An unprepossessing hole in the ground in Hamburg now ranks as the No. 1 fossil park in the United States, and its programs draw more than 100,000 visitors per year – even though most Western New Yorkers still don’t even know it exists.
Last year alone, the Penn Dixie Paleontological & Outdoor Education Center saw visitors from 38 states and nine countries. This May, there were fossil-hunters from Germany, England, Canada, Brazil and Mongolia.
Mongolia? One of the dinosaur capitals of the world? Clearly, there’s something special going on in the old cement company quarry, just off some side roads behind Ford’s Woodlawn stamping plant on busy commuter Route 5.
It’s not the dirt and the rocks. It’s the bugs.
The bugs – fossil-hunter slang for trilobites, the buglike sea creatures that once crawled the floors of the warm tropical sea this area was some 350 million years ago – quietly have turned the unprepossessing quarry into one of the top cultural attractions in Western New York. Its programs, which do include far more than fossil hunting, rank it among the area’s top educational draws. In 2005, in the last ranking of its kind, Penn Dixie stood at 19th on a Business First list of the region’s top 25 attractions – a list that included casinos and amusement parks as well as museums.
This kind of frustrates the leaders of the Hamburg Natural History Society, which runs the site.
“We do malls and other shows,” said executive director Jerold Bastedo, “and we always hear, ‘we’ve lived here all our lives, and we never even knew you were here!’ ”
That’s changing. Now, a generation of children has taken school field trips to the site, and many of them have dragged their parents back on additional collecting trips. Teachers and home-schooling families like the idea, not only because it’s affordable but because the trips are safe and relatively easy to supervise. It’s not that hard keeping track of kids on a flat moonscape.
The trips also fit the educational center concept. “We are the outdoor science lab for a great many schools, and not just in Erie County,” said Mark Castner, the society’s president and the director of the seismology station at Canisius College. This year there have been school groups from Long Island, Central New York and Sandusky, as well as home-schoolers from New Hampshire. “We operate as the nonprofit that provides that outdoor science lab. We’re an educational organization.”
“Think of all the parents who hate us, because their kids now have boxes of rocks and fossils under their beds,” he jokes. But there’s a serious side to that, too – the collecting, along with other activities ranging from nature walks and wetlands tours to astronomy and model rocketry – can ignite curiosity and trigger lifelong explorations.
“Those make a difference in the lives of those kids, in ways you’ll never know,” Castner said.
Castner is amused when children “drag parents out who obviously didn’t plan on getting dirty – but then the parents start collecting too. It’s fun to watch.”
“Even though this is always thought of as a kids’ thing, we have more adults than kids coming to the site,” Bastedo added. “Doctors, attorneys, mechanics, teachers, housewives – all walks of life. We have kept our prices down, so we can keep it affordable for anyone to get in, for families to come in. We’re making contacts and bringing people to Western New York.”
Part of this story starts in the 1970s, when a small group formed to save a plot of land that had been drawing fossil collectors for years but was threatened suddenly by development. Another part of it starts far, far earlier than that.
This region’s species of trilobites – the site’s “signature” fossil – would have looked almost as old to the dinosaurs as the dinosaurs look to us.
“The animals lived in an ocean 350 million years ago, when this area was 20 to 30 degrees or so south of the equator,” Bastedo said. “This area didn’t become a land mass until 340 million years ago. The fossils here are 130 million years older than the dinosaurs.”
There is no evidence that dinosaurs ever were here. Buffalo Museum of Science “digs” have explored a rich history of mastodons and other post-Ice Age animal fossils, but the rock underneath Western New York soils is rich in much older fossils of the trilobites, corals, clamlike brachiopods, graceful sea lilies and other creatures that once inhabited that ancient warm, shallow saltwater sea.
Pressure eventually turned the ocean’s bottom sediments to shale. In a few places, the ancient shale “weathers out” the harder fossils, basically concentrations of harder minerals that under special conditions replaced such organic materials as shells and tissue. In others, excavated blocks of shale, subjected to chisel and rock hammer, break along lines where fossils have lodged.
