The Chazy Reef on Isle La Motte
A Walk Through Time
2. The Middle Reef Layers
In the Fisk Quarry Preserve the middle aged layers of reef are dramatically exposed in the quarry walls. Here the primary reef builders were stromatoporoids, large cabbage like animals who were ancestors of the sponge.
3. The Youngest Reef Layers
A great reef city.
Rock mounds in the pastures and woods of the Goodsell Ridge contain the youngest reef layers with richly complex and diverse assemblages of fauna which themselves represent successive time periods. These layers represent the world’s earliest appearance of a complex reef-building community with the framebuilders consisting of a diverse community of stromatoporoids, lithistid sponges, tabulate corals and bryozoa.
1. The Oldest Reef Layers:
Here the reef is a simple village.
On the southern tip of Isle La Motte the fossil record shows the reef builders to be one or two species of simple branching organisms called bryozoa, a colonial marine organism predating coral in its arrival on the Ordovician scene.
The bedrock of the southern third of Isle La Motte contains the several million year evolutionary history of the oldest known biologically diverse reef in the world This bedrock is tilted so that layers of the reef - from oldest to youngest - are lying on a horizontal plane. Walking from south to north, one literally walks through the successive geologic eras of reef history on Isle La Motte....literally a walk through time.
