Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2010
A LONG HISTORY OF COLLECTING
Extraordinary assemblages of echinoderms and trilobites are preserved in the Rochester Shale of western New York and southern Ontario, Canada. Aside from being one of the first formally designated formations in North America, the Rochester Shale is also noted for its exceptional fossils. Outcrops around the city of Lockport, New York, were famous for their well-preserved crinoids and cystoids as early as the 1820s. Excavations were carried out by the Lockport physician Eugene Ringueberg (1890) and later continued by Frederick Braun (1911, 1914), who was employed by Frank Springer. The specimens are now housed in the Springer Collection of the National Museum of Natural History. These sites have produced an astonishing array of intact crinoids, cystoids, asterozoans and edrioasteroids. More recent study by the authors of this chapter at a commercial quarry run by the Caleb family in Middleport, New York (Fig. 101), and several other localities continues to produce rare echinoderms and spectacular trilobites.
The Rochester Shale, Upper Clinton Group (Wenlockian), crops out along the east–west-trending Niagara Escarpment in western New York and southern Ontario and is composed of Middle Silurian age (Late Sheinwoodian to Homerian) calcareous shales and limestones, deposited about 415 million years before present (Fig. 101). The major intervals of echinoderm Lagerstätten (Homocrinus Beds) occur in the Lower Rochester Shale or Lewiston Member, with only a few sporadic occurrences of well-preserved fossils noted in the upper, dominantly unfossiliferous Burleigh Hill Member (Brett & Eckert 1982; Brett 1983; Taylor & Brett 1996; Brett & Taylor 1997).
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