A diorama depicting the Connecticut River valley at the time that dinosaurs left their footprints in the mud that eventually became the fossil footprints now found along the Connecticut River Valley.
From the collections of the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College
Although they roamed the Earth over 230 million years ago, the legacy of dinosaurs carries on in Western Mass. thanks to a couple crucial resources in the area.
A rich scientific history involving dinosaurs is embedded in the literal fabric of the Western Mass. area: just go no further than a site close to Mount Tom along the Connecticut River.
It is there where an 8-acre parcel of land supervised by the Trustees of the Reservation, a state conservation nonprofit that oversees more than 100 special places in the state, captures a slice of history with the inclusion of more than 800 tracks that encompass four distinct dinosaurs, stromatolites, fish, an alligator ancestor, plants and other ancient species.
According to the trustees, this property features the first dinosaur prints ever scientifically described.
“As is true to our mission, we preserve places of ecological, historical or scenic significance and keep them open to everyone forever,” said Mary Dettloff, the director of public information for the trustees, who added that the parcel of land was purchased by the trustees in 1935.
The footprint types that riddle this parcel of land include eubrontes, which Dettloff said are larger prints likely made by a Tyrannosaurus rex ancestor, while other print types on the site include a smaller theropod, which are considered one of the more common tracks found in the valley, and anomoepus tracks, which have a track length of three to six inches and are considered to be the first type of dinosaur footprint found in the valley in the early 1800s.
In a geological guidebook called “Exploring a Real Jurassic Park from the Dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs in the Connecticut Valley,” which was created by paleontologists Paul Olsen, Patrick Getty and others, the dinosaur reservation in Holyoke features about 28% of trackways that are those of herbivores, and a little over 220 tracks that are attributed to the eubrontes giganteus species.
According to Alfred Venne, a museum educator and director at Amherst College Beneski Museum and Bassett Planetarium, visitors could most likely find the eubrontes tracks without a map since those are bigger. Once people find those and the directionality of the prints, Venne said it becomes easier for visitors to use the map to locate the others.
“It really makes a huge difference,” Venne said.
This parcel of land, which sits just off Route 5 in Holyoke, is not the only place where dinosaur history is maintained, or at the very least, interconnected with the valley.
Amherst College’s Beneski Museum of Natural History has quite the connection to paleontology thanks to its longstanding preservation of physical geological evidence in its walls and its rich intertwinement with key scientific figures of the last couple hundred years.
One of those key figures that helped shape the makeup of the Beneski Museum is Edward Hitchcock, a famous geologist who eventually became the third president of Amherst College.
Researchers in the area have concluded that the first dinosaur tracks in North America were discovered in South Hadley by a young farm boy named Pliny Moody in 1802, more than four decades before the term “dinosaur” became ubiquitous among the scientific community.
While working on his family farm, Moody came across a slab of rock with stone tracks. The slab was eventually purchased by Dr. Elihu Dwight, the first person in recorded history to purchase a dinosaur track.
Eventually, the slab of rock, which would be named “the tracks of Noah’s raven,” after the biblical Noah, would land in the hands of Hitchcock, who is considered one of the first people to truly research and study dinosaur tracks.
According to Venne, it was 1835 in Greenfield where the first dinosaur tracks were brought to the attention of scientists. While splitting rocks in Greenfield to make sidewalks, an installer named Dexter Marsh found some marks in the stone and sent them for inspection to a doctor in the area named James Deane.
“Eventually, because Dean was enamored by what he saw, he knew that the best person to look at rocks with funny marks in them that looked like some kind of bird tracks would be the state geologist,” Venne said. “It just so happened that the state geologist at the time was Hitchcock.”
Hitchcock would visit the Greenfield area and explored other locations where similar rock with similar marks were located. Eventually he would collect 1,200 slabs of rock, all of which are featured at the Beneski Museum. These slabs contain over 12,000 markings, according to Venne.
“He created a new science,” Venne said. “It’s a sub-science of paleontology called ichnology, which by definition is just the study of tracks and traces.”
Hitchcock published his first work a little over a half decade before the term “dinosaur” was coined. It was in this first published work where Hitchcock theorized that the markings on these rocks were from some type of bird.
Once “dinosaur” became a worldwide term, people’s perspective on Hitchcock’s work changed.
“People began to slowly but surely look at Hitchcock’s collection with a new frame that maybe it’s something more than birds,” Venne said. “Over time, it’s generally accepted that the trackways that were found were some kind of dinosaur of some nature.”
Venne said Hitchcock was known as a “scientific splitter,” which means he would look at traces for their uniqueness. Over time, he would group these species into 50 ichnospecies, which were later condensed and grouped into four main species by modern scientists like Olsen while still maintaining Hitchcock’s ichnospecies language in their re-cataloging of Hitchcock’s original work.
“I think it was a nod to his work at the time,” Venne said of the re-cataloging. “The only reason we have what we have at the museum is because of Hitchcock’s work.”
Overall, there have been very few dinosaur bones found in the region, according to Venne. Most of them are either found in the Beneski collection or at Yale.
“There are lots of trace fossil records but very little body fossil records,” Venne noted. “Our guess regarding what kind of dinosaurs probably made the footprints around here was based upon what the plate tectonic record shows us.”
Two of the most important body fossils present at Beneski are the Podokesaurus Holyokensis and Anchisaurus, according to Venne.
The original fossil material from the former, which was named Massachusetts’ state dinosaur a couple of years ago, was found in a boulder near Mount Holyoke by paleontologist Mignon Talbot. The fossil’s original remains were lost in a fire, but Venne said a couple of casts of that fossil were made before the fire, one of which exists in Beneski.
The Anchisaurus fossil, meanwhile, is the remains of a little plant-eating dinosaur that was found in the Springfield Armory location when the superintendent of the Armory of was having some work done there.
“They stopped all the bulldozers and everything else and then kind of went in there and found what they could find,” Venne said. “They found a pretty nice little fossil.”
This collection keeps the history of dinosaurs alive, but Venne said Amherst College is currently not making an active effort to go out and collect further materials because the college does not currently have a paleontologist on its geology staff.
He said the college’s focus could shift back to that type of work, but right now, the focus has been on climate science and hydrology.
Despite this, Venne said the museum will always be a resource for people who may find something of interest in the region.
“As things pop up, if somebody’s actively doing some work in the region, we’re the resource that people come to show us what they’ve found,” Venne said. “We’re always interested in what’s going on.”
Readers can visit the Beneski Museum at 11 Barrett Hill Dr., according to the museum website. Venne said the museum contains 200,000 specimens total thanks to the work from scientists like Hitchcock.
The Holyoke dinosaur footprints are open to the public from April 1 to Nov. 30 from dawn to dusk.
Readers can also learn more about the history of dinosaurs in the Connecticut River Valley by reading Olsen and Getty’s guidebook, which was updated in 2017: tinyurl.com/2p8yzaf4.
