Geoscience Reference
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State Legislature act of 1905 enabled the
acquisition of lands and building of dams
and aqueducts for the purpose of
supplying water to the city. In 1917,
construction started on a dam across
Schoharie Creek at the Gilboa gorge. The
reservoir drowned the former settlement
of Gilboa, and 935 bodies had to be
reinterred from its cemetery (Hernick,
1996). The water supply for agriculture,
the fishing, and the tourist trade all
suffered as river levels dropped.
Paradoxically, it was the threat of loss of
the Gilboa fossil forests under the new
reservoir that provoked the New York
State Geological Survey in 1920 into
conducting a field survey to locate and
rescue any important plant fossils. An
outstanding discovery of fossil stumps was
made at the lower Manorkill Falls, where
Prosser had found them in 1895, and
Rudolf Ruedemann discovered some fossil
'seeds' (actually, sporangia, see later) at
the falls during the same trip. Ruedemann
(1926, pp. 510-511) gave an interesting
account of the finding of the 'seeds': “One
night, as we were trying our luck at fishing
in the Schoharie Creek, both my
companions went out on a bowlder in the
river while I remained on shore to enjoy
the beautiful scenery of the Manorkill
Falls just behind us. While I was sitting
there, I noticed a large slab of black shale
sticking out of the river sand. It was
covered with beautiful clusters of fern
seeds. I seized it, and yelled to the
fishermen. We carried the precious slab
home. When we arrived, my companions
discovered they had left their pipes and
tobacco on the bowlder and blamed me
for having made too much 'fuss' over my
find. But it was worth it, for these are the
oldest seeds known at present. There was
no doubt that the bed from which the slab
came was near by, and we found it the next
morning not a hundred feet away at the
foot of the cliff in the corner between the
Manorkill and Schoharie creeks. From it
we secured a fine collection of seeds. Miss
Goldring went out later and obtained the
spore-bearing organs, the foliage and
rootlets. The locality will be lost to science
when the reservoir is filled.”
The 'Miss Goldring' referred to by
Ruedemann was Winifred Goldring who
was responsible for an important
contribution to the paleontology of New
York through the first half of the 20th
century, eventually becoming State
Paleontologist after John M Clarke.
Goldring had a good knowledge of botany,
so the Gilboa stumps were an ideal project
for her to embark upon, after finishing
her major monograph on the Devonian
crinoids of New York. She was responsible
for the display of the Gilboa fossil forest in
the New York State Museum in Albany.
Goldring had much more plant material
on which to work than did Dawson. She
hypothesized that the various parts
(leaves, seeds, stumps) belonged to the
same plant, which she surmised was a seed-
fern (pteridosperm), not a tree fern. She
produced a reconstruction of the plant as
a tree-sized seed-fern, and called it
Eospermatopteris
. In addition to the fossil
forest exhibit in Albany, Miss Goldring
arranged for some stumps to be placed as a
public exhibit by the road outside
Riverside Quarry, which had produced the
greatest number (and biggest at 3.3 m [11
ft] in circumference) of stumps. The
quarry has long since been filled in, but
the Gilboa Historical Society has relocated
the original stumps to near the town hall
and created a new exhibit (
89
).
German paleobotanists Richard Kräusel
and Herman Weyland went to the
United States and Canada to study
Devonian plant fossils, including the
Gilboa
Eospermatopteris
. These authors
compared Gilboa
Eospermatopteris
to
similar plants from Germany. They
concluded that the supposed 'seeds' were
actually spore-bearing organs (sporangia)
and the plant was not a seed-fern
but belonged to a group known as
progymnosperms, similar to the German
plant that Kräusel and Weyland (1923)
called
Aneurophyton
. More recently,
Serlin and Banks (1978) looked again at
Aneurophyton
, specimens of which they
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