(menacing music) - Have you ever wondered what sort of bizarre creatures lived in Western New York millions of years ago?

There are clues if you look in the right place.

While Shark Girl's origin story may be interesting, we'll need to dig a little deeper to learn about what life was like during the "Age of the Fishes" (spring boings) The real story is in the rocks- They have secrets to tell you if you know the right ways to look at them.

Today we are going fossil hunting to learn more about Western New York's Devonian Past.

Have you ever walked around your neighborhood and wondered what it looked like ten or hundred years ago, a thousand years ago?

What about millions of years ago?

Let's just say there have been a lot of changes.

By looking at the rocks beneath our feet, we can get a better idea of what the world looked like millions or even hundreds of millions of years ago.

Let's take a look back in time 400 million years to the Devonian Period, millions of years before the dinosaurs.

(animal roars) During this time, most life could be found in the ocean.

The first forests were growing on land, and oxygen was being released into the atmosphere, eventually allowing for animals like you and me to live on land.

An ocean covered about 85% of the Devonian globe.

The area that is now Western New York was south of the equator and was covered by sub-tropical inland seas, which hosted a diverse ecosystem of reefs and marine life.

But let's get back to the rocks.

What can we tell from them?

The majority of rocks in Western New York are sedimentary rocks like sandstone, limestone, and shale.

Sedimentary rocks are formed from the accumulation of little pieces of other rocks.

These can tell us a lot about the environment that they were created in by the size of the grains that make it up.

They were typically laid down or deposited in water.

Sandstone forms largely on beaches near the shore.

Rocks like this limestone were formed in warm, shallow water, like coral reefs!

Gray shale is made up of super tiny particles, which tells us that the water that this was made in was pretty deep.

Deeper still is black shale, which is formed under deep, cold water.

How do we know which rocks are older?

Kind of like the dirty laundry in your hamper, the older things can be found at the bottom and the younger things on top.

This is known as stratigraphy.

Deeper layers of sedimentary rock are typically older than the ones higher up.

What else can we find in these rocks?

Like a window to life on Earth millions of years ago, fossils are leftovers from living things that have been preserved in rock.

While we usually think of dinosaur bones as fossils, there are tons of other things that living things can leave behind like footprints, burrow tracks, shells, poop, and more.

Becoming a fossil is actually pretty rare, and finding one is like winning the paleontological lottery!

Scientists estimate that less than 10% of all life that ever existed has been fossilized, and fewer still are found.

So what was Western New York like?

Most of the fossils that we find in Western New York are the kinds of animals that can be found in a warm, shallow ocean- corals, crinoids, brachiopods, and of course, trilobites.

Sometimes fossil hunters could even stumble upon Devonian fish like the Dunkleosteous, a armored fish that was 10 meters long!

By looking at the rock layers, they shift from limestone to sandstone to shale, showing that the water level changed over time.

But they were created from sediments found in ocean currents and waves.

(playful music) We are going fossil hunting at Penn Dixie Fossil Park & Nature Reserve.

And I'm here with my friend Catherine.

How you doing, Catherine?

- Hi, Sarajane.

- Hi, Catherine.

So Catherine, what makes this place so great for finding fossils?

- Penn Dixie's a great place for finding fossils 'cause they're all right on top.

We're a 54-acre nature reserve.

Three of those acres are devoted solely to fossil collecting.

In our most recent past, we were a big cement quarry, and all of the rock was shaved off the top and taken somewhere else, leaving all those fossils right on top for us to find.

- So exciting.

So what are some of the fossils we might uncover today?

- Oh, I'm glad you asked.

We can use this fossil ID card.

This is what we're going to be looking for.

So the first one we'll focus on is the horn coral.

We're 100% going to find a horn coral.

There's a lot of them everywhere.

- [Sarajane] Wonderful.

- [Catherine] Although they're extinct, they would have behaved and acted just like corals today.

And what we're finding is actually the animal's skeleton.

- So all we're getting is the hard parts 'cause the soft parts don't really fossilize so well.

So I think that's really neat.

- We're also going to find the brachiopod, and here's two different examples.

You can see how different they are, but can you see something in common with them?

- [Sarajane] Well, they are symmetrical, so unlike, you know, like, I guess, clams you think of today, they're a little bit off-center, but these guys are right perfectly symmetrical.

- That's exactly right.

And if you can say brachiopod, you're speaking a different language.

- That's true.

- Brachiopod means arm foot, and it kind of gives us a clue as how these guys would function.

- That's so cool.

Here, I can hold onto it.

- Okay.

- Dang, oh my goodness, I got 'em.

- My favorite is the crinoid.

The crinoid is a teeny-tiny circle, so we really got to keep our eyes peeled.

They kind of look like Cheerios or a stack of screws.

And this animal's nickname is a sea lily.

Although it is not a plant.

It's an animal.

- But my favorite part about these is that they're related to starfish, so you're finding like starfish cousins in Western New York, which I think is so cool.

