I had the great good fortune to have a science teacher for an uncle. He loved his work and taught his nieces and nephews about the world at large as well as the part of it we lived in: about soils and rocks, the importance of the summer and winter solstices, and how to identify harmless snakes and move them without getting bitten, among other things.
He enjoyed taking us on field trips on his days off, and one of his favorite places to explore was Eighteen Mile Creek, a tributary of Lake Erie that meanders south of Buffalo, mostly through the town of Hamburg. As a science teacher in the Buffalo City Schools, Uncle Ed knew all the places where people were permitted to go fossil hunting. His goal on these trips was to teach us about paleontology, the study of fossilized plant and animal remains, as well as something about life in Western New York before the Buffalo Bills.
Eighteen Mile Creek is so-named because its waters flow into Lake Erie at a point 18 miles southwest of the former village of Black Rock, now a neighborhood on the western edge of Buffalo.[1] I remember as a child clambering down the shale cliffs behind my uncle, into the gorge formed by the creek. While in places the cliffs rise 100 feet or more, the creek itself is wide but not very deep, a perfect place for wading on a hot summer day while we searched the cliffs for ancient life.
My uncle had a knack for simplifying complex subjects in a way that made them meaningful for children. All of the fossilized creatures we would find in the layers of thin grey shale would be from the Paleozoic Era, he would tell us, and they lived not in the Great Lakes but in a body of water known as the Devonian Sea. Rather than have us try to memorize the Latin names of the fossils (what 11-year-old would remember athyris spiriferoides?), he would tell us the “common names” of what we were finding.
He described how at the bottom of the Devonian Sea lay a magnificent coral reef not unlike the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. The drab, grey fossils we were looking for—brachiopods, pyrite, crinoid stems, and the most sought after prize of all, trilobites—were once as colorful and beautiful as any ocean creatures we might see today. If we found one of these precious relics, he instructed, we were to wrap them carefully in newspaper and put them in a metal box, so as not to break the tiny creatures embedded in the fragile shale. We stuffed the harder, calcified fossils we found near the creek bed and lakeshore, into our pockets.
I remember going home at the end of the day with our small treasures, my head filled with images of small marine animals clinging to rocks, and of plants waving their fronds at the bottom of a sea where I now walked. I still have those fossils, safely tucked away, wrapped in very old newspaper.
As an adult, I have since learned that the Great Lakes are a paleontologist’s dream, with fossils plentiful all along the vast shorelines, thanks to the glaciers that scoured them from the hardened Devonian sea bottom, and the waves that now deposit them on the beaches. I’ve also recently learned about a place called the Penn Dixie Fossil Park & Nature Reserve in Hamburg, on what was once part of the quarry of the Penn Dixie Cement Corporation. According to the Reserve’s website, it is ranked as the #1 fossil park in the U.S. and welcomes guests from around the world.[2]
The Fossil Park is temporarily closed until April 2023, but when it reopens, I plan to visit. I read that you can keep whatever fossils you find during your explorations. What better way to relive my childhood memories of a mind-expanding educational experience, and honor the memory of Uncle Ed, science teacher extraordinaire.
Have you ever looked for or found fossils on the beaches of the Great Lakes or along one of its tributaries like Eighteen Mile Creek? I would love to know if you share my interest in these small relics of the past, or if you have ever simply stumbled upon them. Please let me know in the comments below.
Moxie Gardiner is a writer, gardener, and traveler who grew up on the West Side of Buffalo, NY. In a previous life she was a journalist, magazine editor, speech writer, and policy wonk. Back in the day she made three solo parachute jumps, flew in an F-15 fighter jet, and crawled through mud pits at the Jungle Operations Training Course in Panama. She now meditates and practices yoga. She is almost ready to publish her first novel, set in Buffalo.
[1] An excellent scientific and historical tome on the subject is Geology and Paleontology of Eighteen Mile Creek by Amadeus W. Grabau. This book, Grabau’s master’s thesis at MIT, was originally published in two volumes in 1898-1899, and has since been republished by the Hamburg Natural History Society. I have no idea if my uncle ever read this book, but I hope he did. He would have loved it.
[2] For more information about the fossil park, visit https://penndixie.org/fossil-hunting/