Some of those locations have been lost. A world-renowned trilobite area at the mouth of Eighteen Mile Creek, not far from the Penn Dixie quarry, recently was posted by a new landowner against trespassing. The old Vogelsanger quarry, not far from Amherst’s blue water tower and a proposed hotel development, once yielded spectacular fossils for the Science Museum’s collections but also is inaccessible private property. Hunters prospect rock outcroppings where they can – in New York, Bastedo notes, “the fossils go from the Lake Erie shoreline all across the state” – but Penn Dixie is a rare combination of exposed fossil-bearing rocks and public access. And, unlike state and federal fossil sites and many “pay-to-dig” locations out West and elsewhere, visitors can keep whatever they find.
“This is probably the only place in the United States where you can do this,” said Dan Cooper of Cincinnati, on a late spring day at the site. And it’s even unique among more restrictive collecting sites, which tend to be in the middle of nowhere. “For metro areas, there’s nothing like this,” he added.
Dave Griffith of Boston, Mass., got to the site by way of Irish step-dancing. A daughter, he explained while wielding a rock hammer atop a pile of cracked shale, was competing in a dance event here so he followed a friend’s advice and found the site “about four or five years ago.”
He and son Danny were back for this spring’s “Dig With the Experts,” an annual event during which Cooper and other Cincinnati hunters return to open a new area for digging. “I was just into fossils,” he said with a grin.
“There are fossil people who are as crazy about fossils as other people are about – well, look at all the people who followed the Buffalo Philharmonic to Carnegie Hall,” Castner said.
One of the “fossil people” might be Peggy Johnston, a young teacher who now has made the trip north three times from her home in Punxsutawney, Pa.
“I’m an earth science instructor at Penn State DuBois, and I incorporate information on fossils and the process of fossilization into one of the courses I teach. Actually, it’s a dinosaur class,” she said.
A week later, on an expedition organized by the North Coast Fossil Club out of Cleveland, 11-year-old Nick Folkesen of Kent, Ohio, had less lofty goals – but even better luck.
“This is my first time,” he explained, displaying a large, perfectly preserved trilobite. Asked whether that should be considered skill or beginner’s luck, he opted for “skill.” His godfather, Dr. Edgar Koojiman, just laughed and admitted the find was a bit better than anything he and his 8-year-old son Aron had found in the rocks.
“I was just digging around in a brachiopod layer and I found a lot of good brachiopods,” he added.
Craig Tipton, treasurer of the Ohio club, said the former Cleveland Museum of Natural History affiliate has organized “about maybe a dozen” such expeditions over the years.
Penn-Dixie’s trilobites are the site’s big draw. The first creatures on earth to have eyes – compound ones, like a fly’s – they literally litter the site. Even better, they are internationally renowned for the quality of their preservation and for “multiples,” gatherings of 20 or more on a single slab (the record so far is 43). Some hunters collect to trade or sell, and there are prime Penn Dixie fossils in collections as far away as Japan, and at the Smithsonian.
Trilobites are three-lobed (hence the name), many-legged crawlers that look, and rolled up when threatened, much like the little insects known as “potato bugs.” They range in size from near-microscopic to nearly 3 feet, date back far earlier than the ones from the Penn Dixie site, and lasted far longer. They may have been the most successful creatures ever to inhabit the planet, outlasting changes not only in the weather but in the planet itself, but they’re extinct now. Their closest living relative is the horseshoe crab.
Penn Dixie’s trilobite fossils, which can be up to two and a half inches long, often are full or partial “molts,” as the creatures shed their hard exoskeletons for larger ones. But the clumps may be evidence of hurricanes that roiled a shallow sea cove and buried groups of the creatures in sediment slides.
The site is rich in other fossils, as well. The shells of brachiopods are common. So are horn corals, and segments of the stems of crinoids, or sea lilies. More rarely, there are fish fossils and even jellyfish. “Not everything’s been found,” Bastedo said.
And he’s not worried about giving away the store, by allowing both kids and adults to keep whatever they find. “We have an inexhaustible supply of fossils,” he said.
Digging for fossils at the old quarry site dates back decades.
“I’ve been coming here for 35 years,” said Cooper, who not only collects fossils but started a lab to prepare them for display. In the early days, he recalled, the fossils shared the abandoned quarry site with wrecked cars and drug dealers. And the fossil hunters sometimes couldn’t even get into the site.
