“Oh, I found something!” the 25-year-old Ph.D. candidate squeals, holding up a small rock with a darker hued, fingernail-sized protrusion. A few feet away, Caitlin Colleary, also a paleontology intern and Ph.D. candidate, soon echoes Maccracken’s triumphant cry. For four months, the young American scientists have been waking up before sunrise and spending their mornings sifting through a fossil field on the banks of the canal.
To accommodate increasingly large container vessels, engineers have been expanding the Panama Canal since 2007—the most ambitious project since the waterway’s original construction at the turn of the 20th century. One unlikely winner of the $5 billion engineering project? The scientific community. Investigators affiliated with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), a bureau of the Washington, D.C.-based institution, have been trailing behind demolition teams and collecting the freshly exposed fossils.
Already, the group has determined that the isthmus between North America and South America began rising approximately 21 million year ago, not 3.5 million, as had been commonly thought. This means that the Pacific and Atlantic oceans split apart—and the flora and fauna of the two continents coalesced—earlier than assumed. “Geological history is far more complex than what we had been thinking until now,” says Carlos Jaramillo, a staff scientist at the STRI.