James Stewart

Now, what made this area particularly unique was that most fossils near the equator tend to end up buried beneath millions of tons of soil and vegetation and are largely inaccessible.

Wing, fascinated by this discovery, wanted to see the mine for himself.

When he arrived, however, it wasn't the fossilized leaves that caught his attention, but rather the long-forgotten petrified branch that had been gathering dust in the display case in the reception for nearly a decade.

Wing's instincts kicked in here and he started taking pictures through the glass with his camera.

He then emailed the images of the branch over to paleontologist Jonathan Block of the University of Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

Unknown to Wing at the time, the email he had just sent was about to profoundly sharpen our entire understanding of evolution.

In Block's own words, he flipped out when his inbox pinged, and then the floodgates opened.

What Block was looking at was not some petrified stick, but the jawbone of a land animal.

there was a terrestrial vertebrate of an age never before seen in these parts.

Block identified the jawbone as belonging to a group of extinct crocodiles called Dirosaur, one of the largest marine vertebrates to survive the great extinction event.

And where one fossil was, there were usually many more.

Fueled by a newfound sense of urgency, in 2004, Block and Wing planned a trip back to the Sederhorn mine.

They called Garcia, the finder of the petrified branch turned extinct crop drawer, to ask where exactly to focus their search.

The answer was an area in the north of the mine, particularly exposed and left baking in the extreme heat, an area called La Puente Cut, covering some 6,000 acres.

The conditions were brutal.

Temperatures reached well over 30 degrees Celsius, with zero vegetation for shade.

It was lashed by 40 km per hour gusts of wind, methane fires and rain that each day would erase all of their hard work from the day before.

Nevertheless, they persisted.

The patience was finally rewarded and the spoils were plenty.

They grabbed everything they saw, you name it, ribs, vertebrae, bits of pelvis, shoulder blades and even gigantic turtle shells, some of which were 1.5 metres in diameter.