Three hundred eighty million years ago, Gilboa lay on the shore of the inland Catskill Sea in a tropical setting about twenty degrees south of the equator. Tree-like plants called Eospermatopteris grew near the shore alongside large shrubby plants and horsetails, while herbaceous lycopods thrived around ponds and stream banks. Lungfish, ancestors of later amphibians, may have come onto shore from streams in search of food. This landscape was silent except for wind and rain, lacking insect sounds, birdsong, and animal cries. Long droughts alternated with monsoon rains and flooding, and severe storms sometimes buried much of the shore forest in sand, killing the plants; after the trees rotted, the molds of their stumps were filled with more sand, creating the fossil tree stumps seen today. The Devonian colonization of land was one of the most profound developments in the history of life on Earth, and Gilboa preserves the most complete picture of a Middle Devonian land environment known anywhere in the world. Fossils from Gilboa were first documented in North America when Samuel Lockwood found a sandstone cast of part of a Devonian tree trunk near Gilboa, a specimen later described and illustrated by John W. Dawson in 1871 and named Caulopteris lockwoodi in Lockwood's honor. After the Schoharie Creek flood of October 1869, workmen blasting rock for repairs uncovered fossil tree stumps in life position; Daniel Mackey reported the find to State Paleontologist James Hall in January 1870, and Hall retrieved the stumps and additional material for display in Albany. Construction of the Gilboa dam and reservoir beginning in 1917 exposed many more fossil stumps and other Devonian plant remains. Winifred Goldring, who joined the New York State Museum in 1914 and became State Paleontologist in 1939 as the first woman to hold such a position, scientifically described and illustrated Gilboa fossil material during the 1920s and persuaded the New York City Board of Water Supply to leave fossils at Gilboa rather than move them elsewhere. In 1968, excavations for a reservoir on the Gilboa-Blenheim border led Patricia M. Bonamo and James D. Grierson to discover well-preserved Devonian lycopods and the first tiny land animals known from Gilboa's ancient world. Reconstruction of these remains revealed many animals, especially predatory arthropods, including a nearly complete spider spinneret that provides the earliest known evidence of silk production and the earliest record of spiders, though flying prey had not yet appeared. More than thirty centipede specimens were also recovered, representing a new order called the Devonobiomorpha, along with extinct trigonotarbids described in 1987, mite specimens including Protochthonius gilboa, and a tiny multilegged animal thought to be ancestral to the giant arthropleurids of the Carboniferous Period.