Hundreds of millions of years ago! The concept boggles the mind, but the fossil beds at the Falls of the Ohio provide living proof (or once living proof) that an ocean and coral reef existed more than 350 million years ago in what is now Clark County.

The coral reef, as we find it today, stretches from Louisville north to Indianapolis. The fossilized reef lies exposed only at the Falls of the Ohio and a few limestone quarries around Indiana.

Nowhere else in the world does such a large, exposed fossil reef of this period exist. More than 220 acres of exposed, Devonian age fossil beds make up the Falls of the Ohio, the site of Indiana's newest state park.

Technically speaking, the Devonian Period ocurred between 395 and 345 million years ago. During that time, Indiana and Kentucky languished beneath a warm, tropical sea, and were located about twenty degrees south of the equator. A shifting of the earth's continents eventually moved this part of the earth's surface to its current location.

As hard as it is to imagine an ocean in Indiana, it's even harder to visualize thousands of plants and animals living in and on a coral reef there. In fact, scientists have identified more than 600 Devonian fossil species at the Falls - two-thirds of them "type" specimens, or species discovered and recorded there for the first time anywhere in the world.

During the Devonian age, fish were the most advanced life forms in the aquatic world. Because jawed fish first appeared then, paleontologists dub the Devonian period the "Age of Fish." Despite this fact, very few fossils of fish bones surface here, and unfortunately, no complete fish skeletons remain.

During the 45 million year span of the Devonian Period, the oceans deposited layer upon layer of lime silt, sediments, and plant and animal remains. Of these deposits, five distinct fossil layers lie exposed at the Falls. The uppermost layer - or the youngest rock - is the Paraspirifer Acuminatus Zone, which contains fossils of brachiopods (including paraspirifers, a two-shelled animal similar to a clam); bryozoans (commonly called lace coral); trilobites; and some solitary, branching, and colonial corals.

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