Retired professor gives fossils to college

POTSDAM — In a lab in SUNY Potsdam's geology department, William T. Kirchgasser surveys the tables upon tables covered with his life's work.

At the college where he taught for 35 years, he runs his hands over the dozens of little boxes filled with fossils, each tagged, each with a memory and meaning of its own.

"These are from Yorkshire, England. That's when I started collecting. The North Sea coast — classic Jurassic marine. That's the age of the dinosaurs," he says, pointing to a geologic map of Great Britain.

He moves on; his hands float above the specimens.

"Belgium," he points. "Germany. The south of France."

Elsewhere are pieces he collected in Canada, Australia, Russia, China and Morocco. They are accompanied by photos, books and mementos.

Mr. Kirchgasser is cataloging his collection of several hundred invertebrate fossils, days before he donates it to the college. SUNY Potsdam will use his fossils as teaching tools, and some will be displayed on a rotating basis in the Geology Hallway Museum in Timerman Hall.

"I'm getting along in years. It's a chance for the collection to be held together, cataloged. It'll be used for teaching; that's what I used it for," Mr. Kirchgasser said.

He will bequeath the collection to the college at a dedication ceremony at 10 a.m. Friday.

Mr. Kirchgasser remembers taking trips out West with his family growing up. That's when he first became interested in fossils and geology.

"We used to have lunch out the back end of our station wagon. While our parents were cooking food, I'd be out fumbling around, kicking rocks, finding fossils by the side of the road," he said.

Mr. Kirchgasser's specialty is invertebrate paleontology and biostratigraphy.

"My interests have been using fossils to date and correlate geologic time," he said.

He's primarily interested in goniatite cephalopods, a distant relative of the chambered nautilus, and conodonts, microfossil teeth of an extinct group of soft-bodied fish. Both lived during the Devonian Period, 418 to 360 million years ago.

"They lived for only short periods, which makes them very good for dating rocks within a hundred thousand years. When you're talking about millions of years, that's pretty accurate," he said of the cephalopods. "Just the idea of finding the same genera of species around the world — these things were swimmers, and there was no Atlantic Ocean at the time, so we have worldwide distribution."

Using the cephalopod and conodont fossils as cues, Mr. Kirchgasser is able to give precise dating for Devonian mass marine extinctions, the spread of plants and vertebrate amphibians onto land and the oldest known forests.

Most of Mr. Kirchgasser's fossils were collected on field trips with the International Subcommission on Devonian Stratigraphy and the New York State Geological Association.

He said finding fossils is a matter of knowing what to look for — and if you're lucky, in some places like Morocco and Russia you can just pick specimens off the ground. He says there's an excitement that comes with finding a particularly unique fossil.

"It's finding a species in New York that's only known from one level in eastern Australia. Those are the only places in the world where they occur," Mr. Kirchgasser said. "There must have been a seaway connection between the two, probably by way of what is now western North America."

Mr. Kirchgasser joined the SUNY Potsdam faculty in 1969, and served as chairman of the geology department from 1985 to 2000. He retired from teaching in 2004, but still spends time at the college cataloguing collections.

There are two Devonian fossils named in his honor — the goniatite subspecies, koenenites lamellosus kirchgasseri, found in West Virginia, and the conodont species polygnathus kirchgasseri, found in France and Germany.

Mr. Kirchgasser has enjoyed his long affiliation with the college.

"It's been very good," he said.