Fossil Field Guide Part 1

Fossil Field Guide

Part 1

Indy Anna Bones has been collecting fossils as long as she can remember.

Each stone is a tiny life lived by a tiny creature.

Indy Anna cried for crinoids, an early animal lives like a plant long before plants first took root, fanning their arms and eating whatever floated by.

Life was simple and easy, but entire populations were prone to burial with mud on the turbulent sea bottom.

These creatures were many and varied, and species of crinoid and brachiopod still survive in the ocean today.

The first true masters of the sea were trilobites, dominating the oceans with 17,000 identified species over 270 million years.

Trilobites died off after the mysterious Permian Extinction, and no direct descendants of the trilobites remain.

The New York State fossil is the Eurypterid, or sea scorpion, a 6-foot horror that probably originated in Early Cambrian Brooklyn.

Fish as we know them have been fish for a long time.

The Devonian period is called the 'Age of the Fishes,’ when monster placoderms prowled the water devouring prey with sharp bony jaws.

Fish reached their greatest variation in the Devonian, and is the same time fish first crawled on land to become amphibians, reptiles, and mammals.

Some of these reptiles eventually came back to the water, but none that did could ever be considered dinosaurs.

Ichthyosaurs were reptiles that looked like fish and followed a similar evolutionary path as dolphins and porpoises of later times.

Plesiosaurs are another water-dwelling reptile that hunted fish with a tiny head on a long, slender neck.

One great success of the prehistoric seas was the archelon, a marine turtle that could grow to 13 feet long.

Heirs to the archelon are the leatherback turtle, still chasing mollusks in our oceans today.

This trail had dinosaurs, and Indy Anna Bones headed out to continue her search.

Out of gallery