THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Mills Mansion 4 A tabletop at the bottom of an ancient sea

CATSKILL - It’s easy to admire the fine furniture that fills the Mills Mansion (AKA Staatsburgh). And, if you know your way around antiques, there is a lot to see there. That includes the two of us. We loved all the furniture and all of the interiors that we have seen at Staatsburgh. But we are also geologists, and we look deeper into these “antiques.” And so it was that as we passed through the mansion’s Oval Room, we noticed an especially fine tabletop. It had been cut and polished to produce a handsome shiny surface. We recognized it as a brown siltstone. That is a type of sedimentary rock. That stone had once been a mud at the bottom of an ancient sea, and probably a deep one. That mud had, long ago, hardened into the stone we were looking at. There’s no way to determine the age of this rock, but it easily could be hundreds of millions of years. But there was more; we spotted a fossil in the old silt. We were suddenly looking at an animal that had actually lived in that ocean - it swam in that sea. Take a look at our first photo.

We recognized it as what paleontologists call a coiled nautiloid. You might call it a chambered nautilus - that’s what the modern living ones are called. See our second photo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The modern chambered nautilus lives in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It’s a distant cousin of the modern squid and the octopus. Those three comprise a group of Molluscan invertebrates called the cephalopods. Nautiloids have the eyes and tentacles of a squid. You might think of them as being squids with a fine-looking chambered shell. But they evolved long before the squids or the octopods. The modern nautiloid is largely unchanged from this ancient ancestral tabletop form. And that makes it special to us. You see, the cephalopods are among the most intelligent of the invertebrate animals. And their intelligence dates back in time almost half a billion years. When we see a fossil Nautiloid, we know that it was one of the smartest animals of its ancient planet Earth.

But this one is just an isolated fossil: we don’t know where it came from, nor even what ocean it lived in and, of course, we don’t even know exactly how old it is. But seeing it on that tabletop adds so much to the story. We can’t help but wonder, did the Mills family know that story? They must have all been well educated by the standards of their day. They must have noticed this fossil but what did they think of it?

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