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Name Is No Nano Honor For Garcia

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By SUSAN M. GREEN

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 5, 2008

RUSKIN - RUSKIN - He lives on Manatee Harbor Drive, with his house number emblazoned on a manatee-shaped plaque.

So it's little wonder that Frank Garcia was more excited to have a pygmy sea cow, a prehistoric relative of today's West Indian manatee, named after him than he was 35 years ago to bestow his moniker on an ancient antelope.

The self-taught paleontologist got the word last week from his longtime "boss" and mentor, Daryl Domning, an anatomy professor at Howard University and research associate at the Smithsonian Institution: A creature that swam through Central Florida 5 million years ago will be called Nanosiren garciae.

"I was just so excited because I worked so many years on this project," Garcia said, confessing that he also shares with Domning a fondness for sirenians - the classification of marine mammal that applies to manatees and dugongs.

Garcia has been collecting pieces of the Nanosiren garciae in phosphate mines since the late 1960s or early 1970s. He said some of the hundreds of bone fragments and fossils were discovered in Hillsborough and Hardee counties, but most were in Polk County, on property now owned by Mosaic Fertilizer.

Some of the fragments were buried 25 feet to 30 feet below the ground surface, Garcia said.

He said he knew he had discovered something different when he found pieces of vertebrae similar to a sirenian's but much smaller. Later he found pieces of ribs. Characteristics of the bones ruled out baby sea cows and eliminated the likelihood that the animals were manatees, Garcia said.

"These guys had tails shaped like flukes, like a whale or a dolphin," he said. The shape of the tail is among features that distinguish manatees from dugongs.

Garcia said he shipped most of his finds to Domning, but "there just wasn't enough" to build a skeleton.

Domning said he's convinced the fragments belonged to a miniature dugong, a small version of a sea cow that lives in seas across the world but has been extinct from the waters around Florida and the Caribbean for millions of years. He estimated it was about half the size of today's manatee.

Unlike the modern sea cow, the Nanosiren had tusks that likely were used to rip seagrass from the ocean bottom, Garcia said.

Garcia, a Tampa native, said he began fossil digging in the mid-1960s. He achieved worldwide publicity with a major find in Ruskin shell pits in the early 1980s. Specimens he has collected are in museums in New York, Chicago, Canada and England, he said. He is the director of Paleo Preserve at Hillsborough County's Camp Bayou.

Though happy about his new namesake, Garcia said last week he planned to christen the ancient animal with an easier handle: Famunda, short for "From Under." Garcia is a member of a local karaoke group called Famunda All Stars.

Reporter Susan M. Green can be reached at (813) 865-1566 or sgreen@tampatrib.com.

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