Seeking refuge in the Renosterberg range near Middelburg during the Eighth Frontier War, he found an Early Triassic fossil skull resembling an amphibian. Thereafter Stow spent a great deal of his time exploring the Cretaceous deposits within the Sundays and Zwartkops basins near Port Elizabeth and the Karroo System near Dordrecht. After the war Stow was persuaded by Dr. Richard Nathaniel Rubidge to report his discoveries to Thomas Rupert Jones of "The Geological Society". At a meeting of "The Geological Society" on 17 November 1858, a paper by Stow "On Some Fossils from South Africa" was read. The species was later named "Micropholis stowi" by Huxley, and is currently placed in the family Amphibamidae. The paper was the first of many contributions by Stow to geological journals, the most important probably being "Geological Notes on Griqualand West" published in the "Quarterly Journal" of 1874, shortly after he was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of London in 1872. His landmark work on the geology of Griqualand West was never published.