Wooster Geologists

LOCKPORT, NEW YORK (August 9, 2015) — This was the last day in the field for Andrej Ernst and me. We met all our goals (collecting bryozoans from the Rochester Shale, finding sclerobionts anywhere, and learning more about New York fossil localities) and had a great time. Now we have two days left to pack our specimens, ship those going to Germany, and review our notes. We will probably get some time tomorrow to see Niagara Falls!

We worked this morning in Caleb’s Quarry, a place we visited on our first day. Paul Chinnici, one of the fossil enthusiasts working this quarry, was our generous host. We were impressed with how much has changed in just the five days since our last time here. The large excavation above, for example, is new. This is fossil-collecting at a very large scale!

Andrej searched for more bryozoans in the top layers of the shales while I studied these blocks of resistant calcareous siltstones and limestones. They are from a layer about midway down in the quarry. The shales erode to clay around them while they stand in relief.

The blocks have excellent trace fossils, including Chondrites seen in this bedding-plane view on the top of a block. Chondrites was made by small animals mining the sediments for deposited organic material.

The trace fossils cut down into the siltstone, seen here in side view. The tunnels are filled with a clay-rich sediment that weathers a lighter color, giving us this contrast.

Many of the blocks show a turbidite-like structure, with coarse shelly debris at the base and cross-bedded siltstone above. This may mean that the deep-waters that accumulated the clays to make the gray Rochester Shale were occasionally disturbed by massive turbidity flows of a sediment-water slurry. Were these triggered by storms or seismic events connected to orogenies to the east?

Because of the recent excavations at Caleb’s Quarry, we were able to see this persistent calcareous siltstone in its stratigraphic context. It is here marked by the hammer. Note the gray shales above and below.

With this last observation, our fieldwork is officially done!

During the afternoon we again visited the Erie Canal locks in Lockport. This time we took a tour of “Lockport Cave”, which is really a set of tunnels dug in the mid-19th century to channel river water through “races” to power factories. It is quite an ingenious use of hydropower before electricity. Above are the remains of the last of these water-powered factories, a paper pulp mill.

We entered the main tunnel through a massive pipe that used to bring fast-flowing water to water wheels in the paper factory. The pipe is eight feet in diameter, and the water flowed at about 12 miles per hour.

This is the only one of my interior photos to succeed. The place was fascinating, even if it was cool, damp and dark. The trip included a short underground boat ride along a narrow water channel.

Finally, just because it is cool, here is the Lockport Railroad Bridge over the Erie Canal. It is called “the upside-down bridge” because the trusses are underneath the tracks. The legend is that the railroad company built the bridge this way to limit the height of boats on the canal, thus limiting its competition for cargo transport!

LOCKPORT, NEW YORK (August 8, 2015) — Andrej and I began some deep collecting of Silurian localities in the Lockport area today in our survey of the bryozoan and sclerobiont faunas. The sites are, shall we say, not the most attractive, so let’s start with this common but gorgeous flower along the roadsides in western New York: Cichorium intybus (chicory). It is an invasive perennial from Europe that now has a global distribution. It has its uses as a coffee substitute, livestock feed, and salad stock. I love the color and serrated petals.

And here is why we lead with a flower. Andrej Ernst is sorting through samples from the Hickory Corners locality on State Route 93 in Lockport. The fossiliferous limestone here is the Hickory Corners Member of the Reynales Formation (Lower Silurian, Aeronian). The bryozoans are wonderfully diverse, and the top of the unit is a bored carbonate hardground. We happily collected here most of the morning, despite the trash and traffic.

We returned to a site along railroad tracks at Niagara Street in Lockport to collect from the Lewiston Member, part B, of the Rochester Shale. Again, the bryozoans here are fantastic, including my new favorite, a delicate cyclostome named Diploclema.

