Join us for a virtual tour of the New York City area’s prehistoric timeline, covering over 500 million years, including vibrant seafloors teaming with bizarre fauna, burning forests of massive tree ferns, muddy floodplains traversed by packs of raptor-like carnivores, maybe even a view of the first creature to crawl on land. A New Yorker’s journey into this past often begins and ends within a small corner of the Hall of Vertebrate Origins at the American Museum of Natural History, but nothing beats the thrill of finding a fossil knowing that you are the first to set eyes on it since it was buried in mud eons ago. Fortunately, there’s a wealth of opportunities to find fossils beyond Central Park West, even some within reach of a subway ride!
In this class you’ll visit (virtually) several points of interest across Greater New York’s prehistory that provide a narrow snapshot of ancient life on Earth, preserved and exposed through very specific and unlikely geologic processes. You’ll learn the locations of several fossil hunting sites within a day trip of NYC, most of which require nothing more than a keen eye and roomy pockets.