1590: "The Penn Dixie Fossil Site"

Penn Dixie, Fossil Park, it sits in Hamburg, New York, about 12 miles or 19 kilometers,

south of Buffalo, near Lake Geary. Today, it's a public fossil site covering about 54 acres,

roughly 2.3 million square feet, or 22 hectares. Families come here with small hammers to split

open pieces of shale, and sometimes those rocks they reveal creatures that lived 380 million years ago.

Fossils from the middle Devonian period, about 380 million years old lie inside those rocks,

long before Lake Geary or the Ice Age, lakes like Lake Warren existed. At the time,

Western New York, labenitha shallow inland sea, that filled the Appalachian Basin.

Marine animals, they lived all across the seafloor, where towns and highways now stand.

Trilobites such as El Dredjops, Raina, they crawled along the bottom.

Rockupods opened and closed their shells in the currents.

Crinoids and corals, they grew along parts of the seabed.

This marine ecosystem thrived shortly before one of Earth's major extinction events.

By the end of the Devonian period, roughly 75% of marine species would disappear during

what scientists call the late Devonian extinction. When those animals died, their shells

settled into mud on the seafloor. More sediment buried those layers over millions of years,

slowly hardening the mud into shale, and preserving the shapes of those animals inside.

Many trilobites here are found remarkably intact, because

fine seafloor mud buried them very quickly, sealing them away from oxygen and scavengers.

Those rock layers eventually became part of the bedrock of Western New York.

Hundreds of millions of years later, people began cutting into those rocks.

The land operated as the Bayview Quarry later owned by the Pendixi cement corporation,

from the early 20th century until mining stopped in the late 1960s.

Workers blasted and removed rock, and they used it in cement and steel production.

As the quarry deepened, the digging cut directly into the ancient seabed and exposed one

of the richest Devonian fossil beds in all of North America.

Mining stopped in the late 1960s leaving the fossil layers exposed.

In the early 1970s, fossil collectors and paleontologists began visiting the abandoned quarry.

One of the people who helped spread word about the site was fossil enthusiast Dan Cooper.

By 1990, local residents and scientists, they realized the site could easily disappear

to development, so the community stepped in.

In 1993, the Hamburg Natural History Society formed to protect the quarry.

In 1995, the town of Hamburg purchased the property, and in 1996, about 32.5 acres, roughly

131,500 square meters were transferred to the society.

The protected area has since expanded to about 54 acres.

Admission is quite modest, typically in the midteens for adults with discounts for seniors,

military members, students and children. The park generally operates seasonally from spring

through fall. Today, anyone can walk onto the old quarry floor, split open the shale

and see marine life from a sea that covered western New York nearly 400 million years ago.

These are interesting things with J.C.