Beecher's Trilobite Bed is located in Cleveland's Glen, NY
outside of Rome and is a classic example of a Konservat-
Lagerstätten, or preservational mother load of fossils. The bed
was deposited following a small underwater landslide
(microturbidite) during the last phases of the Taconic Orogeny
(collisional mountain building episode) that occured in the
Upper Ordovician (approximately 445 million years ago). The 4 cm
Bed is characterized by the abundance of pyritized trilobites
occuring within the surrounding shale.  Discovered in 1892 by
William S. Valiant, the site was first excavated between 1893
and 1895 by the Bed's namesake, Charles Emerson Beecher of Yale
University. Beecher published two papers using specimens from
within the Bed but died unexpectedly in 1904 rendering much of
his unprepared material, and, more importantly, the exact
location of the Bed, lost indefinitely.  In the ensuing years,
several papers were published using Beecher's materials (for a
list click here), but the location of the sou