Preserving fossil forest a stumper
Cairo site unsecured; vulnerable to weather and souvenir seekers
The world’s oldest forest isn’t found in a museum. It’s not in a national park. The fossilized remains are behind an out-ofthe way municipal building in Greene County.
Land surveyors discovered the area in 2009, and over the next decade, scientists uncovered fossilized roots systems from three distinct plant species. The fossils, which predate the earliest dinosaurs by 140 million years, were the oldest of their kind, pushing back by 2 million years the date when the ancestors to modern trees are believed to have developed.
The town of Cairo, which owns the land, is now struggling to find a way to preserve the discovery before the unsecured site falls victim to the elements and souvenir-seekers. But town leaders have competing visions for the future of the site, potentially compounding the problem.
World’s oldest forest
The site looked far different during the life of the Cairo forest. The climate was subtropical and the area was covered with wetlands.
The Catskills were not a group of smoothed mounds, but instead a large plateau. To the east rose a jagged mountain range, the Acadian Mountains, as tall as today’s Himalayas. To the west was a giant inland sea — the Appalachian Basin.
According to the findings of
researchers from Binghamton University and Cardiff University in England, who spent years examining the site and published their findings in Current Biology, floodwater washed over the forest 385 million years ago, pushing sediment over the trees, killing them, but preserving their roots.
The researchers completed their work in 2019, but the priceless land remained in the town of Cairo’s hands.
Cairo resident Joe Hasenkopf is the chair of a town committee formed to study the question of how to preserve the site.
“Essentially what we want to do is build an education center … a building over the entire site, with glass running over the top of (the fossils) so you can walk over the site without walking on it,” he said.
“It’s an old quarry, so there could be a parking lot for schoolchildren and college students and tourists, but also a full lab so you can have grad students actually study it, with the glass high up enough for them to get under there and study things, but low enough so it’s protected and people aren’t trying to chip little pieces out and take them home as souvenirs, which are useless.”
Fears of the fossils being damaged aren’t unfounded: Town Supervisor John Coyne said people were already coming to the site.
There were two distinct groups, Coyne said: People drawn to the science and history of the fossils, who reach out to the town for permission to take a tour. And then there are offroad vehicle enthusiasts.
“Unfortunately, we get people in our community that think they can drive their four-wheelers on the (site) and that’s OK,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important to try to get some funding to protect and to preserve it.”
Small town, big find
Cairo, with a population of 6,400 and a budget of less than $3 million, does not have enough money to secure the find. Boulders have been shoved into a ring around the part of the site to prevent vehicles from running over them, but outside funding must be sought to do anything further.
The town is pursuing two grants to help preserve the site.
The first would help pay for a series of concrete barriers that would be placed around the entire site to keep ATVs out, Hasenkopf said.
The grant was not yet secured, according to Hasenkopf, so he did not want to say where it was from, but the installation of the barriers is still a ways off. As a town undertaking, the project would have to go out to bid before the barriers could be
installed.
The second is a Community Development Block Grant for a feasibility study on constructing a permanent education center at the site. The town applied for the grant last March.
The end goal was to partner with a college on the center, Hasenkopf said, adding he had talked to several universities about the project, but “no one wants to do anything without a feasibility study.”
Preserving the site has led to infighting in the town government. When the Town Board met with their state assemblyman, Chris Tague, in March 2020, board member Jason Watts skipped the meeting, Coyne said.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t have the full board’s support — we had enough to move a resolution and things like that, but with a project like this, it would be great to have full community support.”
Watts, who is running for town supervisor — Coyne is not seeking reelection — wanted to sell the site at the time.
Watts said he has since changed his mind, because the site can’t be sold.
To sell it, the site must be appraised, but “there’s nothing to appraise it against,” Watts said — the site is globally unique and therefore priceless.
Watts said as recently as May’s Town Board meeting he wanted to sell it, according to HudsonValley360, and claimed at an earlier meeting he had received an estimate on the site of between $500,000 and $1 billion.
