Virginia’s cities are “accidental museums of paleontology” waiting to be explored.
Illustration by Tristan Yuvienco
I was squatting about 18 inches from the exterior wall of the hulking Old Stone School in Hillsboro (population 80), holding a full-frame camera with the hood of its 135-millimeter lens about two inches from one of the school’s limestone building blocks. When I heard a child yell “Weirdo!” I turned to see a boy hanging out the window of a passing school bus and flipping me off. Before I could fashion an age-appropriate response, the bus had rolled by, leaving me feeling bullied and unsure about my new passion.
I was confused, too. I mean, I was just fossil hunting. It’s like Virginia’s official state pastime! And, now I’m the weirdo?
What may have perplexed the young man was the fact that, while Virginia has a well-documented history of fossilized creatures hiding in its sedimentary rocks, most fossil hunters look down to find their quarry. They dig at one of our state parks, not eyeball—or photograph!—a school wall like it might be a lost Caravaggio.
I was staring at the wall because I had just talked to Christopher Barr, the preeminent amateur urban paleontologist in the Northern Virginia/D.C. metroplex. He was cool. His website was cool. I wanted him to think I was cool. So, I drove three miles to the nearest village and spent two hours attempting to emulate Barr’s expertise.
Barr is a D.C. attorney who’s been walking around the city for decades. Around 2002, he really started to look as he walked. Remembering his college geology classes, he realized he was walking in, as he calls it, “an accidental museum of paleontology.” When the federal government started building to impress, architects generally switched from a hodgepodge of local sandstone and limestone to facades of the stronger, marble-like Indiana limestone. Limestone is made mainly of the dissolved remains of ancient marine organisms. But, if you look closely at the right kind of limestone, you’ll find that not all of the life has disappeared.
On his website, DCFossils.org, Barr details every fossil he has found—perhaps every fossil to be found—in the buildings of downtown D.C. He categorizes his finds into the geological time period (Cambrian, Jurassic, Cretaceous) during which they were deposited in sediment and began the unfathomably slow process of being pressed and transformed into limestone. Fellow enthusiasts can use the site as a guide to viewing Jurassic fossils at the National Zoo’s Reptile House or Cretaceous fossils at the National Museum of Natural History, for example, thanks to the limestone from all over the world that was used to build the city.
And, although Barr arguably has the most extensive and sophisticated website of any amateur urban paleontologist in the country, he realizes he’s just beginning. “I haven’t branched out into Virginia as much as I would like,” he says. Limestone was used extensively in buildings all over the state. He notes that his brother lives in Richmond, so they’ve spent time crawling around and studying the steps of the Virginia State Capitol Building.
How cool that ancient treasures might be so close to home (or in the foundation of your old home)! After reading the website, of course I loaded up my camera equipment, drove to the closest significant limestone structure in my corner of Virginia—the Old Stone School of Hillsboro—and excitedly began my hunt, photographing peculiar shape after peculiar shape to send off to Barr for examination. I love photography because it forces me to see the world around me in different ways. Similarly, while hunting fossils, I saw a building I have seen thousands of times in a completely new way. This single structure became a whole new world.
I was excited to hear back from Barr. I was sure I had made a discovery, maybe even a new one. I was sure I had found the fossil of some unknown brachiopod. The scientists and I would name it Hillsborian bobiopodnelsonous.
His response had the ring of a rejection letter from, say, the nicest literary agent in New York. It hurt, but it offered encouraging words and some good advice to anyone interested in this endeavor: “I have reviewed the pictures, and I appreciate your determination and tenaciousness, but I did not see identifiable fossils in them—not saying there were none, but none that I could identify. I would not be too discouraged—getting used to identifying the fossils does take quite a bit of time.”
Since then I’ve read deeply about the region’s numerous limestone formations and the types of ancient creatures common to our sedimentary rocks. I’m armed with more information, and my eye is a little better trained. I’m excited to go for my next hunt, to try again to see the world around me in a fresh, new way.
This article originally appeared in our April 2019 issue.