Our last site of the day was along the entrance road to a quarry. With all the surrounding rock, the only fossiliferous horizon is exposed in a shallow drainage cut in the road itself. Andrej is pulling a few bryozoans from the top of Lewiston Member, part E, of the Rochester Shale. The thick shales above him are the Burleigh Hill Formation.

When our work was done for the day, we became tourists and visited the Erie Canal locks in Lockport. (Hence the name!) This is a view looking east from the bottom of the two-lock sequence. We wanted to see the locks actually transport a boat, but it was a slow Saturday afternoon.

A view of the massive doors upstream of one of the modern locks. The engineering feats here date back to the early 1820s.

Geology is evident here too. This is a block of crinoidal limestone showing cross-stratification. Many of the older buildings in Lockport are made of Silurian stone excavated to create the Erie Canal.

LOCKPORT, NEW YORK (August 5, 2015) — What looks like an ordinary commercial quarry above is actually quite unusual. It is an excavation done entirely by amateur paleontologists (“citizen scientists”) to collect and preserve fossils from the Rochester Shale (Upper Silurian, Wenlockian). The story of Caleb’s Quarry is well told in the linked American Museum of Natural History article. It is near Lockport, New York, and one of the most famous fossil sites in the region. I’m lucky to be here.

This late summer expedition to New York is to help my German friend Andrej Ernst (University of Hamburg/University of Kiel) collect bryozoans from the Rochester Shale. This bryofauna is inadequately described for phylogenetic and biogeographic analyses, so Andrej has a grant to do the deed from outcrop sampling to preparation, analysis and publication. While assisting Andrej, I am also scouting out new localities for future geology Senior Independent Study projects at Wooster. We will be in Niagara and Erie Counties for a week doing this work.

Absolutely critical to the project is the field advice and direction of Carl Brett (University of Cincinnati). Carl is without peer when it comes to many paleontological and geological topics, but for the Silurian of New York he is one of the gods. Carl grew up in the region and has been studying the rocks and fossils since he was a young teenager. He gave us two days of magnificent stratigraphic instruction, and he introduced us to the amateur team digging at Caleb’s Quarry. We were also joined for three days by Brian Bade, a citizen scientist from Ohio with an extraordinary passion for fossils, along with deep knowledge and appreciation for how science works.

Fred Barber, one of the excavators at Caleb’s Quarry, is here showing Carl Brett magnificent crinoids collected from this locality.

The gray shale matrix is homogenous and soft enough to be removed from the fossil by an expert preparator. This crinoid shows outstanding preservation down to the pinnules on its arms.

Of course, Andrej and I are most interested in the bryozoans from Caleb’s Quarry. Here is a beautiful specimen that has been carefully reconstructed.

I found these brachiopod-rich beds intriguing. Striispirifer is a new name to me.

Trilobites are always the stars of Paleozoic fossil sites like this. While we were at the quarry we watched one of the excavators (Kent Smith) unearth this gorgeous specimen. I believe it is Dalmanites limulurus.

The trace fossils here are very interesting. There may be project possibilities with this ichnofauna because of the diversity present at the quarry and the bedding plane exposures. This is the trace fossil Chondrites.

After our quarry visit today we then stopped at some other exposures of the Rochester Shale. This scene shows what fieldwork is like without quarries and roadcuts! We are here along a tributary of Jeddo Creek, at the top of Lewiston Member B of the Rochester Shale. Hard to tell, eh?

Here Brian Bade is examining a deeply weathered section along the creek. Years ago Carl Brett took advantage of this disaggregation of the Rochester Shale to sieve the sediment for small fossils. He has generously given us the “washings” from this cut, which represent months of his work as a graduate student. They are loaded with tiny bryozoan bits, along with many other taxa.

We ended the day with a look at several other outcrops in the Lockport area. The impressive contact here between the massive sandstone and the underlying red shales is called the Cherokee Unconformity. It is a megasequence boundary correlated across most of North America. It was thought until recently to be the Ordovician-Silurian boundary, but now all you see in this image is considered latest Ordovician.