The Goodsell Ridge Preserve is a site of the ancient Chazy Reef, a fossil reef formed 480-450 million years ago during what geologists call the Ordovician Period. The Chazy Reef is known by scientists world-wide as the oldest multi-organism reef in the history of life on earth.
Paleontologists believe the reef was formed almost half a billion years ago, when Lake Champlain was part of the shallow Iapetus Ocean, where Zimbabwe is today.
A well-marked path leads through the field to outcroppings swirled with signs of life — swirled skeletal remains of cephalopods, gastropods, bryoaozs, sponges, crinoid stems and stromotoporoids. “Discovery Areas” are numbered and identified.