20 Books About Prehistoric Ohio Wildlife

Ohio has a rich geologic history, albeit with some large chunks of time missing. For instance, did you know there are no dinosaur fossils found in Ohio? For millions of years rivers, and then massive glaciers, cut down any Mesozoic rocks that might have contained dinosaur fossils.

Ohio does however, have excellent Paleozoic rocks, which predate the dinosaurs. Much of the bedrock in Northwest Ohio is made up of Silurian or Devonian age rocks that are around 400 million years old. If you visit Fossil Park in Sylvania, you can find trilobites, brachiopods, and more.

On top of all that, much of our soil and clay is made up of deposits from the massive glacier that sat on much of Ohio (and North America in general) over 10,000 years ago. Occasionally, we find huge, billion-year-old igneous rocks that were transported hundreds of miles from northern Canada via ice movement. The Oak Openings region contains sands that were once an ancient beach to the body of water that would eventually recede to become Lake Erie.

Some of these books are about animals that are long extinct, such as the trilobites, and others that are not extinct, but do not live in Ohio or have recently returned.