0:00
Penn Dixie, Fossil Park, it sits in Hamburg, New York, about 12 miles or 19 kilometers,
0:05
south of Buffalo, near Lake Geary. Today, it's a public fossil site covering about 54 acres,
0:11
roughly 2.3 million square feet, or 22 hectares. Families come here with small hammers to split
0:19
open pieces of shale, and sometimes those rocks they reveal creatures that lived 380 million years ago.
0:30
Fossils from the middle Devonian period, about 380 million years old lie inside those rocks,
0:36
long before Lake Geary or the Ice Age, lakes like Lake Warren existed. At the time,
0:43
Western New York, labenitha shallow inland sea, that filled the Appalachian Basin.
0:50
Marine animals, they lived all across the seafloor, where towns and highways now stand.
0:56
Trilobites such as El Dredjops, Raina, they crawled along the bottom.
1:02
Rockupods opened and closed their shells in the currents.
1:06
Crinoids and corals, they grew along parts of the seabed.
1:11
This marine ecosystem thrived shortly before one of Earth's major extinction events.
1:17
By the end of the Devonian period, roughly 75% of marine species would disappear during
1:23
what scientists call the late Devonian extinction. When those animals died, their shells
1:30
settled into mud on the seafloor. More sediment buried those layers over millions of years,
1:36
slowly hardening the mud into shale, and preserving the shapes of those animals inside.
1:43
Many trilobites here are found remarkably intact, because
1:48
fine seafloor mud buried them very quickly, sealing them away from oxygen and scavengers.
1:55
Those rock layers eventually became part of the bedrock of Western New York.
1:59
Hundreds of millions of years later, people began cutting into those rocks.
2:03
The land operated as the Bayview Quarry later owned by the Pendixi cement corporation,
2:09
from the early 20th century until mining stopped in the late 1960s.
2:14
Workers blasted and removed rock, and they used it in cement and steel production.
2:20
As the quarry deepened, the digging cut directly into the ancient seabed and exposed one
2:25
of the richest Devonian fossil beds in all of North America.
2:30
Mining stopped in the late 1960s leaving the fossil layers exposed.
2:35
In the early 1970s, fossil collectors and paleontologists began visiting the abandoned quarry.
2:40
One of the people who helped spread word about the site was fossil enthusiast Dan Cooper.
2:47
By 1990, local residents and scientists, they realized the site could easily disappear
2:52
to development, so the community stepped in.
2:56
In 1993, the Hamburg Natural History Society formed to protect the quarry.
3:02
In 1995, the town of Hamburg purchased the property, and in 1996, about 32.5 acres, roughly
3:10
131,500 square meters were transferred to the society.
3:16
The protected area has since expanded to about 54 acres.
3:21
Admission is quite modest, typically in the midteens for adults with discounts for seniors,
3:27
military members, students and children. The park generally operates seasonally from spring
3:33
through fall. Today, anyone can walk onto the old quarry floor, split open the shale
3:40
and see marine life from a sea that covered western New York nearly 400 million years ago.
3:50
These are interesting things with J.C.