including royalties, including contracts with AM&H and the University of Alaska.
02:53:21.000So when I went to New York to tell them where the cow eats the cabbage, went through the basement, looked at the bones, met with the head guy.
02:54:06.000But I told you I was in the solid waste business.
02:54:10.000I know what asbestos abatement's all about.
02:54:12.000So I'd taken some samples while I was down in the basement looking at those bones.
02:54:17.000And I had them analyzed up in Fairbanks, of course.
02:54:21.000And it's called non-RACCM. Asbestos-containing material is called ACM, A-C-M. Non-RACCM is non-regulated asbestos-containing material, which means it's not hazardous.
02:54:35.000So I'm going, okay, I'll get these bones.
02:54:39.000I had the funds set up, I had the money put out.
02:55:54.000If guys set out to do that and they played a clip from this podcast, you have my full permission, and then go and jump in that water with scuba gear, start pulling out mammoth tusks, Holy shit.
02:58:56.000Oh, these specimens were collected 100 years ago, were wrongly assumed to represent previously known species of or genera.
02:59:05.000During the Pleistocene, there were three lineages of horses in the Americas, the Cabaline horses, the New World stilt-legged horses, and the Hippodion horses.
02:59:23.000The Cabalene horses belong to the Equus genus, which includes all living species of horses, donkeys, and zebras.
02:59:29.000The species of Cabalene horses that lived in North and South America likely included the predecessor of the modern-day domesticated horse.
02:59:41.000The New World stilt-legged horses are so anatomically resembled the Asiatic wild horses and donkeys that paleontologists mistakenly thought they were closely related.
02:59:50.000In recent years, paleontologists began to reject this assumed affinity, and the genetic studies cited in this blog entry supports their reassessment.
03:00:32.000I bet he would have some very unique insight.
03:00:34.000Yeah, Forrest Golan, I think I told you this, had texted me and said he was in Anchorage and he wanted to come up and visit the Boneyard, but I was already in Florida.
03:00:44.000And I told you that, you know, hey, he had got a hold of me and why don't you guys come up next year?
03:00:49.000You know, it was thawed out and water's running and shit like that.
03:01:31.000You're a real communicator, and you also have a true appreciation for history and prehistory, which is, if you don't have that, I ain't got time to talk to you.