Connecticut Valley is home to thousands of fossils bearing dinosaur impressions left in the sediments. Dinosaurs left their footprints in mud, which filled with sand or small pebbles and eventually hardened into rock. Millions of years later, erosion brought them to surface level and made them accessible to us.
Unfortunately, fossil bones are difficult to interpret and only provide a vague idea of what once existed. However, these fossils capture what certain dinosaurs were doing at a given time, an immediacy that is unparalleled with fossil bones. Paleontologists were able to deduce dinosaurs’ speed, which dinosaurs traveled in herds, that some herds kept their youth in the middle of migrating packs, or that when dinosaurs walked their tails did not drag on the floor. Foots prints close together indicate that the dinosaur was running and the opposite for when a dinosaur was walking. Even so, Dr. Donald Baird points to ecological limitations and mistakes in preservation that he believes falsely attribute tracks to prosauropods because of their abundance of fossil bones in the area, and dismissing other dinosaur possibilities just because their fossil bones are not found there.
When scientists discover fossils they record all of its features, including the track orientation, shape, geological setting, especially while the fossil is still in the ground. This process reminded me of how plants are documented in the Botanical Gardens. Seeing how much can be learnt from million year old dinosaur fossils, made me really recognize and appreciate all of the plant documentation efforts.
Lithology: (a) The study of rocks
(b) The character of a rock formation; also : a rock form having a particular set of characteristics
Radiometric dating (often called radioactive dating):
Technique used to date materials such as rocks or carbon, in which trace radioactive impurities were selectively incorporated when they formed. Radiometric dating methods are used in geochronology to establish the geological time scale.
