March 2021

Some life-or-death fossils

On the Rocks – The Woodstock Times

Robert and Johanna Titus

If you want to get into a good debate on a college campus, then raise up the issue of consciousness. What is consciousness? When did it evolve? Even – does it actually exist? Most of the debates center on people. Do you think that you are conscious? We know people that would quarrel with that. The two of us are just a bit too busy for all this, but we would like to raise a similar issue today. Do clams have consciousness?  Clams? Consciousness? Does that sound like an issue that would only turn up in an On the Rocks column? Quite possibly so let’s get on with it.

First of all, one of us, Robert, is a paleontologist; the other, Johanna, is a biologist so we have some first-hand experience with clams, including having dissected some of them. Clams have nothing much that resembles a central nervous system, so it would seem that they could not have any level of consciousness. They cannot be deep thinkers (or even shallow thinkers!).

But we are familiar with some clam fossils that raise some doubts about this. And they are right here in the Catskills, perhaps near to where you live. Take a look out the nearest window. If you live anywhere near Woodstock, then there was once the top of a great delta out there – the Catskill Delta. That was about 400 million years ago. It would have reminded you of today’s Ganges River Delta in Bangladesh. As in Bangladesh, rivers, some of them very large, flowed by – right in your neighborhood. There were floods in those rivers too. Take a look at our first photo. It shows a sequence of Catskill bluestone strata. These are matched by a lot of other bluestone sequences, all throughout the Catskills. Those bluestone sands were deposited in those Devonian age Catskill Delta rivers. They were commonly flood deposits. They conjure up images of powerful stream floods, carrying great masses of sand in their dirty waters. That was during the flood, but then the flood currents subsided. Slowing flow currents cannot carry very much sediment, so those sands were quickly deposited. They, much later, hardened into sandstone. There is nothing unusual about any of this.

But keep looking. See those two vertical structures. What on earth are those? We see these, also all through the Catskills and they have attracted a lot of attention. Geologists have determined that they are fossil clam burrows. They were dug by clams who were working their ways upward through those flood sands, probably right after the floods had passed.

The clams, themselves, have been found and they belong to a genus name Archanodon. See our second illustration. This was a relatively common clam, living in the many streams that crossed the old Catskill Delta.

We have seen a lot of these and typically these burrows are found in flood strata measuring two to three feet in thickness. When we are looking into the past, we see that these flood sands must have posed quite a problem for our clams. When you are a three-inch-long clam, suddenly buried in three feet of sand, then you have a problem. Fortunately for our clams, they were well equipped to deal with this problem. They had large and strong burrowing muscles (curiously, they are called “feet”) that enabled them to work their ways upward. That’s where these burrows came from. They are called escape burrows.

If clams can be gregarious, then Archanodon was. They lived together, in large numbers, on the floors of their streams. When the floods struck, they were all buried together. Each one faced the same life-or-death decisions. They could dig, or they could die. They dug. Our photo shows the escape burrows of two clams, but at this outcrop there are dozens more. Every member of this colony went to work digging itself out. They seem to have always succeeded; we have never found one only halfway up.

Well, that gets us back to our initial question: do clams have consciousness? Did our clams experience fear? Did they have any awareness of what had befallen them? Did the actually decide what to do? We really don’t know. We suspect that they may well have been equipped with some sort of automatic response system that allowed them to deal with what should have been a scary situation. We guess that we will never know for sure. We will bring this up for debate the next night we are in a geology bar – or at a faculty meeting.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”

A starfish: living in Saugerties?

On the Rocks

Robert and Johanna Titus

We were saddened to read of the recent death of sculptor Tom Gottsleben. His specialty was working with bluestone so you can appreciate our interest in his work. But our interest was heightened by a visit to his bluestone home “Spiral House” on the back of Mount Marion in Saugerties. Tom actually “won” one of us (Robert) in an auction sponsored by the Woodstock Land Conservancy. He bid more than anyone else for an afternoon of geological services. Robert visited Spiral House and Tom and his wife led him around the grounds.  Robert’s job was to wave his arms and explain the geological past of all the bluestone that Tom had adapted to his home’s architecture. Spiral House had also, long ago, been thoroughly glaciated and it was most fun to find the evidence of ice age glaciers. But It got still better when a sequence of black marine sandstones out back was found. Some of those strata were rich in marine fossils. Did Tom win Robert in the auction – or did was it the other way around? It was an absolutely unforgettable experience.

