Massive Lindenhurst fossil discovery on display

Sometimes, one discovery can change how you see the world around you.

Take for instance, the 1957 discovery of a large fossil rock in Lindenhurst. While excavating a new home site, workers unearthed a rock so large it had to be split to get it out of the ground. Embedded in the rock were fossils of sea creatures 420 million years old, revealing a time when this entire region was under water.

The fossils included small rounded shells of lampshell brachiopods, and the long pointed shells of kronoceras and orthoceras, two types of cephalopods ("head footed"). Cephalopods are a class of animals that include today's squid.

Robert Vogel, founder of the Lake County Museum of History in Wadsworth, (a forerunner of the Lake County Discovery Museum), acquired the rock for the museum's collection. Vogel ambitiously collected artifacts to represent different eras in Lake County's past, and the fossil rock was quite a coup, since it attracted national and international attention.

American interest in fossils and dinosaur bones began in the early 1800s. As a young nation, the United States struggled with its national identity. With no ancient history or man-made monuments to brag about, it took exploration of the continent to reveal a wealth of "larger than life" natural wonders: the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, giant Sequoia and Redwood trees, and dinosaur fossils.

These discoveries inspired giant-sized legends such as Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. The discovery of the 420-million year old sea creature fossils put Lake County on the "larger than life" map.

The fossil rock will be prominently displayed in a new exhibit, "Prehistoric Lake County," at the Lake County Discovery Museum open through Aug. 30, 2009.

Another exciting component of the exhibit will be the fleshed-out skull of a Dryptosaurus. The Dryptosaurus was a primitive, meat-eating tyrannosaur that lived in eastern North America during the Late Cretaceous period about 99 to 65 million years ago, and is believed to have migrated across the Midwest.

An incomplete skeleton was first discovered in 1866 in a New Jersey quarry. Although artists have done renderings of the dinosaur, this is the first time it has been "fleshed out." Creating this re-creation will be Tyler Keillor, a paleo-artist with the University of Chicago, who represents the cutting edge in three-dimensional sculpted reconstructions of dinosaurs.

The exhibition will follow a loose geological timeline, and examine the large gap in Lake County's fossil record, caused by glacier movement of the last Ice Age some 12,000 years ago.