Rare Fossil Identified

As Jay Schneiderman walked with a group of Ross School students along the oceanside cliffs in Montauk last spring, he had no idea that the unusual rock he'd found might turn out to be a fossil of an extinct tropical plant, perhaps as much as 65 to 120 million years old.

Mr. Schneiderman, who lives in Montauk, was teaching sixth-graders from the private East Hampton school about erosion and showing them how rain "carves out these incredible shapes in the cliffs there," he recalled this week.

He was pointing out evidence of erosion all around them, even on rocks worn smooth by the sea, when "all of a sudden I looked down at a rock that didn't look like the others . . . . It was quite heavy. It was hard for me to pick up."

Impression Of A Leaf

He lugged the 50-pound object up to the school bus and used a screwdriver to break it open along a thin fracture line.

The surface bore impressions from shells and debris, indicating the possibility of the presence of a fossil, Mr. Schneiderman said, but he wasn't expecting what he found inside: a "beautifully intact impression of a leaf." It turned out to be possibly as old or older than a dinosaur.

Photographs of the fossil - of a cycadeoid leaf about 4 inches long and 1/2- inch wide - were eventually sent to Paul Olsen, a paleozoologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in Palisades, N.Y., who made the identification.

Now Extinct

Though he cautioned that his expertise was not in botany and said a paleobotanist should verify the plant, Dr. Olsen said this week "it was fairly easy" to identify the fossil.

Cycadeoids were tropical, nonflowering plants with very firm green leaves extending from a short trunk, like palm trees, though much smaller. Superficially, they looked like today's cycads, which include not uncommon house plants such as zamia and cycas, said Dr. Olsen.

He based his opinion on the appearance of the extinct plant, the appearance of the rock it was fossilized in, and the place where it was found, said Dr. Olsen, a professor of earth and environmental science at Columbia.

Cycadeoids were found in tropical areas, which, during the cretaceous period 65 to 120 million years ago, included much of North America.

That was before the Ice Age. The fossilized plant could not be less than 35 million years old, Dr. Olsen said, since only then did North America begin to cool off.

"This plant would have seen dinosaurs roaming," said the scientist.

Though it wound up in Montauk, the plant probably originated to the north and was carried along with the southward advance of glaciers as ice caps spread. The glaciers carried rock and other materials across the bed of Long Island Sound that eventually formed Long Island itself.

Shape And Color

The shape of the rock and its brownish-red color indicate that it is unlikely to be of another age group, Dr. Olsen said.

From the photographs he saw, the rock appeared to be silt stone - nothing unusual, said Dr. Olsen, but probably part of the big delta system that entered the Atlantic at the time.

It will take a specialist to say with certainty just what Mr. Schneiderman's fossil is, which will determine just how significant a find it may be. In any event, said Dr. Olsen, it is the only object of its kind he knows of from eastern Long Island.

Andrew Greller, a Queens College biology professor who is currently preparing an exhibit of Long Island cretaceous fossils, agreed that a botanist would have to study the find to know for sure what it is.

But if it is what Dr. Olsen believes it to be, a fossil from the cretaceous period, "then it's a rare find for Long Island," said Dr. Greller.

Larry Penny, director of East Hampton Town's Natural Resources Department, was the first person with scientific expertise to look at Mr. Schneiderman's fossil. He too identified it as a cycadeoid.

The Oldest Ever

Mr. Penny and others said fossilized wood and whalebones have been found around Amagansett and Montauk before, but no one remembers anything matching the potential age of Mr. Schneiderman's find.

Unless a plant specialist deems the fossil to be a previously unidentified plant, it will not add to the body of paleontologic knowledge, Dr. Olsen said.

It will, however, reinforce what is known, he said, and, more important, point to the possibility of other fossils, particularly of animal remains, in the general area.

"I'm sure there will be other fossils," Dr. Olsen said this week. "I'm certain."

Fossil Will Stay Here

However, he said there was no reason to believe more fossils would turn up where Mr. Schneiderman found his (a location The Star agreed not to disclose).

"It could be in a sand pit, or a house excavation," Dr. Olsen said, "not necessarily on the beach."

Mr. Schneiderman, who teaches science, math, and music at Ross and is the chairman of the Town Zoning Board of Appeals, plans to donate half of the fossil to a museum - possibly Yale University's Peabody Museum - but said the other half would stay on the South Fork, perhaps in a local nature center.

In the past, he has advocated building such a center at the county park in Montauk. "That I think would be the best spot," he said this week.