Paleontology in New York
Little is known about Mesozoic New York, but during the early part of the era, carnivorous dinosaurs left behind footprints which later fossilized.
However, evidence indicates that during the Ice Age the state was worked over by glaciers, and home to creatures like giant beavers and mammoths.
[2] The terrestrial Ordovician rocks of New York record the process of a coastal plain encroaching westward into an inland sea from a chain of mountains rising along the easternmost edge of North America.
As the sea level lowered the waters covering the western part of the state became shallower and the salt more highly concentrated.
[1] Common marine invertebrates of Devonian New York included brachiopods, Rugose and Tabulate corals, crinoids, bryozoans, squid (cephalopods), and trilobites.
The fishes of Devonian New York included small arthrodires, chimaeroids, crossopterygians, lungfishes, and ostracoderms.
[1] Nevertheless, evidence suggests that during the Triassic the geologic forces responsible for the breakup of Pangaea formed rift basins in the state.
[2] Dinosaur footprints of the ichnogenus Grallator were left behind to fossilize in what would become Nyack Beach State Park in Rockland County during the Late Triassic.
[2] Like the Mesozoic, strata dating back to the early portion of the Cenozoic are largely absent from New York's rock record.
The local people adhering to this interpretation of the ancient remains likely included the Abenakis, Algonquin Mohicans, Pequots and others who spoke the Iroquois language.
They called the ancient giants Weetucks or Maushops, which were believed to have lived eight to ten generations ago.
According to Cotton Mather, there was universal consensus among the Native Americans living within a hundred miles of the Claverack discovery that the remains were verification of their tales of ancient giants.
[13] Mather himself attributed the bones to wicked giants that drowned in Noah's Flood in a work written the next year.
The Warren Mastodon, as the specimen became known, was so well preserved that Dr. Asa Gray was able to analyze its stomach contents and help reconstruct the flora of the ancient forest it fed in.
[7] More recent was the 1984 designation of the Silurian sea scorpion Eurypterus remipes as the New York state fossil.
