Friday, September 19, 2003

Fossil Park

When our friend the biologist calls, it’s often because he’s hatching an interesting day trip. This last time he spotted an article in the South Bend Tribune introducing a new fossil park, and so late one morning two carloads of us motored almost four hundred million years back into the Devonian Age.

The first car in our caravan was stacked with scientists. As they drove they probably talked about the latest wrinkles in evolutionary theory. You know, the inside scoop on red algae or something like that. But our car was dominated by English majors, so we drove along the fields of northeastern Indiana day-dreaming of dinosaurs.

I imagined myself wearing khaki and pith helmet, clenching an aromatic pipe between my teeth and leaning over a rock outcropping. I’d be holding a tiny hammer in one hand and a delicate brush in another as I removed the horrifying tooth of a Tyrannosaurus Rex from its stony resting place. Isn’t science grand?

It turned out, though, that the Fossil Park fossils were tucked into a shale deposit much older than any Johnny-come-lately dinosaur. My imaginary T. Rex wouldn’t even be a twinkle in its papa’s eye for another three hundred million years.

The public park is located in Sylvania, Ohio, a suburb northwest of Toledo, about 150 miles from South Bend. The gates are open on weekends only, through mid-October. Call 419-882-8313 for more information.

Visitors leave their cars and walk down a wide, gently sloping cement path into a shallow limestone quarry, where mounds of old shale formations – rocks and slippery gray mud – are ready for their inspection. You can also putter around in loose rock here and there in the digging area. No matter where you look, it takes only minutes to find your first fossil. Soon you know what to look for, and you see four hundred million year old creatures everywhere. They’re usually small, the size of a nickel or a quarter, and they’re often strange coral-like animals that look more like plants, if plants were made of stone, that is.

It’s true that these fossils don’t have the drama of a giant Field Museum dinosaur like Sue or the smarmy enthusiasm of a television star like Barney, but they’re mysterious and have a quiet beauty. Some we found were filled with pyrite crystals – fool’s gold – that glittered and shined in the afternoon sun. Others carried iron deposits that had oxidized, turning the whole fossil a reddish color that contrasted with the shale around it. My best find was a brachiopod, a little ridged clam-like creature shaped like a bat’s wings. It had oxidized and gave a pinkish glow to the gray rock that held it.

Children may have been the best fossil hunters in our group, especially the six year old, who caught on quickly. Within an hour, while most of us were finding imprints of ancient creatures in larger rocks, she was spotting segmented crinoid stems and bits of coral and whole brachiopods loose in the gravel. She never found a trilobite, but otherwise she had the makings for a pretty good Devonian sea.

On the way home, our caravan stopped at an ice-cream stand and cooled off with soft-serve and slushies. We were on the toll road during the dinner hour, but since all the food there is known to cause extinction, we drove on. Back in twenty-first century South Bend, we pulled our bags of fossily rocks out of the car. Already it seemed vaguely un-American to have spent the afternoon sitting on the ground picking through the rocks like that. We could have been watching wide-screen sports or renting the latest DVD, but, instead, we had spent our time searching for and then holding in our hands the tiny, enigmatic, ghostly remains of a distant age.

Fossil Park information: 419-882-8313.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on September 19, 2003
Nature & Outdoors • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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