THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - Tiktaalik

How would you like to be the person who made a truly important scientific discovery, right here in the Catskills? You might think that you definitely need an advanced degree in some science to do that, wouldn’t you? That’s the way science should work, isn’t it? After all Alexander Flemming had a degree in medical science before he discovered penicillin. But no, that’s not the case. With what we have in mind you simply have to be fit enough to do some serious hiking in our Catskills. You need some good eyesight and motivation. Mostly you need some very good luck. The two of us cannot provide you with any of those. But there is something else; it is very helpful if you know about something that needs to be discovered. We can give you some very good advice on that.

Most of our Catskills’ stratified rocks date back to origins in an ancient delta – the Catskill Delta. Think about that as you hike or drive through these landscapes. To your left and right are shales and sandstones that had been originally deposited as the sediments of streams, ponds, and swamps that, about 385 million years ago, littered the surface of that delta. And there should be the fossils of the plants and animals that once lived in these habitats.

That gets us to our potential discovery. The Devonian Time Period was an important chapter in the history of the evolution of life onto the land. That was when trees first evolved and forests first spread out across the landscapes. Forest ecology itself was evolving and, within it were the first land animals. Who were they? Logic tells us that they must have been amphibians, by far the most primitive of tetrapods, four-legged, land-dwelling animals. Paleontologists have long speculated that the fossils of very primitive tetrapods might be found in the Catskills. But somebody has to do the finding; why not you?

First things first; you need to know what to look for. That gets us to our photo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. That is a fossil creature called Tiktaalik. That’s a fish that has been found as a fossil in the Arctic of Canada from the late Devonian Time Period. It is a strange animal. With that wide flat, triangular skull, it does not look much like a fish but that is what it is. It also has stiffened and strong bones in its fins. It’s thought that these allowed it to prop itself up on the floor of the rivers and ponds where it lived. Perhaps it even managed a form of walking. That makes it what we call a transitional form; it lies in between swimming fish and walking land animals. Paleontologists speculate that this was the first step (pun not intended) in the direction of walking out onto the land.

So far, this creature has only been found from those late Devonian Arctic 

strata but it’s fair to think there might have been similar, but older animals living on our middle Devonian Catskill Delta. Those wouldn’t be amphibians, but they would be the ancestors of the ancestors of the earliest amphibians. If so, then perhaps someday you might be climbing up some Catskills mountain when you spot one of those triangular skulls. They could be up to a foot long so they would be easy to see. If you do, then we would like it if you let us know. 

We would REALLY like that.

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