Charles Ver Straeten, curator of sedimentary rocks at the New York State Museum, stood on the crumbling stone of an old quarry when his eye caught a pattern. In 2009, he was scouting out the area with colleagues Linda Van Aller Hernick and Frank Mannolini for a potential field trip — nothing unusual, since paleobotanists have been visiting the former highway department property since the 1960s. The famous Gilboa fossil forest, discovered a century ago, is a short jaunt up the road from Cairo, New York. Something seemed out of place: His trained eye spied wandering gutters in the stone, a feature common to marine rocks. But even in the Middle Devonian period, the swathe of land that one day became Cairo wasn’t at the bottom of the sea. 'Archaeopteris' root system at the Cairo foss...
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