The Cincinnati Anticline

There's a natural formation known (primarily to geologists) as the Cincinnati Anticline. It's a vast oval-shaped area that extends over the three-way intersection of Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, and extending well into central Kentucky. The oval's Eastern side runs along Cincinnati, hence the name.

According to the book Elements of Geology by William Harmon Norton, the anticline is of great interest to those studying the fossil record. The anticline is almost entirely composed of Ordovician strata, and the Silurian and Devonian decrease as they approach it. Norton takes this to mean that the anticline is "an island upwarped from the sea at the close of the Ordovician or shortly thereafter."

Supposedly it's this anticline that makes much of Kentucky so rich in fossils from the ancient ocean, including the Falls of the Ohio along Louisville's riverside - and yet the Falls of the Ohio is said to be of Devonian origin, not Ordovician. I leave the matter for professional geologists to sort out.

According to a surprisingly florid bit of text in the usually dry Kentucky Encyclopedia, the anticline is also indirectly responsible for Kentucky being the thoroughbred horse capitol of the world. Early settlers noticed the geological qualities of the anticline contributed to making Kentucky a land with densely fertile soil, rich in calcium and phosphorus, and this in turn led to it being prized by horse ranchers:

"This legacy of phosphatic limestone, inherited from millions of shells and skeletons, deposited millions of years earlier when central Kentucky was an ocean bed, was now to be used to build the skeletons of horses... the phosphatic limestone which forms the basis of central Kentucky's soil has proved its efficacy."

The anticline also just happens to roughly correspond to the area affected by the 1895 Charleston, Missouri, earthquake along the New Madrid Fault (see area indicated in red in the image above).

Kentucky Crinoids

Recently beheld some excellent large rocks in Jefferson County - not going to reveal where since I haven't harvested the best specimens yet - filled with all manner of fossilized prehistoric aquatic yummies, including molluscs, worms, coral, and (mostly) crinoids from the Ordovician period. Click on the images for larger versions.



As Wikipedia's Crinoid page notes, "Some thick limestone beds dating to the mid- to late-Paleozoic are almost entirely made up of disarticulated crinoid fragments." And that's what we have here. One may also note on their Ordovician Period page that most of the fossil examples shown from this period are from Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee. This area must be an Ordovician hot spot for some reason (as would be evidenced by the Falls of the Ohio's famous fossil beds).




The stems of these prehistoric Crinoids are actually a series of separate cell-like segments held together by tissue, nerves and ligaments which were threaded through the central hole. This material often rots away before the segments themselves, leaving a pile of tiny disarticulated discs. In Europe, these were actually collected and strung like beads, variously called "Fairy Money", "St Boniface's Pennies", "St. Cuthbert's Beads", and "Star Stones".

Kentucky State Fossil

Kentucky State Bird? Cardinal, of course.

Kentucky State Song? "My Old Kentucky Home" by Stephen Foster, naturally. And the Kentucky State Tree is the Tulip Poplar.

But did you know that Kentucky also has a state silverware pattern? It's apparently called "Old Kentucky Blue Grass: The Georgetown Pattern". And the state beverage is milk. Milk. Not bourbon. Milk. Who dreams this stuff up??

Kentucky even has a state fossil - the Brachiopod. Wikipedia says "they are sessile, two-valved, marine animals with an external morphology superficially resembling bivalves to which they are not closely related. Approximately 99 percent of all brachiopod species are documented solely from the fossil record".