Family Travel

Unearth the Unexpected at Penn Dixie Fossil Park & Nature Preserve

- L.A. SOKOLOWSKI

Does time travel exist? Maybe.

Take Exit 56 on the New York State Thruway and, in a few short minutes, you can enter what remains of a 380 million-year-old undersea world of Devonian brachiopod, crinoid and trilobite fossils waiting to be found at Penn Dixie Fossil Park and Nature Preserve in Blasdell south of Buffalo.

Celebrating its 28th season, the 54-acre Penn Dixie Fossil Park (site of a former cement quarry that exposed multiple ancient layers of rock) earned the Guinness World Record™ in 2018 for World's Largest Fossil Dig (905 participating diggers) and a 2011 scientific study (published by the Geological Society of America, and authored by Dr. Renee M. Clary, Dept. of Geosciences, Mississippi State University and Dr. James Wandersee, Dept. of Educational Theory, Policy and Practice at Louisiana State University) ranked it the #1 fossil park in the U.S.

"Our trained staff and volunteers can guide your journey through the layers in search of fossils. Penn Dixie is famous for its trilobites - extinct arthropods that dominated the seas for 270 million years - but other fossils are just as plentiful if you know where to look.

"Visitors are welcome to keep any fossils they find, though we do ask for photos of really cool specimens, and offer help with collecting, tools for digging, and cards to help identify your fossils," says Sydney Mecca, marketing and development coordinator for Hamburg Natural History Society/Penn Dixie.

POTATO BUGS OF THE OCEAN 

What makes Penn Dixie the perfect family trip?

Its hands-on history recounts how North America and Europe, while still a single submerged land mass south of the equator, hosted reef ecosystems replete with brachiopods, horn corals, and those skittering and scavenging "potato bugs of the ocean, trilobites.