Stories in Stone Read Free Page B

and river channels.
    The warm and well-watered valley was ideal habitat for dinosaurs. As they tromped around in the moist mud and sand along the
     valley’s streams and lakes, the great and the small left behind thousands and thousands of footprints, which remained intact
     as the mud hardened to rock. These tracks are one of the coolest and also most geologically important aspects of the brownstone.
     Because fossilized footprints record a specific moment in time in the life of an animal, they eventually helped paleontologists
     revolutionize our understanding of dinosaurs.
    * * *
    In 1802 a lad named Pliny Moody was working his family’s field in South Hadley, Massachusetts, when his plow thumped against
     a block of brown sandstone. Clearing away the soil, Moody discovered four raised tracks crossing the flat slab. Each four-inch-long
     track had three toes and looked like it was made by a bird. Since the slab was of no use in the field,Moody’s family decided
     to use it as a doorstep, where it remained for several years until a local doctor, Elihu Dwight, purchased the curious rock.
     Dwight nicknamed the tracks’ maker Noah’s Raven, and showed them to Amherst College natural history professor Edward Hitchcock,
     who also thought that birds had made the tracks. 11
    The Noah’s Raven slab is now on display in an honored spot in the main collection of tracks at the Amherst College Museum
     of Natural History. Three feet by two feet by two inches thick, the reddish slab tapers to twelve inches wide at the bottom,
     where the top two inches of a toe are visible. Three other tracks run in a line up the slab, clearly showing where a dinosaur
     walked across the wet sand. The tracks are darker and raised slightly above the surrounding rock. They aren’t actually an
     impression but a positive cast of the original track. Dinosaur tracks form when an animal steps in moist, firm sediment, which
     subsequently dries and hardens. New sediment then fills in the track, creating a cast, as well as preserving the original.
     Geologists generally refer to both the cast and the original as tracks.
    Hitchcock, who acquired the slab from Dwight, was close to correct about what walked around in the mud of the ancient valley.
     A dinosaur, the progenitor of birds, made the Noah’s Raven tracks about 200 million years ago. It stood about thirty-six inches
     tall and walked on two feet in a pigeon-toed manner. Other tracks from this dinosaur species indicate that they could have
     walked on all fours, occasionally dragged their tails, rested with their breast and rump on the ground, and traveled in family
     groups. They also fidgeted, or at least multiple prints in the same locality indicate that they stomped or patted their feet
     when resting. The same type of tracks have been found across eastern North America, in South Africa and Poland, and on the
     Colorado Plateau. Paleontologists call the track maker Anomoepus , meaning “unlike foot.” 12
    Noah’s Raven is only one part of Amherst's collection of twenty thousand tracks and casts. Most of them came from the Connecticut
     River valley, either from the Portland Formation, including the Noah’s Raven slab, or equivalent rocks in other parts of the
     valley in Massachusetts. The collection, the world’s largest, was assembled by Edward Hitchcock between 1836 and 1864 and
     now resides in a beautiful new museum on the Amherst campus.
    “Hitchcock was the preeminent geologist in America,” said Steve Sauter, coordinator of education at the Amherst museum. 13 And yet Hitchcock never conceded that the Noah’s Raven tracks were made by a dinosaur and therefore were the first evidence
     of dinosaurs found in America. (British naturalist Richard Owen coined the term dinosaur in 1841 and by the 1850s most geologists
     and naturalists knew dinosaurs to be a widespread and diverse group.) “Hitchcock could never accept that God created monstrous
     beasts like dinosaurs,” said