Welcome Students!
This section of the Fossil Finders website is set up to help students learn more about the Fossil Finders project and share their experiences with other classrooms. In Learning About Fossils, you can find more information about the different kinds of fossils you are seeing in your sample set.
You can also contact scientists at the Paleontological Research Institute with questions regarding your research using the Student-Ask-a-Scientist form on this page. You may be able to find answers to your questions just by checking out the Ask-a-Scientist FAQ link.
You can also share your experiences and findings with other schools and classrooms using the Student-to-Student Bulletin Board. We hope these tools help you assist the project and learn more about the work that geologists do!
Special Report From Chenango Forks:
On October 20th, the Chenango Forks Geology class hit the road and headed into the Devonian Period. That morning, we stopped at the Paleontological Research Institute in Ithaca, New York. The building, originally the Odd fellows Home orphanage, was turned into a collection-storage site seventy-five years ago. There we met paleontologist Trisia Smrecak. She showed us a two-foot-wide, yet-to-be-analyzed fossil that had just been brought in by a farmer near Binghamton, our hometown. The Research Institute is, with over three million specimens and many on display in their museum, a valuable resource for paleontologists around the world.
Chenango Forks students at the Paleontological Research Institute
The Institute has a large collection of Devonian specimens, so Trisha showed us fossils that we might find in Devonian-age rocks later that day. After an hour’s instruction at PRI, we headed out to the field for the rest of the day. We parted with Trisha and traveled towards Taughannock Falls and Seneca Stone Quarry, where we observed rock layers that had been bathed alternately in warm, shallow seas, deep, dirtier waters and clean, abrasive waves. We collected fossils of bivalves, crinoids, trilobites, brachiopods and cephalopods for our personal collections.
Later that day we met Trisha at the Pompey, New York Road Cut. We collected fossils for our own collections and took bulk samples of the shale and limestone in the Horizon Two, Three and Four rock layers. The samples, which went back to Chenango Forks High School with our class, will be analyzed for Devonian-age fossils in our research project with Cornell University and the Paleontological Research Institute.
Forks’ students at rock outcrop.
We finished off day one of our trip with a lecture by Mineralogist Dr. David Bailey at Hamilton College on the incredibly versatile igneous rock basalt, whose features and applications span the areas of geology, mineralogy, biology and chemistry. We also were able to look at the scanning electron microscope in the Hamilton College lab. Our class will continue to work with Cornell University and the Paleontological Research Institute in analyzing our Pompey road cut samples, and we thank Trisha Smrecak for her guidance.
This report is a collaboration of Sharon Hartzell, Ryan Pasternak, Jackson Haskell, and John O’Neill.