THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Crypt at the Greenville Cemetery

CATSKILL - We always have to be on the lookout for new topics to write about. After all, we have to come and visit you every week. So, it was some time ago, when we attended a meeting of the Greenville Local History Group, that something came leaped out at us. The talk that night was about the Greenville Cemetery. That’s right in the heart of town. The speaker mentioned in passing that the stone that makes up the crypt was packed with fossils. Take a look at our two photos. That sure sounded like a column to us so off we went, as soon as we could.

Sure enough, when we got there, we saw a lot of fossil shells in most of the stones that make up the building. It is hard to put names on fossils that show up only as cross sections in building stones. But look in the middle of our close-up view. The shell there is what paleontologists call a brachiopod. Like a clam, this creature has two shells but in all other respects it is entirely unlike clams. It is an altogether different type of animal – a brachiopod. Geologists are most fond of “brachs;” they are very common in very old strata, especially in the Devonian rocks in the Catskills region. We looked over all of those stones and soon recognized that there were a lot of brachiopods – and many of them were pretty big.

But we didn’t recognize the rocks. All stratified rocks belong to units called geologic formations. Around our region there are the Oneonta formation, the Ashokan Formation, the Gilboa Formation and a large number of others. We have been working on these for decades and know them quite well. We have written about them too. Put a sample in front of us and we can usually name them. But we looked at these and couldn’t come up with a name. That was a problem; when we write these columns, we like to sound like we know absolutely everything.

Well, we had a solution to both problems. We could learn the name of this rock unit and also fool you into thinking we know everything. We know two of the leading experts on the New York State Devonian.  Those were Dr. Charles (Chuck) Ver Straeten and Dr. Alexander Bartholomew. We sent pictures and both of them identified the unit as being the Oriskany Formation. Chuck has even written about the Oriskany in a recent book.

This sample contains what is called the “Big Shell Community.” The fossils here tend to be larger than usual. They’re heavier too. That helped them flourish on high energy, wave swept sea floors. And that, in turn, places them in a nearshore setting. So now, whenever we go into the Greenville Cemetery, we will stand and look around. We will see the sandy and sunlit bottom of a nearshore sea floor. The sand below us is dotted with large heavy brachiopods. Waves are approaching from behind us, and we feel the agitation. But those brachs don’t; they are too heavy to be budged. Then we blink our eyes, and we are back in modern-day Greenville.

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