“Back then it was hit or miss – all-night drives only to be turned away when we got here, or you’d be digging and there’d be shotgun shells going overhead,” Cooper said.
Penn Dixie’s successor, the Hamburg Shale Co., shut down and graded the site in the 1960s. In the 1970s, groups from the Science Museum and elsewhere were collecting fossils there. There were ownership shifts through that decade and the 1980s, when a town group combatting the idea of a chemical storage building began promoting the idea of a fossil park. The Hamburg Natural History Society was formed in 1993 to raise funds and save the property.
Bastedo, a former Science Museum geologist, joined Hamburg town board member and Frontier biology teacher Mark Cavalcoli in an effort that won town support. Hamburg bought 75 acres of the site in 1995, and deeded 32.5 of them to the society the next January. Another 17 acres were purchased by the society in 2004, and four years later another five acres on Jeffrey Road were added to give the site a new front door that someday will include parking and a visitor center for all-weather events, overnight Scouting activities and site-related displays.
Immediately after the first land transfer there were school group visits, and one program a month.
Now, there are more than 400 events and programs a year, ranging from school science show visits to on-site nighttime and solar astronomy, with a range of special events and lecture seasons in between. There are picnic shelters on site, a wetland constructed with Federal Aviation Administration funding in remediation of wetland conversion to runways at a local airport, amenities installed as Eagle Scout projects, areas for bird-watching, a website (www.penndixie.org) and a system of paved walkways for handicapped access.
“We’ve had blind people come out and find trilobites,” Bastedo said, “and wheelchair use has been great.”
The society now has more than 1,100 memberships, from single-student ones to “grandparent” memberships that welcome seniors with up to five kids in tow; members come from across New York, surrounding states and other countries. And in 2011, a seven-year study by professors from two Southern state universities ranked it as the top fossil park in the country. Buoyed by that honor, the society has begun trying to raise the $2 million for a visitor center that will mark an evolutionary leap forward in the depth of programs the site can offer – not to mention 10 to 20 jobs and some permanent bathrooms.
“This thing has grown more than we expected, quicker than we expected, because of the demand for it,” Bastedo said. “We need staffing, and we need a building, to grow our programming.”
“But we do not want to be a museum. We’re an outdoor education site, a hands-on facility.”
One with an inexhaustible supply of fossils.
Last year alone, the Penn Dixie Paleontological & Outdoor Education Center saw visitors from 38 states and nine countries. This May, there were fossil-hunters from Germany, England, Canada, Brazil and Mongolia.
Mongolia? One of the dinosaur capitals of the world? Clearly, there’s something special going on in the old cement company quarry, just off some side roads behind Ford’s Woodlawn stamping plant on busy commuter Route 5.
It’s not the dirt and the rocks. It’s the bugs.
The bugs – fossil-hunter slang for trilobites, the buglike sea creatures that once crawled the floors of the warm tropical sea this area was some 350 million years ago – quietly have turned the unprepossessing quarry into one of the top cultural attractions in Western New York. Its programs, which do include far more than fossil hunting, rank it among the area’s top educational draws. In 2005, in the last ranking of its kind, Penn Dixie stood at 19th on a Business First list of the region’s top 25 attractions – a list that included casinos and amusement parks as well as museums.
This kind of frustrates the leaders of the Hamburg Natural History Society, which runs the site.
“We do malls and other shows,” said executive director Jerold Bastedo, “and we always hear, ‘we’ve lived here all our lives, and we never even knew you were here!’ ”
That’s changing. Now, a generation of children has taken school field trips to the site, and many of them have dragged their parents back on additional collecting trips. Teachers and home-schooling families like the idea, not only because it’s affordable but because the trips are safe and relatively easy to supervise. It’s not that hard keeping track of kids on a flat moonscape.
The trips also fit the educational center concept. “We are the outdoor science lab for a great many schools, and not just in Erie County,” said Mark Castner, the society’s president and the director of the seismology station at Canisius College. This year there have been school groups from Long Island, Central New York and Sandusky, as well as home-schoolers from New Hampshire. “We operate as the nonprofit that provides that outdoor science lab. We’re an educational organization.”
“Think of all the parents who hate us, because their kids now have boxes of rocks and fossils under their beds,” he jokes. But there’s a serious side to that, too – the collecting, along with other activities ranging from nature walks and wetlands tours to astronomy and model rocketry – can ignite curiosity and trigger lifelong explorations.