But this was not the first geology done on Mount Marion. Our main story in this issue is about what must be the most remarkable fossil finds ever found in the Woodstock area, and its discoverer. Let’s talk about that discoverer first. He was Thomas Cole, but not the painter; this was the Rev. Thomas Cole Jr., youngest son of the painter (our first photo). Cole Jr. was born several months after his father’s death. He grew up to be the rector of the Trinity Church in Saugerties until his death in 1919.

.  During his lifetime the younger Thomas Cole developed a keen interest in all things geological. One of three known obituaries, published upon his death in 1919, even refers to him as “the best amateur geologist in the state”.  Evidently, he did a lot of hiking and that led to his finding any number of fossils.

The Reverend Cole’s most important paleontological discovery was described in Bulletin 158 of the New York State Museum (1912). He located, atop the south slope of Mt. Marion, a sandstone surface densely covered with fossil starfish (our second photo). Mt. Marion displays 500 feet of stratigraphy. All of these strata were deposited at the bottom of a sea that once covered all of New York State. It’s commonly called the Hamilton Sea. Toward the top of this ridge are several ledges of sandstone that project outwards, above the surrounding slopes. These strata were first deposited as sand at the bottom of that Devonian age sea. Those sedimentary rocks represent sea floors that are a little less than 400 million years old.

The Rev. Cole found and collected one slab, particularly rich in fossil starfish. He sent it off to the State Museum, and that quickly generated a lot of interest. It wasn’t long before Museum staff ascended Mt. Marion and located Cole’s starfish ledge. It must have involved a great deal of hard labor, but some 200 square feet of that sandstone ledge were eventually uncovered. This would have represented a large swath of Devonian age sea floor.  About 400 specimens of starfish of the species Devonaster eucharis were collected from it. Many of them were found in a fine state of preservation. They give us a very clear picture of their anatomy.   Altogether, this was a most remarkable discovery.

The largest of the starfish slabs, collected about 1911, has been (please forgive us) a star attraction at the State Museum for many years. What is more remarkable than the abundance of these starfish is their close proximity to a large number of sizable fossil clams. This was a Devonian age seafloor that was populated by clams of several different species. They were large clams too. And large clams, today, as probably in Devonian times, provide hearty meals for starfish.

Living starfish attack living clams and so, no doubt, did fossil ones. At least one fossil starfish was even found astride two open clam shells (third photo). The mouth ends of the starfish were commonly found facing the innards of the clams. It is a most astonishing juxtaposition of predator and prey, something the fossil record rarely preserves. These are Devonian age seafloor dramas and that’s what the Reverend Cole seems to have recognized.

And this last circumstance conjures up an image of another, even more remarkable bit of history. Those starfish were found in the process of their attacks. That means some sudden catastrophe must have instantly overwhelmed them. Geologists suspect that some sort of submarine avalanche must have swept across this seafloor just at the moments when those attacks were underway. Masses of soft sediment, swept by powerful currents, seem to have suddenly buried both predators and prey. This is something that does turn up in the fossil record – but rarely. It was a most unusual instant in time, preserved like a snapshot. Scientists are always wary of accepting the validity of such unlikely events, but the two of us have seen similar ledges and are inclined to think all this really happened just as has been described.

In the end, this was truly a great achievement for the Reverend Cole, a genuinely important one scientifically. We gain insights about Thomas Cole Jr. from all this. The Mt. Marion discovery could not have been a one-time stroke of luck. Cole must have spent enormous amounts of time exploring and looking for fossils.  He seems to have been a determined geologist.

We have never found the trail up to the fossil ledge. It is quite possibly off of Fish Creek Road. Do you know the way?

  Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.com Join their Facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.”

How far away is the Devonian?

The Woodstock Times – On the Rocks

Robert and Johanna Titus

   If you have been longtime readers of “On the Rocks” then you will know that we almost always write about geology that we have gone out to the field and seen for ourselves. We would like to depart from that in this issue. In fact, we are going to step out of Geology, itself, altogether. It all began when we were pondering the Devonian time period. That’s the geological chapter that extended from 419 to 359 million years ago. It’s an important unit of time here in the Catskills. All of the bedrock you see hereabouts was formed during the Devonian.  But what, we wondered, was going on in the universe that surrounded the Earth during that time? That got us pondering some more. We were being typical scientists and we were doing typical science thinking.

