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Two related articles from today's Chicago Tribune: -------------------- Can you dig it? -------------------- Fossil hunters from across the globe descend upon ---- and down into ----abandoned quarry in Ohio for chance at world-class find Nara Schoenberg, Tribune staff reporter August 29, 2006 SYLVANIA, Ohio -- Some people are satisfied with digging for dinosaurs, but if you want something really old -- say, 375 million years old -- then you want a trilobite, a cell-phone size bug creature with bulging eyes and a name redolent of vintage "Star Trek." There's no greater thrill for a first-time fossil hunter than to see one of those remarkably detailed compound eyes staring out from a crumbling piece of shale. And there's no better place in America to go trilobite hunting than little Fossil Park in Sylvania, Ohio. Approaching from Toledo, the nearest city, you drive down a flat suburban street past Kroger, Blockbuster and a field full of neat townhouses, make a right at the telephone pole with an ad for "1-877-LUV-JUNK" and a left at the modest blue and white sign at the edge of a soybean field. At the end of a gravel road, a winding handicapped-accessible ramp takes you 35 feet down to the bottom of an abandoned quarry, where tourists from as far away as Japan and Jordan have hunted for fossils. "If you're a fossil geek, you've either got to go to Devon, England, or come to Sylvania, Ohio," for prime Devonian-era fossil collecting, says Gary Madrzykowski, director of the Olander Park System, which oversees Fossil Park. Experts point to a few other places in the U.S. where the Devonian-era pickings are good, but they have high praise for suburban Sylvania, where ice age glaciers scraped off the relatively new layers of earth where dinosaurs are found, and exposed the silica shale beneath. Local quarries broke up the shale, which is chock-full of sea creatures: trilobites, including the frog-eyed Phacops rana, corals, brachiopods -- think ancient clams -- and the lilylike crinoids, which are mostly found in the form of little Cheerio-shaped stem segments. Some of the best Sylvania specimens end up in geology museums; one was recently offered on eBay for $2,500. "That area is world-class fossil collecting," says Ron Rea, a retired geologist with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. Maybe you hunted for fossils as a kid. Maybe you spent hours at, say, the railroad tracks, sifting through rocks, searching, unsuccessfully, for the elusive imprint of a shell or a skeleton. This is nothing like that. Trucked in from a working quarry a mile down the road, the crumbly gray rocks are crammed with treasures. My husband, brother-in-law and father-in-law, all veteran Toledo fossil hunters, began uncovering brachiopods in minutes and, after some disorganized and slightly frantic digging, I found my focus and picked off a gorgeous clam creature, complete with batlike wings, right from the ground. "Is it a brachiopod?" I asked my husband. "No, that's one of those wing creatures." I gave him a quizzical look. "I don't know what they're called. We've just always called them wing creatures." Rules change with times My husband dates from the era, about 30 years ago, when the working quarries were open to amateurs on weekends. Anyone brave enough to sign a consent form could descend two or three stories into the quarries and chisel their museum-quality fossils right off the boulders. "I can't believe they're letting us do this," my husband recalls thinking at age 7 or 8. But times changed, lawsuits threatened and the quarries tightened their rules. By the late 1990s, owner Hanson Aggregates Midwest was getting hundreds of requests for visits by fossil hunters and looking for a way to say yes while maintaining a working quarry, Madrzykowski says. "Being an operation that blows stuff up, you can't just say, `Well, sure, bring 30 school kids here while we're firing TNT off all morning long,'" Madrzykowski says. Hanson approached the City of Sylvania, Sylvania approached the park system, and in September 2001, Fossil Park -- a 10-acre site owned by Hanson and leased by the park system -- opened for business. Local officials thought Fossil Park would get maybe 1,000 visitors on opening day. It got 3,500. "It looked like gang war had broken out," recalls Madrzykowski. "There were people here with hammers and chisels and sledgehammers and ice picks. People are banging on rocks, and there are these little 3-year-old kids walking around with no eye-guards, and we were like, we've got to rethink this thing right now." The next weekend, officials implemented a "no tools" rule at the park. Throwers, painters and soakers Today, about 20,000 people visit each year from as far way as China, South Africa, Israel and Peru. And if the scorching Saturday when we arrived is any indication, they've found ingenious ways to get around the "no tools" rule. There are "throwers" who hurl boulder-sized rocks, overhead, onto the ground, hoping they will break, "painters" who brush the soft shale with a wet brush in an effort to loosen fossils, and "soakers," who dunk their finds in giant water-filled Tupperware containers. Whatever the method, the goal is generally the