The "Could I Have Become A Fossil Millionaire?" Story

 It was an ordinary day.  Reading an article in the Lancaster Newspaper titled "A LINK TO THE PAST."  Story was about paleontologist and retired geology professor Roger Thomas who teaches at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  

Professor Roger Thomas

He recently was interviewed by LNP for a story in the newspaper about trilobites which are distant relatives of crabs and lobsters.  Most of the fossils that are pictured in the story were found in Manheim Township in the Friutville Quarry on Beacon Hill Road which is a quiet street that's lined with single-family homes except for the quarry which has been owned by F&M College since the 1950s.  The fossils are exhibited at the North Museum of Science and nature in Lancaster and in the F&M's Department of Earth and Environment.  Recently, more fossils of the same age, including the earliest known marine snails, have been found in a basement excavation off Buch Avenue.  

Professor Thomas searching for samples

The location is about half-a-mile from the original site.  The floor of the quarry along Fruitville Pike exposes small and large rocks.  Hammering the rocks reveals the fossils.  How neat it must be to be able to discover fossils that have been located in Manheim Township for hundreds of years.  I recently moved about a mile from the area, but lived about a quarter-mile from the site before I moved.  Professor Roger Thomas recently talked to a group of members of the Lancaster County Fossil and Mineral Club which was founded about 10 years ago.  Mr. Thomas spoke about Cambrian age fossils from Lancaster and York counties, their collectors and their roles in the Cambrian Explosion of marine animal life.

A sample of a Sawfly

Millions of years ago this region was "a continental shelf off the margin of the ancient continent of Laurentia, a precursor of modern North America and at the margin of the Iapetus Ocean near the equator, running east to west."  In other words...Lancaster County was on the ocean floor.  Over the past 100 years, the quarry has yielded 25 to 30 kinds of fossils of long extinct animals,  nearly all hand-size or smaller marine animals.  Geology Today, an international geological magazine, features an article by Prof. Thomas in their March/April 2021 issue.  Prof. Thomas' article featured H, Justin Roddy, who lived from 1856-1943 and was a teacher at the former Millersville Normal School and a professor of geology and curator of natural history at F&M for 17 years.  

Professor Thomas holds a 500 million years old fossil

The Camptostroma rodyi fossil, a primitive relative of starfish and sand dollars from the Fruitville Quarry is named after him.  The quarry exposes the larger Kinzers Formation, which runs east of Kinzers, north of Lancaster and across the Susquehanna River to York, PA.  The Kinzers formation is well known for its rich variety of fossils that are intermediate in age, between those of the famous fossils from the Burgess Shale in British Columbia, in Canada to Chengjiang, in China.  The major important issue is fossils found at those three formations all existed during the time of the Cambrian Explosion, a tech use to refer to the great diversification of marine animal life between 540 million to 500 million years ago.  Examples would be mollusks, snails, slugs, mussels, squid, arthropods (crabs and lobsters) and echinoderms which include starfish and sand dollars.  Prof. Thomas notes that the quarry may have been open as a source of fill used in constructing a nearby trolley line.  While the trolley is no longer in existence, the quarry lives on and F&M students are learning from it.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.

PS - My wife and I lived with our family about a quarter-mile from the quarry for 27 years.  We often had water in our basement from what we were told was a nearby quarry.  It came from behind an old wooden door that I could never seem to get open as long as we lived there.  Could that quarry have been the quarry I have just written about?  We recently moved from the area, but I will forever wonder about the chances of the source of water in our basement as coming from behind that door which led to the Fruitville Quarry???  Could I possibly have become a fossil millionaire?  I guess I will never know!!!