Tag: New York
-
A Homeowner Found Huge, Fossil Teeth While Mowing the Lawn. Then, Excavations Revealed a Complete Mastodon Jaw
Smithsonian Magazine has a story about the discovery of Mastodon fossils. A homeowner was mowing his lawn in Orange County, New York when he spotted strange shaped poking up through his plants. His first thought was they were old baseballs. Subsequent digging revealed they were rather fossil teeth with a complete mastodon jaw. The prehistoric…
-
450-Million-Year-Old Fossil Arthropod Found Preserved in Fool’s Gold
SciNews has news of a new species of arthropod from the Ordovician Period. Lomankus edgecombei lived some 450 million years ago in what is now New York. This specimen was found at a fossil locality that includes the famous Beecher’s Trilobite Bed. That locality is known for equisite pyrite replacement fossils. The legs of trilobites…
-
They were looking for fossils at Penn Dixie. What they found has shocked the paleontology world
The Buffalo News has a story about a rare find at the Penn Dixie Fossil Park & Nature Reserve in Blasdell, NY, which is near Buffalo in western New York. Carpoids were found while splitting the Devonian shale in the park. Carpoids are rarely found in fossil deposits. They are distant relatives of starfish, sea…
-
The world’s oldest fossilized forest is in Greene County. It needs saving
The Times Union in Albany, New York has a story about the world’s oldest fossilized forest. The forest was discovered in a quarry in Cairo, NY, near where other ancient trees were discovered in Gilboa, NY. These lycopsid “tree” fossils date to the Devonian Period, about 400 million years ago. They were described in a…
-
Digging up fun and fossils at Penn Dixie Fossil Park
The Buffalo News has a story about the Penn Dixie Fossil Park. Want to visit the beach this summer? Why not a Devonian beach in New York? If you love fossils, step back in time and collect fossils from an old cement quarry that is absolutely chock full of fossils. Brachiopods, horn corals, and trilobites…
-
PBS Eons: When Trees Took Over the World
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the first “trees”… hint, they didn’t look like trees back then. 420 million years ago, the forest floor of what’s now New York was covered with a plant that didn’t look like a tree at all, except its roots were made of wood. Instead…
-
Trilobite Tuesday #5: Are These Trilobite Eggs?
Scientific American’s “The Artful Amoeba” had a piece about trilobite eggs a few years ago. It seems that Markus Martin, an amateur paleontologist, discovered gold, or more specifically trilobite gold. Atlas Obscura has the more personal details of this fossil find. It what was once known as Beecher’s Bed, Martin found and then prepared some…
-
In Upstate New York, Ancient Arthropods Can Get Turned Into (Fool’s) Gold
Atlas Obscura has a piece about trilobites… golden trilobites. Trilobites are some of the most desirable fossils and highly detailed, pyritized trilobites are especially desirable. “Beecher’s Bed” is a famous trilobite quarry discovered and named for Charles Emerson Beecher, a paleontologist a the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. It is made of…
-
World’s Oldest Fossil Forest Unearthed
SciNews has a post about the oldest forest ever discovered. Located in Cairo, NY, near the Devonian fossil forest found near Gilboa, this forest has been dated to about 386 million years old, which is a couple million years older. Details can be found in a paper which was recently published in the journal Current…
-
Preserved Trilobite eggs from the Ordovician of New York State
Sciency Thoughts has a story about pyritized trilobite eggs. The eggs were found associated with 2 Triarthrus eatoni trilobites from the Ordovician Whetstone Gulf Formation (Lorraine Group), in upstate New York. The eggs were found in the cephala (head) of the trilobites, which is similar to the method of reproduction in Horseshoe Crabs. In Horseshoe…
-
An Exotic Terrane in New York City
From the New York Times: … Exotic is the word. The rock outcrop that emerges like the tip of a geological iceberg from the children’s playground in DeWitt Clinton Park, at West 52nd Street and 12th Avenue, is an astonishing work of natural sculpture; utterly sensuous — almost sensual in spots — with smooth curves and…
