Story reprinted from    with permission

Sunday, December 9, 2001
Mike Lafferty, Dispatch Staff Reporter

GRANVILLE, Ohio -- For a few brief hours, Denison University students and faculty and staff members gingerly stepped back 350 million years.

They did so while dodging dump trucks in a mammoth hole 60 feet deep and 300 feet wide in the side of College Hill, where the university will construct new classrooms, offices, a parking garage and a grassy commons.

The invitation to comb the rocks for fossils was a now-or-never deal; the next phase of the $60 million project -- pouring concrete pilings and foundations -- must begin to keep the project on schedule for completion in 2003.

Joe Kennedy didn't hesitate to join the tour.

"This has been the best show in town all fall," said Kennedy, who coordinates tutoring and mentoring at Denison when he isn't gawking at the yellow construction equipment maneuvering far below in the crater.

"I wouldn't miss this for anything. I've been following it since the first spoonful."

The area was cleared of trees in the spring before earthmovers were brought in to prepare the site for the concrete that will support the new buildings.

For months, staff members and students have watched the work from the top of the hole, dubbed "Slayter Crater" for its proximity to Slayter Hall.

Then came the invitation to poke around in what some would consider a geological playground. Three tours were scheduled over two days.

Ken Bork, a geology professor, was excited, to say the least.

Although he has examined similar rocks and fossils scattered throughout the area in Licking County, Bork said the crater collection is awe-inspiring.

Before the final tour began late Wednesday afternoon, Bork briefly explained that the Bayer Sandstone layer they would see was formed by the westward erosion of the Appalachian Plateau.

"Continents are colliding, and as they collide they build mountains up, and as they build up they shed the debris out," Bork said.

The debris was deposited at the bottom of a shallow saltwater sea that covered the area, he said.

Once in the crater, visitors expecting to see dinosaur fossils were disappointed.

"This stuff is 100 million years before the dinosaurs," Bork said.

He pointed out countless fossils of tiny marine invertebrates called crinoids -- ancient relatives of starfish -- and brachiopods, tiny tentacled creatures covered with a bivalve shell.

When they died, their bodies fell to the bottom of the sea and were entombed in the sediment.

Explorers, including some townspeople, poked and chipped, dug and puzzled over the rocks. Some brought samples to Bork and other Denison geologists for explanation.

"You have a nice death assemblage there," Bork told Diane Pyle, who works in the university's finance office.

Art Chonko, the university's physical plant director, stopped the tour when the first of hundreds of concrete trucks arrived awhile later.

Pyle looked somewhat sad.

"This is fascinating," she said. "I'm glad to get down here. I'm going to hate to see it covered over."

For press inquiries:

Name

Barbara Stambaugh

Position Title

Director, Media Relations

Primary Email

stambaughb@denison.edu

Business Phone

(740) 587-8575