An Arresting Fossil Grabs Police Officer’s Attention

For Del Szatmary, a New Jersey police officer, catching criminals is a career. Tracking down fossils is a hobby.

Tagging along with a group of professional paleontologists visiting a fossil-rich area of central Pennsylvania, Szatmary looked down at a heap of rocks and spotted a piece of the past that has experts marveling.

Szatmary found a near-perfect fossil from the Paleocharinid family, a spider-like creature that died about 370 million years ago. It’s also the first intact example from the late Devonian Period--150 million years before the first dinosaurs appeared on Earth.

“The amazing thing is that it’s so well preserved. It’s in such good shape,” said Ted Daeschler, a vertebrate biologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, where Szatmary has volunteered for five years. “That group of arachnids is not well known. We’re learning a lot from it.”

Szatmary, a Lakewood, N.J., patrolman, was with Daeschler and others on a trip to Clinton County Oct. 25 when he made the discovery.

The area on Route 120 outside Renovo offers a prime “slice of the Devonian Period” and is an important site for paleontologists from around the world, Daeschler said. The 75-foot cliff offers a large collection of fossils and bones from primitive sharks, fish and early amphibians that once inhabited the area, which was marshy, green and subtropical at the time.

Szatmary, 49, was lagging behind a bit, looking at a pile of rocks that had slid off the 75-foot cliff, when something caught his eye.

“It was just lying there. It stuck out so sharply, that I thought it was a bug that was on the rock,” he said. “I picked it up, and I rubbed it, and I said, ‘Nope, it’s in there.’ ”

The creature was just 6 millimeters long (about a quarter of an inch), had eight legs, antennae and a segmented body. It looks much like a tick, but comparisons with present-day insects are impossible, Daeschler said.

Bill Shear, a professor of biology at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and an expert in paleo-arachnids, said there are two periods when the creature most shows up in the fossil record: 415 million years ago and 285 million years ago.

Szatmary’s discovery sheds new light on the middle range of that period, he said.

Szatmary may be an amateur paleontologist, but he’s no slouch with a chisel and a brush. He found his first dinosaur bone when he was 9 and has been a serious hobbyist ever since.

“I do it for relaxation,” he said.

Daeschler said Szatmary is more than just an amateur.

“He certainly has developed the eye [to catch little details], but more importantly he has the knowledge to safely extract things,” he said. “If Del hadn’t preserved the back of the rock . . . that could have been it; an important find would have been lost.”

The tiny fossil, currently on display as part of the academy’s “Spiders!” exhibit through May 5, may soon be linked forever with its finder.

If the fossil came from a genus and species previously unidentified, Shear said, he intends to name it after the police officer, giving it the name Szatmaryi.

Szatmary, 18 months from retirement, intends to go back to school when he leaves the force. He said he didn’t understand all the hoopla when he first realized what he’d found, but then it sunk in.

“For 40 years, what I’ve been collecting all the time is stuff that’s been identified by others,” he said. “Now, I’ve helped identify something.”