“Those make a difference in the lives of those kids, in ways you’ll never know,” Castner said.
Castner is amused when children “drag parents out who obviously didn’t plan on getting dirty – but then the parents start collecting too. It’s fun to watch.”
“Even though this is always thought of as a kids’ thing, we have more adults than kids coming to the site,” Bastedo added. “Doctors, attorneys, mechanics, teachers, housewives – all walks of life. We have kept our prices down, so we can keep it affordable for anyone to get in, for families to come in. We’re making contacts and bringing people to Western New York.”
Part of this story starts in the 1970s, when a small group formed to save a plot of land that had been drawing fossil collectors for years but was threatened suddenly by development. Another part of it starts far, far earlier than that.
This region’s species of trilobites – the site’s “signature” fossil – would have looked almost as old to the dinosaurs as the dinosaurs look to us.
“The animals lived in an ocean 350 million years ago, when this area was 20 to 30 degrees or so south of the equator,” Bastedo said. “This area didn’t become a land mass until 340 million years ago. The fossils here are 130 million years older than the dinosaurs.”
There is no evidence that dinosaurs ever were here. Buffalo Museum of Science “digs” have explored a rich history of mastodons and other post-Ice Age animal fossils, but the rock underneath Western New York soils is rich in much older fossils of the trilobites, corals, clamlike brachiopods, graceful sea lilies and other creatures that once inhabited that ancient warm, shallow saltwater sea.
Pressure eventually turned the ocean’s bottom sediments to shale. In a few places, the ancient shale “weathers out” the harder fossils, basically concentrations of harder minerals that under special conditions replaced such organic materials as shells and tissue. In others, excavated blocks of shale, subjected to chisel and rock hammer, break along lines where fossils have lodged.
Some of those locations have been lost. A world-renowned trilobite area at the mouth of Eighteen Mile Creek, not far from the Penn Dixie quarry, recently was posted by a new landowner against trespassing. The old Vogelsanger quarry, not far from Amherst’s blue water tower and a proposed hotel development, once yielded spectacular fossils for the Science Museum’s collections but also is inaccessible private property. Hunters prospect rock outcroppings where they can – in New York, Bastedo notes, “the fossils go from the Lake Erie shoreline all across the state” – but Penn Dixie is a rare combination of exposed fossil-bearing rocks and public access. And, unlike state and federal fossil sites and many “pay-to-dig” locations out West and elsewhere, visitors can keep whatever they find.
“This is probably the only place in the United States where you can do this,” said Dan Cooper of Cincinnati, on a late spring day at the site. And it’s even unique among more restrictive collecting sites, which tend to be in the middle of nowhere. “For metro areas, there’s nothing like this,” he added.
Dave Griffith of Boston, Mass., got to the site by way of Irish step-dancing. A daughter, he explained while wielding a rock hammer atop a pile of cracked shale, was competing in a dance event here so he followed a friend’s advice and found the site “about four or five years ago.”
He and son Danny were back for this spring’s “Dig With the Experts,” an annual event during which Cooper and other Cincinnati hunters return to open a new area for digging. “I was just into fossils,” he said with a grin.
“There are fossil people who are as crazy about fossils as other people are about – well, look at all the people who followed the Buffalo Philharmonic to Carnegie Hall,” Castner said.
One of the “fossil people” might be Peggy Johnston, a young teacher who now has made the trip north three times from her home in Punxsutawney, Pa.
“I’m an earth science instructor at Penn State DuBois, and I incorporate information on fossils and the process of fossilization into one of the courses I teach. Actually, it’s a dinosaur class,” she said.
A week later, on an expedition organized by the North Coast Fossil Club out of Cleveland, 11-year-old Nick Folkesen of Kent, Ohio, had less lofty goals – but even better luck.
“This is my first time,” he explained, displaying a large, perfectly preserved trilobite. Asked whether that should be considered skill or beginner’s luck, he opted for “skill.” His godfather, Dr. Edgar Koojiman, just laughed and admitted the find was a bit better than anything he and his 8-year-old son Aron had found in the rocks.
“I was just digging around in a brachiopod layer and I found a lot of good brachiopods,” he added.
