Sorpions in Fort Erie?

We’re Off On A Scorpion Hunt! Bell9 By Earl Plato

It was Fall some years ago when Elaine and I headed to the limestone quarries off Ridgemount Road, Ridgeway. We were going to look for scorpions! Scorpions? In Fort Erie, Southern Ontario? Yes. Let me explain. This was an active quarry site . Huge dump trucks were moving in and out. We drove past the crusher and down a rough road in the southwest corner. Here a bulldozer was creating a pile of limestone slabs. I walked up to the dozer and asked the operator where the fossils were. He pointed to a pile a little further on and said, :That’s where they look for those things” We started looking in the jumbled pile. We were looking for fossilized descendants of the Horseshoe crab. They are called eurypterids or sea scorpions. The ones found in Ridgemount quarry were about five inches in length. They have five pair of legs. Four short pair were used for walking. The other pair were spread out into paddles, There were five abdominal plates or segments, There were gills on the underside. Strange creature, eh. We knew what we were looking for I had been to the Buffalo Museum of Science. They have a great display of eurypterids there. Eurypterids flourished in Western New York and our Niagara Peninsula in the Devonian era when the land was covered under a vast inland sea, The ones displayed were giant sea scorpions. As I said the ones we would find on subsequent visits were small replicas. Eurypterids - Fort Erie’s great little fossils.