We realized that when you are looking into space, you are always looking into the past. When you are looking at the moon, you are looking at an image of light that departed it a short time ago. We asked our cell phone, and it told us that the image of the moon, that we see, left it 1.3 seconds ago. Our cell phone went on to tell us that light from the Sun is Eight minutes and 20 seconds old. We can’t actually see the Moon or the Sun; we can only see them as they were in the past. Do you think thoughts like this? Then you are a bit of a scientist.

We realized that there must be something out there that emitted light during the Devonian, but our cell phone was of no help. Our “smart” phone might have been stumped, but the Physics department at Hartwick College was not. We posed our question, by email, to the faculty of that department and in just a few minutes we got a very good answer. Living, breathing PhD physicists do these things all the time; they are very bright people. Dr. Kevin Schultz, Associate Professor of Physics, looked into NASA records and found a galaxy, poetically named UGC 12591. It lies just a little less than 400 million light years away from our Earth. That makes its light just a little less than 400 million years old. That light has been traveling toward the Earth all that time. When it reached the halfway point, Dinosaurs were just getting themselves started (that’s more science thinking). In short, that galaxy’s light was shining during the Devonian; it was there during the Devonian.

Would you like to see this Galaxy? Well you need to look into the westernmost region of the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster. That is an enormous chain of galaxy clusters which extends across some 250 million light years of space. It is regarded as one of the largest “things” found in the cosmos. UGC 1259l is big; it is four times the size of our Milky Way Galaxy. That makes it four times bigger than everything you can see in the night sky. Think about that for a moment. The bad news is that you won’t be able to actually look at UGC 12591; it’s too far away. Our photo was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. If you don’t have access to the Hubble you won’t be able to see it yourself.

That galaxy is out there; it is that far away. But Hubble is not just looking far into space; it is looking far into the past. This column’s photo is of the galaxy as it was when lower Devonian tropical seas were invading New York State. Our local limestones are as old as the image you see in this column. That light was in transit while the trees of the fossil Gilboa Forest were growing. That light was geologically ancient at the very times when all the rocks you see around here were forming. We scientists ponder such things.

We should specify that we are not that smart; we paraphrased much of this article from a NASA publication. Dr. Schultz helped. We hope that Bob Berman will forgive our trespassing.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The
Catskill Geologist” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”

Where the boys are.

The Woodstock times

On the Rocks, Jan. 24, 2019

Robert and Johanna Titus

You might remember the discovery of the Hyde Park mastodon. That was back in 1999. A local family, the Loziers, wanted to enlarge the pond that was in their backyard. When work was underway, they noticed what they thought was a log. That turned out to be the limb bone of a mastodon. Weeks of intense excavation by hundreds of volunteers resulted in the retrieval of an almost complete skeleton. It, eventually, was mounted and is on display at the Paleonto0logy Research Association Museum in Ithaca.

The animal was an adult male between 30 and 40 years in age. It was speculated that he was walking on the pond’s thin ice when he fell through and drowned. But is that it; is that the whole story? Maybe not. Recently, an article in a professional journal called Current Biology focused on another type of elephant – the mammoth. Researchers were studying the genetics of 98 Siberian mammoths. They were surprised to find that 69 of them were males. When they studied the literature, they found that this was the norm. Wherever large numbers of mammoths (and probably mastodons) were found, similarly large percentages of them were males.

They reasoned that, at birth, there likely had been an even numbers of males and females. So, what had happened to all those males? Why had so many of them died and, more importantly, why had they been preserved in such disproportionate numbers? Here is where we come across one of the leading philosophies of geology: “the present is a key to the past.” When geologists (and paleontologists too) come across a quandary from the distant past, they look to the present for a solution.

In this case, the biology or better the sociobiology of modern elephants may offer a solution to the problem. Modern day elephant herds consist of females and juveniles. They are led by experienced older females. Male elephants live solitary lives or are found in smaller male herds. The thought is that experienced female matriarchs can lead their herds away from dangers that they have, from life experiences, learned about. But males, especially solitary males, are more likely to behave in reckless manners. They are risk takers and that leads to what mammoth researchers labeled as “silly” deaths. Such males are more likely to fall through ice or sink into bogs. We have read about one particularly disturbing example. One male mastodon was found still standing in a small pond deposit. He may have died a slow death. When such things happens, their corpses are likely to end up buried where they can be preserved and, many thousands of years later, discovered by especially bright primates. Members of female herds die undramatic deaths in locations where they are not likely to be preserved.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”