Left to right: Author’s fossils; rock face along roaside; trilobite or crinoid?; moving water carves through rock at the Williamsport Falls
(To see larger views of the fossils and rocks, click on each image. They might be slow loading, they are high-resolution files.
I don't have a hi-res photo of the Falls, this file came from Wikipedia. )

by Jeannie Kane Byers
Editor, WanderWarrenCounty.com

As the daughter of a civil engineer who built roads and bridges in west-central Indiana, I was raised on rocks. My dad was a patient instructor, not teachy. He would just show me an enticing bit of stone and tell me one interesting detail about it. Being a curious kid, I would launch into questions...what is it? where did you find it? Then I would be off on my own search. Dad had a mixed collection, everything from Indian beads (crinoids), arrowheads and fools gold to geodes, stacked here and there in boxes, on shelves and in drawers, occasionally in his pants pocket. I have my own collection now, gathered from stream beds, gravel roads, parking lots, friends’ yards and trails at an apartment complex...you get the picture. I’m a closet rock hound.

Shortly after moving back to Warren County, I was out on a drive through the Pine Creek valley and stopped to take a look at a tall outcropping of rock that looked promising. I walked along the roadside and soon tripped over what was left of a deer carcass. I took a closer look, still being a curious kid at heart, and spotted an interesting piece of rock just a foot or so from the skull. I pulled it out from the weeds and...whoa, baby, it was a fossil over 10" long. There was another piece nearby that was similar enought to be from the same life-form, whatever that was. And there were two much smaller pieces with a different surface pattern and shape. On closer examination I saw that the larger pieces had imprints in their surfaces that closely resembled the pattern on the surface of the little chunks. I’ve been stopping by there on a regular basis, just to see what else might drop from the rock face into my lap.

Warren County is a storehouse of ancient remains. Just this week I was driving around the gravel roads of the southwestern part of the county, and stopped to take a look where the county highway department had recently widened the road. The grader cut into the roadside bank, exposing rock material that hadn’t seen the light of day for thousands of years. In that spot I picked up a handful of slate bits that caught my interest. Three of them I suspect contain portions trilobite fossils, but I haven’t confirmed that yet; could just be wishful thinking!

So where does this stuff come from and why do we keep driving and stepping on it all over Warren County? If you attended fourth grade in Indiana, you probably studied the geology and natural history of our state. You learned how it was covered with a great inland sea for millions of years, building up layer upon layer of plant and animal remains. Those remains became packed in mud and silt that, from time and pressure, became the bedrock of the Midwest, hundreds of feet thick and laced with fossils.

In our comparitively recent history, Indiana off and on covered by an ice sheet over a mile thick. For thousands of years that ice melted and retreated, refroze and advanced, moving with it vast amounts of dirt, rock and debris. As the glacier made its final retreat, it left behind the rich soil, often peppered with “fieldstone” from Canada, Wisconsin and Michigan, that Indiana is known for. It also left us a network of valleys, gorges and bluffs that cut through the debris into the bedrock underneath as the meltwater poured off the glacial mass. For those readers who have visited Warren County, you know that yes, some of the county is flat and covered with corn and soybean fields. You also know that we have some beautiful rolling hills, dramatic scenery and fascinating features like the Pot Holes at Fall Creek Gorge and Black Rock on the Wabash River. As these features were created by the glacial melt, they dropped slabs of sandstone, slate and shale into the waters below. These stones carried with them the remains of the sea creatures that once inhabited our home.

Take a hike along a local creek or stop by the Williamsport Falls, and you can see for yourself how powerful those waters were, and how they were able to “dig up” those fossil remains just to drop them at our feet. Take a look at a fossil and you’ll get a sense of how our home’s long history has created the Warren County we know today.

And watch out for poison ivy!

Jeannie B

If you would like to learn more about our home, visit the Natural History of Indiana web site. There you will find information about the glaciation, flora and fauna that are native to the state, how our environment was formed and how we’re living in it today. Check out the DVD containing all four episodes of the documentary at the Williamsport-Washington Township Public Library. After I return it, of course.