Paleontology in New Hampshire

[1] During the early Paleozoic, New Hampshire was covered by a warm, shallow sea that would come to be inhabited by creatures like brachiopods, bryozoans, corals, crinoids, and trilobites.

New Hampshire fossils had attracted scientific attention by the late 1800s when C. H. Hitchcock reported local invertebrate remains preserved near Littleton.

However, it can be easily inferred based on data from the neighboring states that New Hampshire was probably covered by a warm shallow sea.

[1] These all left their remains in what is now a stratigraphic unit called the Fitch Formation at a site 1.7 miles (2.7 km) northwest of Littleton.

Two miles northeast of Lisbon crinoid columnals and chain corals can be found preserved in marble on the eastern bank of the Ammonoosuc River.

As this uplift proceeded local sediments started eroding away rather than being deposited, so New Hampshire has no rock record from this interval of time in which fossils might have been preserved.

[6] In 1873, C. H. Hitchcock first reported the Silurian brachiopods, bryozoans, corals, crinoids, and trilobites discovered 1.7 miles (2.7 km) northwest of Littleton to the scientific literature.

[4] Several decades later, in 1958, geologists made a fossil discovery in the far western region of New Hampshire that they regarded as wholly "unique".

The rocks preserving this unusual find consist of a unit of "coarsely crystalline calcite in a matrix of quartz, hornblende, and other minerals" called the Clough Formation.