Craig Tipton, treasurer of the Ohio club, said the former Cleveland Museum of Natural History affiliate has organized “about maybe a dozen” such expeditions over the years.
Penn-Dixie’s trilobites are the site’s big draw. The first creatures on earth to have eyes – compound ones, like a fly’s – they literally litter the site. Even better, they are internationally renowned for the quality of their preservation and for “multiples,” gatherings of 20 or more on a single slab (the record so far is 43). Some hunters collect to trade or sell, and there are prime Penn Dixie fossils in collections as far away as Japan, and at the Smithsonian.
Trilobites are three-lobed (hence the name), many-legged crawlers that look, and rolled up when threatened, much like the little insects known as “potato bugs.” They range in size from near-microscopic to nearly 3 feet, date back far earlier than the ones from the Penn Dixie site, and lasted far longer. They may have been the most successful creatures ever to inhabit the planet, outlasting changes not only in the weather but in the planet itself, but they’re extinct now. Their closest living relative is the horseshoe crab.
Penn Dixie’s trilobite fossils, which can be up to two and a half inches long, often are full or partial “molts,” as the creatures shed their hard exoskeletons for larger ones. But the clumps may be evidence of hurricanes that roiled a shallow sea cove and buried groups of the creatures in sediment slides.
The site is rich in other fossils, as well. The shells of brachiopods are common. So are horn corals, and segments of the stems of crinoids, or sea lilies. More rarely, there are fish fossils and even jellyfish. “Not everything’s been found,” Bastedo said.
And he’s not worried about giving away the store, by allowing both kids and adults to keep whatever they find. “We have an inexhaustible supply of fossils,” he said.
Digging for fossils at the old quarry site dates back decades.
“I’ve been coming here for 35 years,” said Cooper, who not only collects fossils but started a lab to prepare them for display. In the early days, he recalled, the fossils shared the abandoned quarry site with wrecked cars and drug dealers. And the fossil hunters sometimes couldn’t even get into the site.
“Back then it was hit or miss – all-night drives only to be turned away when we got here, or you’d be digging and there’d be shotgun shells going overhead,” Cooper said.
Penn Dixie’s successor, the Hamburg Shale Co., shut down and graded the site in the 1960s. In the 1970s, groups from the Science Museum and elsewhere were collecting fossils there. There were ownership shifts through that decade and the 1980s, when a town group combatting the idea of a chemical storage building began promoting the idea of a fossil park. The Hamburg Natural History Society was formed in 1993 to raise funds and save the property.
Bastedo, a former Science Museum geologist, joined Hamburg town board member and Frontier biology teacher Mark Cavalcoli in an effort that won town support. Hamburg bought 75 acres of the site in 1995, and deeded 32.5 of them to the society the next January. Another 17 acres were purchased by the society in 2004, and four years later another five acres on Jeffrey Road were added to give the site a new front door that someday will include parking and a visitor center for all-weather events, overnight Scouting activities and site-related displays.
Immediately after the first land transfer there were school group visits, and one program a month.
Now, there are more than 400 events and programs a year, ranging from school science show visits to on-site nighttime and solar astronomy, with a range of special events and lecture seasons in between. There are picnic shelters on site, a wetland constructed with Federal Aviation Administration funding in remediation of wetland conversion to runways at a local airport, amenities installed as Eagle Scout projects, areas for bird-watching, a website (www.penndixie.org) and a system of paved walkways for handicapped access.
“We’ve had blind people come out and find trilobites,” Bastedo said, “and wheelchair use has been great.”
The society now has more than 1,100 memberships, from single-student ones to “grandparent” memberships that welcome seniors with up to five kids in tow; members come from across New York, surrounding states and other countries. And in 2011, a seven-year study by professors from two Southern state universities ranked it as the top fossil park in the country. Buoyed by that honor, the society has begun trying to raise the $2 million for a visitor center that will mark an evolutionary leap forward in the depth of programs the site can offer – not to mention 10 to 20 jobs and some permanent bathrooms.
“This thing has grown more than we expected, quicker than we expected, because of the demand for it,” Bastedo said. “We need staffing, and we need a building, to grow our programming.”
“But we do not want to be a museum. We’re an outdoor education site, a hands-on facility.”
One with an inexhaustible supply of fossils.