(soft guitar music)
 NARRATOR: Between
 March and November,
Shane Tucker crisscrosses
Nebraska's highways
in search of the state's most
elusive former inhabitants.
 Tucker is a collector,
 seeking fossil evidence
 of Nebraska's
 prehistoric animal life.
And much of his work is done
solo in wide open spaces.
SHANE TUCKER: A lot
of the animals we find
in the Nebraska fossil records
seem very foreign, you
know, elephants, camels,
horses like zebras, and it
would've looked a lot more
like Africa than Nebraska
13 million years ago.
NARRATOR: Checking
rocks, sediments and crevices
are a big part of Tucker's
job as a paleontologist
 at the University of
 Nebraska State Museum.
TUCKER: Far less than one
percent of the animals
and their skeletons are ever
preserved in the fossil record.
Takes a lot of time learning
the whole rock sequence
within Nebraska.
We determine fossils by the age
and by the rocks
that they're in.
NARRATOR: Tucker drives
eight to 10,000 miles each year
in his search for
Nebraska's ancient wildlife.
(truck driving by)
What makes Tucker's quest unique
 is his unlikely
 group of helpers.
CONSTRUCTION SUPERVISOR: We're
sitting right up over here.
He's gonna grate for a four-lane
that we're gonna
pave for a two-lane.
(machine drowns out voices)
TUCKER:
What we're doing today is part
of the Nebraska Highway
Paleontology program,
which is a cooperative effort
between the Nebraska
Department of Roads
and the University of
Nebraska State Museum.
I brought some bones out
to kinda show you guys.
This is a complete
lower jaw from a bison.
You're kinda looking for the
kind of cream-colored bone.
These go extinct 10
to 14,000 years ago.
This is pretty typical
of what we find
on a road project, once the
heavy machinery hits a bone.
It's a lot of little pieces.
But those little pieces
clue us into the area
where the bone is
eroding out of,
and as you see in the bank here,
more bones have eroded out.
So, we have the
bottom end of a bison,
a shoulder-blade, and
this is one of the bones
in the back region.
Just by finding the fragments,
it keys us into an area
where we may find
more complete bones.
 (truck driving by)
And I follow road
construction projects
throughout the state,
throughout the year
in order to save
fossils from destruction
by heavy machinery.
(truck engine hums)
 NARRATOR: Tucker checks 150
 to 200 construction
 sites each year.
TUCKER: Nebraska's
Highway Paleontology Program
was the first of its kind
anywhere in the nation.
(heavy machinery)
It started in 1960, and so it's
been going for 55 years now,
and in that time frame, we've
found over 250,000 fossils.
(digging in dirt)
Fossils from nearly every
county in the state,
91 of the 93 Nebraska counties.
 NARRATOR: This road,
cut along a rural highway
in rural Northwest Nebraska,
is the latest site.
TUCKER: Nebraska would've
looked a lot different
13 million years ago.
We would've had streams
with very densely
vegetated shorelines,
some tropical forests.
We would've had a lot
different animals living
in those forests.
Things like elephants,
camels, rhinoceros.
 NARRATOR: Today,
 Tucker is excavating
 with members of the University
 of Nebraska State Museum.
 And they're expecting a visit
 from a road construction crew.
TUCKER: The contractor's
usually a bit hesitant,
but when you tell 'em
that they're gonna
still be able to work,
they think it's pretty cool
that they're gonna
be able to take part
in this scientific discovery.
CARL HART: We're actually
doing a road project,
we've got a nine-mile of
widening cable-guard rail
and resurfacing of the highway.
We just stop here periodically
every time it rained
and see if something
would come up.
We'd spend five or
10 minutes looking,
and then we continue
going on with the project.
I do notice there is
some right over here.
These pieces here.
They must've been covered up,
and now -
they were uncovered
because of the rain.
It's kinda interesting that
we're finding this much stuff
out of such small holes.
Hopefully we can find
something a little bigger
and a lot better than
what we are right now.
So, we'll take this
over and show to Shane,
that we are still finding
pieces in this area,
just from this small
excavation site.
Hello!
TUCKER: How are you doing today?
HART: Good! Back again, huh?
TUCKER: Yeah, back again.
HART: Well, we were checking
on the pile for ya, and
that's kinda what we found when,
after the rainstorms and stuff.
TUCKER: Okay, well, this
is super exciting.
This is a little antelope jaw,
you got part of the skull here,
with the teeth sticking down.
This would be a little antelope
that maybe a foot,
foot and a half tall.
If we found the antler of it,
we could tell which
species of it.
And this big one
here, this is cool.
This is a camel metapodial.
So, basically these
two bones in us
have been fused
together in a camel.
So that's exciting.
That would be a camel
probably four and a half,
five feet tall.
That shows us there's
really good potential
for this particular road cut
to produce fossils for us.
HART: Well that's good, I
hope we find a few more.
TUCKER: Yeah, I hope so too!
 NARRATOR: Two hours south,
another roads crew tip leads
to more complete fossil remains.
TUCKER: Well, we have a
skull and lower jaw
of a fossil species of bison.
Would've been roaming
here somewhere
between 14 and maybe
40,000 years ago.
In addition to
skull and lower jaw,
we're finding some
of the vertebrae,
maybe a portion of a rib here.
So, there's a fairly good chance
we'll find an entire
skeleton to this bison.
Most people think
of bison or buffalo
as being native to the area,
with the Native
Americans hunting them,
millions of 'em on the plains.
They weren't native to the area.
They actually were an immigrant,
they came over from Asia
relatively late in the Ice Age.
This particular
species goes extinct,
along with horses and
camels and mammoths,
about 14,000 years ago.
So, this is a stream channel
that's six to seven
million years old.
 NARRATOR: Sharing
 this knowledge
 at events like
 this community dig
 connects the public
 to the mission
 of the Highway
 Paleontology Program.
TUCKER: This is an active,
scientific quarry,
so all the fossils have to
go back to the University.
It's a chunk of a bigger bone.
We've collected over 15,000
fossils, mostly small things.
And I guarantee everybody
will find a bone
or at least a chip
of bone today.
PROFESSOR: It would be a flake
of enamel from--
TUCKER: We'll learn something
about the climate or habitat,
and each piece is
more or less a piece
to the big jigsaw puzzle.
And the more pieces to
the jigsaw puzzle we have,
the clearer picture we have as
to what Nebraska looked like
many thousands or many
millions of years ago.
