Photograph courtesy Ron Fine
The Queen City is home to the oldest continuously operating fossil club in North America, the Cincinnati Dry Dredgers. Founded at UC in 1942 as outreach for night classes, the Dredgers continue to educate, socialize, research, and publish monthly. Anyone can join, with beginners’ classes preceding regular meetings and hands-on field trips the following day.
“Our group is really focused on education,” says Dry Dredgers President Jack Kallmeyer. “We give out something we call a paleontological research awards that we’ve presented every year since 1999 and those typically go to graduate students. Since 2001, we’ve co-sponsored a show called GeoFair where a high percentage of the floor space is dedicated to educational displays and places where you can go and find out how to collect.”
Members’ discoveries have been recognized nationally and gone into collections at UC, the Smithsonian, and the Field Museum in Chicago. Many Dredger fossils are on display in the Ancient Worlds Hiding in Plain Sight exhibition at the Cincinnati Museum Center.
Photograph courtesy Bill Heimbrock
One of these discoveries is the Godzillus fossil, found in 2012 by Ron Fine and named after beloved kaiju Godzilla. While the specimen has been displayed and published, professional paleontologists are still trying to figure out what it’s made out of. “It could have been an algal mat or a bacterial mat, but they’re not really sure,” says Kallmeyer. “People know that it’s something, not just some random sedimentary deposit. It’s an actual preservation of something that was alive over 450 million years ago.”
If you’re interested in checking out the Cincinnati Dry Dredgers, the group next meets on Friday, October 23 at 8 p.m. (or 7:15 p.m. for beginners) in UC’s Braunstein Hall, room 201. There will be a field trip at 10 a.m. the following day.
Photograph courtesy Dry Dredgers Society