- But everyone's favorite, the one everyone comes to find: the trilobite.

- [Sarajane] They are so cool.

- So when we look for these guys, we're going to keep our eyes peeled for a kind of a black, hard shell.

The trilobite's really important, especially its eyeballs.

They have different lenses, kind of like a dragonfly, and scientists think they could have seen shapes and colors.

And it's one of the reasons we have the eyeballs we have today.

- That is amazing, and I just love the fact that we can dig up this animal and study it.

It lived millions of years ago, and we can kind of figure out how it lived and how it worked, and I think that's so cool.

- So let's take a look right here on the surface.

We'll start recognizing some of those different shapes and patterns on the angular flat rock.

Here's three different kinds right off the bat.

We've got one of those horn corals, a brachiopod, and a little crinoid.

- That's so cool.

So, (clears throat) you've done this once or twice.

It's probably easier once you get used to it, right?

- Definitely, your eyes will get more adjusted to the gray color and those different shapes.

But I bet you'll start noticing some.

- [Sarajane] Think I just got one.

- Nice.

- Yes!

Oh my goodness, this is so cool.

Yeah, so this is a brachiopod.

- Exactly.

- It's not even just a partial.

I'm so excited.

- And that's a picture perfect one.

- I'm so excited.

(laughs) Whoa, the rocks over here are way bigger than the ones over there.

Like how are we going to get the fossils out of these?

- We've got a chisel.

We've got a rock hammer.

- Oh.

- And to put them to work, we're going to kind of pick a bigger block, bigger than the size of your hand, something like this.

- Okay.

- Now, when you're trying to get the fossils out of the rock, you never want to hit perpendicular to the fossil.

It could destroy anything that's in there.

You always want to hit parallel to the beds.

- Oh, okay, so like with the lines that are in the rock.

- Exactly, like pages in a book.

- Cool.

- So we'll put the rock down, make sure it's nice and secure.

I'm going to put my chisel in one of the little cracks that I can see already.

- [Catherine] Oh, you're brave.

- Well, there's a nice guard here to keep your hands safe.

And then you can give, you know, as light of taps or as hard as you want.

- [Sarajane] Oh!

- [Catherine] And the rock will just split open like this.

- [Sarajane] That's so satisfying.

(laughs) - There's a tiny horn coral in there, but, you know, some are duds.

Here, this is a good one.

- [Sarajane] That's a good one, okay.

- So we'll set you up.

- Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, use the stuff around you, very nice.

Okay, so this is, there's those lines.

- Yep.

- I don't want to smash whatever that might be, but.

Okay.

- Some nice taps.

(hammer clinking) A little more muscle.

- [Sarajane] I have muscles.

- [Catherine] You see that line starting to open?

- Okay, okay.

Keep going?

- Yeah, keep going.

- Oh boy.

- All right, ready?

- [Sarajane] Oh, wow, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

- Oh!

- Wait, what did I get?

What did I get?

What did I get?

(gasps) I got trilobite!

- [Catherine] Trilobite head.

- [Sarajane] I got trilobite.

I'm so excited.

- So now that we know there's one in there, we can work on getting the bigger stuff around it off.

And then this might be a good one to take home.

- Oh, I'm so excited, so excited.

So now that we've unearthed some of these creatures that haven't seen the light of day in like 400 million years, how do we preserve 'em?

- Well, when you're a paleontologist, your job does not stop in the field.

You got to take it to the lab and keep working.

So at home, you can use some really easy tools like dental picks or an open safety pin if you don't have a dental pick, and you kind of just chip away the shale that's around the fossil you want.

The shale is really fragile, so it doesn't take much effort to get in there, a good wintertime project.

And then once your fossil is out of the rock or exposed, you can clean it with a soft bristled toothbrush, favorite tool of the trade, a nice cool water rinse.

And once it's dry, you can mix Elmer's glue with water half and half, paint it on, and it keeps your fossil nice and safe.

- Wait, that's it, just glue and water?

- That's all it takes to keep it preserved, and we like doing that mixture because it's archival-safe, which means you can always get back into it if you wanted.

- That's awesome.

(electricity buzzing) We got a glimpse into what life was like in Western New York nearly 400 million years ago and had a lot of fun digging fossils in Penn Dixie.

If you're interested in learning more about fossilization, check out our Compact Science Viewer Challenge.

We have a fun experiment that you can try at home to create your own fossils.

Get all the instructions on our website and be sure to share back your results in the comments.

I'm Sarajane Gomlak-Green, and you've been watching "Compact Science."

Until next time, stay curious.

(energetic percussion music) - [Announcer] "Compact Science" is funded in part by the Joy Family Foundation and the New York State Department of Education.

- Take five, take five.

Take five.

It's an echo.

Ready, go.

- The thing about these rocks is they all look exactly the same.

- What was I talking about?

Oh.

Whoa, these rocks are way bigger than the ones over there.

- [Catherine] Yeah.

(Catherine and Sarajane laugh)