same. After dallying with brachiopods and corals, most newcomers, myself among them, home in on the 800-pound gorilla of the Sylvania fossil scene. Or as Quinn Conlon, 5, of Hillsboro, Ohio, put it, "I'm looking for one of those bugs." "Trilobites!" said his brother, Mackenzie, 8. Even my 2-year-old twins got the idea. "This is a cello-bite!" one of them announced, incorrectly but with great enthusiasm. My time at Fossil Park waning, my sons wilting in the blazing sun, I made the kind of promises I imagine alcoholics or addicted gamblers make to themselves -- "Just 10 more minutes." Just 10 more minutes and I would stop looking and leave, trilobite or no trilobite. My eyes having adjusted to the geological riches before me, I surveyed the ground calmly and carefully, lifting promising rocks or just gazing gravely at textured surfaces. Where once I had just seen bumps, now I saw the gray-black of tiny trilobite fragments, darker than the lines ribbing a brachiopod, and thicker. Eye catches bulging black eye My 10 minutes were almost up when, right on cue, I saw it: A bulging black eye, so detailed it seemed alive, gazing up at me from a piece of crumbling shale. I looked back into eye of my first trilobite, and Blockbuster and Kroger faded away. For a second, I was back in the "Age of the Fishes," when Ohio was a tropical sea and the dinosaurs were still 160 million years in the future. - - - Supply will last for centuries Now that the Ohio quarry has become a public park, attracting thousands of people worldwide, will the quarry eventually run out of fossils? "Yeah, eventually we will," says Gary Madrzykowski, a local official overseeing the park. "But they tell me that will be in about 300 years." Every few weeks, trucks bring in fresh rock loaded with fossils from a nearby working quarry. Whether people come to the park this summer or years from now, Madrzykowski said, they will find fossils, especially after a good rain. "It's just like picking them off the pile at that point." -- S.R. ---------- -------------------- Fossil hunting is still a family affair -------------------- By Sam Roe Tribune staff reporter August 29, 2006 When I was in 5th grade, I brought my fossil collection to school for show and tell. My classmates oohed and aahed as they passed around the ancient trilobites and brachiopods, handling them as though they were Faberge eggs. When my classmates were done, I nonchalantly stuffed the fossils back into my pocket. After all, my home was full of them. My family had found the fossils at a quarry near our home in Ohio. Back in the 1960s, we would head to the quarry on Saturday mornings, when the mine was closed. My mom would sign permission forms in the manager's office while I stood perfectly still behind her, fearful that one wrong move would spell rejection. But soon we were winding down a long road to the massive quarry below. It was truly a kid's paradise: We would climb on boulders, smash rocks, cover ourselves in dirt and find some of the best buried treasure in the world. Armed with my own hammer and chisel, I quickly filled my fossil bag. Back home, we cleaned our fossils with vinegar and painted the good ones with clear nail polish to bring out all of the fine detail. Our very best fossils were displayed -- on coffee tables, windowsills, on top of the TV. When it came to showing off our rocks, my dad never saw a flat surface he didn't like. We were saddened when the quarry closed to the public. This was more than our semisecret fun spot. This was where our family bonded. We didn't build sand castles at the beach, go fishing at the lake or even go to movies. We hunted for fossils at the quarry. And when my mom died, the quarry became even more important in our memories. When I learned a few years ago that a small section of the quarry was reopening to the public as Fossil Park, I had mixed feelings. Would it be cheesy? Too crowded? Would there even be fossils? I was relieved when I recently checked it out. There were still plenty of rocks, dirt and brachiopods. I was even pleasantly surprised that my entire family wanted to come along. My brother brought my mom's old fossil bag, and my dad showed my 2-year-old twin boys how to loosen up fossils by knocking rocks together. For a couple of hours, the quarry was actually better than I remembered: Now we had three generations of rockhounds at the site. I left that day with a camera full of pictures and a bag brimming with fossils. The twins had their bags, too, and my wife -- at first a skeptic -- eagerly filled a plastic bag she had been saving for dirty diapers. Now I am methodically going through each bag, cleaning the fossils, arranging the best ones on the garage windowsill, and planning our next trip to the old quarry. ---------- sroe@tribune.com Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune nschoenberg@tribune.com Fossil Park is open Saturdays and Sundays only, May 27 through Oct. 22, weather permitting. Admission is free. August hours are Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The park closes at 5 p.m. from Sept. 2 through Oct. 22. Call 419-882-8313, ext. 31, or go to www.olanderpk.com. Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune
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