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THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS: A Devonian Sea Floor

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By ROBERT and JOHANNA TITUS

We know, we know, we have heard you. You hate shopping at the malls, and you refuse to shop online. The two of us are a lot like that too. But you have the perfect solution to your problems. You have all those fine shops on Warren Street in Hudson. We can only go once or twice a year, but we do enjoy it. This year we have been window shopping for geological antiquities, and we have had some real success.

Last time we found some 50-million-year-old antiques, fossil fish from way out west. This time we found our way into Red Chair Antiques and did even better. We identified ourselves as geologists who were on the hunt, and we were led to a most remarkable table. It had one of the finest stone tabletops that we have ever seen. Most people would call it marble but we saw it as limestone, and real picturesque limestone.

Looking closely, we saw some fossils. They were invertebrate animals called sea lilies (aka crinoids). Actually, they were fragments of these animals, segments of the original skeletons. See the center of our second illustration. Also, there were fossils of reef building animals called stromatoporoids. See the lower right of that same photo. We were looking at a rich, but very ancient seafloor ecology from about 400-million years ago. See our third photo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. This table was also from France; it had been imported. It’s a gem. If you buy it, write to us and we will tell you more.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”

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