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THE FOSSIL TRACKWAYS OF

DINOSAUR STATE PARK

ROCKY HILL, CONNECTICUT

Saturday November 7 , 1998

In 1802, a farm boy named Pliny Moody discovered a slab of rock with the impressions of what appeared to his family to be turkey-like bird tracks. Decades later, Edward Hitchcock, upon studying these tracks and many others from around New England, concluded that, although birdlike, they were not made by any known bird. He was more correct than he knew, since they proved to be tracks of bipedal dinosaurs - a group of animals only recently described at that time. The tracks of the Connecticut Valley were the first systematically studied tracks of dinosaurs anywhere, and today one of the most accessible and finest examples are found at Dinosaur State Park in Connecticut.

The tracks are found in the East Berlin Formation of the Newark Supergroup, and record the wanderings of a number of Lower Jurassic creatures, mostly dinosaurs. The part of the trackway exposed now forms a huge centerpiece to the museum built around it (renovated in the last two years), with a variety of trackways of carnivorous dinosaurs laced across it, ranging from the small bipedal tracks Grallator to the large Eubrontes. The museum also houses a collection of exhibits apropos to the tracks, their preservation, paleoecology, etc. The Field Trip Leader for this day will be Donald Phillips.

Mr. Krueger is Environmental Education Coordinator at the park, and will describe many features of the trackway and museum, including what the tracks tell us of the behaviors of the individual dinosaurs that made them during the Jurassic.

All attending must be members of the New York Paleontological Society

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