The Cooper Street Rock Snake, 1908.

The serpentine figure of a snake drew New Yorkers from all over to come see what had miraculously wedged itself inside a rock some 2,000 years ago. The New York Herald reported in 1913 that it would be preserved by the Museum of Natural History. The Evening Post called it a "Queer Rock Formation" in 1923. Many believed that a 25-foot long snake had wedged itself between rocks during an earthquake some thousand years prior.

However, a literary magazine for children, the St. Nicolas, finally "unearthed" the mystery of Inwood's oldest inhabitant: "The rock formation, the whole mass, is limestone...the serpent-like markings are only the twisted, and squeezed, and somewhat broken, and thoroughly metamorphosed remnants of a thin layer or bed of impure limestone lying within a larger...more uniform mass...They are not fossils, but they are to a geologist fully as interesting as a fossil and maybe more so." The magazine had brought in Charles P. Berkey, a Geology Professor at Columbia. He endearingly referred to the mark as "nature's handwriting that tells to a nicety just what has happened in the very long ago."