Any sale he might have pursued would have been to an educational institution, Watts said.
“They’re the ones that can find the funding. We can’t find the funding for this,” he said. “We could do some kind of fundraiser, some chicken BBQ or something, and then we’ll only get a couple thousand dollars to put towards this.”
Coyne was dismissive of Watts’ change of mind. “It just bothers me how people change their tune when the tide changes,’” he said.
The world’s first trees
There are three distinct species found at the Cairo site, according to the article in Current Biology . The first, Eospermatop-teris, appears about a dozen times at the site. The palm tree-like plant was first identified at a nearby site in Gilboa, which held the title of world’s oldest forest before the Cairo discovery.
The second set of root fossils, those of Archaeopteris, are more than 30 feet in diameter, consisting of 10 to 15 primary roots branching from what were probably central trunks.
The researchers also found a third, enigmatic root system at the Cairo site, according to the article.
William Stein, professor emeritus of biology at Binghamton University and one of the site’s main researchers, called this root system “a very interesting puzzle.”
The system was “immediately recognizable” as a lycopsids-like plant — but these plants were thought to not exist until tens of millions of years after the Cairo site was preserved.
Lycopsids come from the Carboniferous period, a time when the biomass of plants growing and dying was greater than the amount of clastic material — grains of rock — on the earth’s surface, causing decomposing plants to become giant peat bogs. The bogs were buried and compressed over time, creating modern-day coal deposits.
The root systems in Cairo come from the Devonian period, about 60 million years before the Carboniferous, Stein said, but more research had to be done to prove lycopsids existed so long ago.
“Anyone who understands the paleontology of plants would recognize these things as what they are,” Stein said, referring to lycopsids. “But what we can’t say is what they
definitely are — so we still call them ‘enigmatic.’” Whether this plant is a
lycopsid, the Archaeopteris specimens found at the Cairo site are the oldest discovered tree.
Stein points out another reason why securing the site is crucial: There may be other fossils to be uncovered.
“We’ve only surveyed a portion of the area,” he said. “The difficulty of it was the uncovering. It takes a lot of time to get all of the gravel off of the site and properly map it and so forth.”
“It could be nothing, it could be a lot,” Stein added, but the researcher, who spent nearly 10 years studying the site, said it was up to other scientists to take up the torch.
An economic boon?
Coyne said a science center could help everyone.
Greene County’s economy, with its skiing, hiking and resorts, depends on tourism, and a science center could benefit Cairo and surrounding towns.
“We see this as a global destination,” Coyne said. European tourists visiting this summer had already requested to tour the site.
Cairo contains the community of Round Top, which includes three allinclusive resorts. Researchers and others interested in the site could stay there, Coyne said.
“It’s just an economic benefit for the whole entire community,” he said.
Warren Hart, Greene County’s deputy administrator and the head of Greene County Economic Development, Tourism and Planning, agreed.
“An important segment of tourism is travel around history,” he said, “so (the forest) presents a very lucrative opportunity for additional travelers to the county and that translates to additional direct and indirect visitor spending.”
If the science center was developed, Hart’s office could promote it via advertising and social media “to attract people to view the fossil forest and stay here, and make it part of their itinerary,” he said. “We would work it into our regular business of attracting tourists to the county.”
However, the town must act quickly. In the age of Instagram geotagging, nothing stays secret for long, and the town also fears what the winters could do to the fossils.
“The water and the ice get underneath it, and it’s shale,” Watts said, fearing the fossilized impressions could crack like potholes.
“We’re going to lose this. I would like to hope that someone would step in and help us with something to protect it — it’s a very valuable piece of land.”
“
We’ve only surveyed a portion of the area. The difficulty of it was the uncovering. It takes a lot of time to get all of the gravel off of the site and properly map it and so forth. It could be nothing, it could be a lot.”
— William Stein, professor emeritus of biology
at Binghamton University