Prehistoric Geology & Fossils
During the Ice Age, or Pleistocene, great glaciers covered all of Rhode Island. They carried away or buried many of the sediments and sedimentary rocks that might have covered the state. The hard metamorphic rocks that are now exposed harbor few fossils.
Yet the fossils that are found in Rhode Island tell amazing stories. Trilobites are hard-shelled animals that lived in ancient seas long before dinosaurs lived on land. Trilobites are common fossils in many states across the nation.
Rhode Island boasts three trilobites which might be considered ordinary anywhere else. In Rhode Island they are very special because they are found together. The same three trilobites are also found together in parts of Africa. This indicates that North America and Africa were once joined together. In fact, Rhode Island itself is thought to represent a piece of Africa that was torn away when the continents separated. If the continents had drifted apart hundreds of millions of years later, Rhode Island might today be populated by lions, zebras and wildebeest!
The continents were torn apart more than 570 million years ago during the Precambrian Period. This was before the trilobites in Rhode Island’s rocks had even evolved. Scientists believe the trilobites evolved soon after the continents were divided and lived in the ancient sea that lie between them.
But most Rhode Island fossils represent the “Coal Age.” These fossils are found in the Narragansett Basin, which occupies most of eastern Rhode Island. Coal mining has uncovered about 300 species of plants about 305 to 290 million years old.
Found with the plants in some of the older rocks are insects. These include about a dozen different kinds of cockroaches. With their hard shells and flattened form, cockroaches can almost be imagined to be land-dwelling trilobites. Who could have imagined that these prehistoric insects would one day be common pests in people’s homes?
Besides insects, there are also fossils of spiders and of amphibian tracks. These fossils tell us what Rhode Island was like during the Pennsylvanian Period, which belongs to the Coal Age. It was warm and moist, perhaps similar to Florida today, with lush forests of trees and ferns.
Fossils in Our Lives
Coal is no longer mined in the Narragansett Basin, much of which has been reclaimed by the sea.
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