20 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



Contributory to the foregoing studies are the important researches 

 which pertain to the past life of the earth. In this department 

 advances of high significance have been made. 



Fossil trees of Gilboa. In the Devonian period of our development 

 the continental land lay off to the east of the Catskills, extending 

 far into the present area of the Atlantic. The present Catskill 

 mountains were then the low shore of a shallow sea lying at the west, 

 covering the interior of the State and country and receiving the heavy 

 drainage from the eastern land mass. That lost land of the east 

 was wooded with a primitive vegetation, and its westerly rivers 

 brought down the debris of this woodland and scattered its remains, 

 its stems and leaves, through its vast delta and shore deposits. It 

 is the lower or earlier part of the Catskill terrane that, shows most 

 abundantly this close intermixture of terrestrial and marine condi- 

 tions; the earliest of the fresh-water mussels which burrowed in the 

 sands of the river mouths; the forest growth carried at times by the 

 river and coast currents far out among the marine deposits and 

 mingled with the animal remains of the salt sea. Perhaps nowhere 

 else in the known records of the rocks is there such an extraordinary 

 accumulation of the land flora of this geological age as in these sands 

 which underlie the slopes of the Catskills westward into the Allegany 

 plateau. Along the unstable coasts of those days a forest growth 

 of trees of most primitive character, still not understood, grew thick 

 and to notable heights of 20 to 40 feet, spreading down to the water's 

 edge. By occasional submergence of the coast these trees were 

 carried beneath the water and the sediments piled up about their 

 bases. The rising of the land again lifted the coastal forest out 

 of the sea. Thus we have found these remains of the buried forests, 

 standing as erect stumps in the rock beds, just as they grew. The 

 first evidence we had of these most ancient of all forests was developed 

 some 50 years ago by a heavy washout in the upper reaches of the 

 Schoharie creek at Gilboa. Nothing more was heard of them 

 until 1897 when Prosser of this survey reported finding, 

 at a higher horizon, several small specimens lying loose 

 by the roadside at the Manorkill falls over a mile above Gilboa. 

 With the beginning of the present operations at Gilboa and vicinity 

 in the construction of a dam for a reservoir of Schoharie water to 

 swell the supply for the New York City water system, it was deemed 

 advisable again to visit the region in the hope of finding more 

 specimens and to determine whether the localities where the forest 

 stumps had been found would be under water as a result of the 

 creation of the artificial lake. In 1920 no specimens were found 



