NYS Museum exhibit on Ancient Life in New York State
Reconstruction of Late Cambrian shallow carbonate shoreline with stromatolites (bacterial mud mounds).
Climachtichnites is a trace fossil made by a large animal with fleshy walking appendages. These trackways are only found in Late Cambrian shoreline sandstones. The identity of the trackmaker remains a mystery.
Cambrian Climachtichnites trackways across a rippled sandflat, Potsdam Sandstone.
Reconstruction of Ordovician pelagic life, including a large orthoconic nautiloid, seaweed, graptolites, and gastropods.
Fossil eurypterid (sea scorpion) and illustration from James Hall's Paleontology of New York.
Eurypteris remipes - the state fossil of New York! Late Silurian Bertie Dolostone.
Reconstruction of a Silurian sea scorpion or eurypterid.
Reconstruction of a large eurypterid from the Late Silurian of New York.
Mass accumulation of large pentamerid brachiopods from the Silurian of New York.
Large slab of the Middle Devonian Cherry Valley limestone with abundant nautiloid and ammonoid cephalopods.
Closeup of Cherry Valley limestone cephalopods showing coiled ammonoids and orthoconic and cyrtoconic nautiloids.
Ammonoids from the Middle Devonian Cherry Valley limestone.
Large orthoconic (straight-shelled) nautiloid in the Cherry Valley limestone.
Mass accumulation of fossil glass sponges (Hydnoceros) from the Middle Devonian of New York.
Closeup of Hydnoceros sponges showing typical basket-like framework of glass sponges.
Hydnoceros - Devonian basket sponge.
Seastars from the Middle Devonian of New York.
Seastars preserved in Devonian Hamilton Group rocks.
Closeup of Devonaster - a seastar from the Middle Devonian.
Fossil tree stump from an Upper Devonian forest found preserved in the Catskill Mountains near Gilboa, New York.
Devonian fossil plants, including Archaeopteris, the oldest seed-bearing plant known.
Close up of Archaeopteris, a Late Devonian seed-bearing plant.
Dinosaur trackways (a species known as "Grallator") from the Upper Triassic Stockton Formation, Rockland Co., NY.
Cast of articulated Coelophysis skeleton - the purported trackmaker responsible for the small three-toed trackways (Grallator) found in Upper Triassic rocks in the Newark Basin.
Reconstruction of Coelophysis - a Late Triassic carnivorous dinosaur.
Closeup of the head of Coelophysis.
The Cohoes Mastodont. Mastodonts were forest-dwelling elephants that lived in North America until the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago.
The Cohoes Mastodont.
Underground stream outlet along escarpment at John Boyd Thatcher State Park. The Helderberg limestones are riddled with caverns and underground streams - an example of karst topography typical of a region underlain by carbonate bedrock.