Creek Running North

About forty years ago, my uncle was plowing a field in the Finger Lakes region of New York when he found the fossil pictured here (photo taken by Craig). It was an oddity, and he brought it to his mother-in-law — my grandmother — for display on her patio. We kids always called it “the meteor” — that was probably my fault, in my role as oldest grandchild and science geek.

My aunt owns the rock now; it’s achieved “family heirloom” status. And it’s a very old heirloom indeed: it’s a 375 million year old glass sponge, one of a large number still to be found in the area around Interlaken, NY. In 1999 one of my Grandmother’s neighbors found a bunch of them, one of which made its way to the possession of a Cornell University paleontologist. A particularly slow news day got the find some national press.

I called my grandmother when I read the stories, and said “Hey Grandma, you ought to call that guy Dr. Chiment over to Cornell; I think he’d want to take a look at your ‘meteor.’” She said something like “that’s nice” and we talked about something else. Probably just as well: Chiment might have been a bit busy at the time unearthing the Chemung mastodon.

Glass sponges are strange, immobile animals with siliceous exoskeletons. Unlike other sponges, glass sponges (Hexactinellida) cannot contract in response to external stimuli, but they are far from passive organisms. They have what one could call a nervous system: different parts of the sponge communicate with one another by way of electrical impulses.

In recent years huge polar reefs of glass sponges have been found, in one notable instance when researchers attached cameras to Weddell Seals which then went about their business diving beneath Antarctic ice. How odd to be reminded, reading a book on a dangerous research expedition to an deadly ocean canyon beneath the most inhospitable climate on earth, of my uncle in shirtsleeves puzzling over a basketball-sized rock wedged against the moldboard.