Paleontology in West Virginia
The Paleozoic seas of West Virginia were home to creatures like corals, eurypterids, graptolites, nautiloids, and trilobites at varying times.
West Virginia was never the site of glacial activity during the Ice Age, but the state was home to creatures like mammoths, mastodons, and giant ground sloths.
One local ground sloth, Megalonyx jeffersonii, was subject to the scholarly investigations of Thomas Jefferson, who misinterpreted the large-clawed remains as belonging to a lion-like predator.
About 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period, West Virginia was almost completely covered by a shallow sea.
[2] Silurian evaporites left by extremely salty seawater during a dry climate preserved West Virginian eurypterids.
[6] Other Silurian life forms of West Virginia included nautiloids with straight shells and an abundance of ostracods.
[2] During the transition from the Silurian to Early Devonian West Virginia was home to corals, whose remains fossilized by silicification.
[8] The Carboniferous coal swamps of West Virginia were dominated by ground pines of the genus Lepidodendron that could reach more than 100 feet in height.
[3] During the Ice Age the glaciers never extended sufficiently far south to cross into West Virginia, but during their southernmost extent they nearly approached the northern panhandle.
[15][16] Near the end of the 18th century, workers operating saltpeter vats in a cave then considered part of Greenbrier County, Virginia discovered fossil limb bones.
[18] Such discoveries frequently occur when the excavation of coal mines removes the rock underlying the trackway, leaving it exposed on the tunnel's ceiling.
[18] More recently, in 1990, Frederick A. Sundberg, and other colleagues erected the new ichnospecies Hylopus hamesi to hold fossil amphibian footprints from the latest Mississippian Bluefield Formation.
Based on the anatomy of the foot responsible for the traces, the researchers concluded that the tracks were left by anthracosaurs, possibly the species Protergyrinus scheelei, which was also known from West Virginia's Mississippian deposits.
Additional details gleaned from descriptions of Haynes Cave taken from the correspondence of subsequent owner, Tristram Patton, add more evidence that it was the true site of the discovery of Megalonyx.
