From dinosaur tracks to dollar signs: Pioneer Valley history, science to fuel new local dinosaur tourism initiative

[ Originally published on: Thursday, April 02, 2009 ]

GREENFIELD -- Dexter Marsh was building a sidewalk out of sandstone in Greenfield in the 1830s when he came across the dinosaur track that would form the basis of his now famous natural history collection.

Today marks the 151st anniversary of his death, as well as the beginning of what some local people hope will be the development of a whole new tourist industry in the Pioneer Valley based on the fossils native to the region.

According to Tim Neumann of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield, a number of groups, ranging from museums to commercial organizations, are working together to 'brand' the area along the Connecticut River as the 'Valley of the Dinosaurs.'

The idea is to increase tourism through focus on the (dinosaur) track sites and their history.

PVMA has been awarded a state Cultural Council Adams Planning Grant for the work, which will allow hiring of a consultant and coordinator to orchestrate the work of planning committees.

'The overall planning goal is to coordinate nonprofit and commercial public programs and artistic creation of goods, experiences and annual events that use the tracks as a theme,' Neumann said.

The goal is to develop a plan centered on year-round permanent attractions as well as seasonal activities, annual events, and special exhibits. The intention is to build new revenue and jobs by packaging and promoting tourism in the Pioneer Valley through collaboration and linkage along the dino theme.

In February, PVMA convened a meeting of potential partners including Springfield Museums, Wistariahurst museum in Holyoke, Enchanted Circle Theater, Hitchcock Center, Amherst College Natural History Museum, WGBY, Great Falls Discovery Center, Northfield Mountain Recreation and Environmental Center, and the Emily Dickinson Museum. In September, PVMA met with scholars in geology, history, history of science, and biology from the Five Colleges. Responses at both meetings were extremely enthusiastic and generated a plethora of ideas.

According to Neumann, the Connecticut Valley tracks were the first such fossils found in North America.

Although they were not recognized as dinosaur fossils when they were first discovered -- they were thought at the time to be the tracks of giant birds -- the track-ways of the Pioneer Valley excited considerable interest in the general public and the scientific community.

The first dinosaur tracks found were discovered in 1802 in the town of South Hadley by a farm boy named Plinius Moody. Other tracks were found in the area in succeeding years, but apparently no one paid them much heed until the mid-1830s when Marsh and a local doctor, James Deane, brought them to the attention of Amherst College's Edward Hitchcock.

Marsh, who had apparently never received a formal education, worked as a janitor at the County Courthouse and the Second Congregational Church across the common, as well as doing odd jobs around town.

Marsh was so fascinated by the 'bird tracks' that he had found that he spent much of the rest of his life haunting the shores of the Connecticut River collecting more of the fossils and adding them to the little museum that he built in his house just downhill of the old courthouse, now called the E.A. Hall building, on what is now Bank Row.

A history of Greenfield notes that Marsh built himself a flat-bottomed boat that he filled with drills, wedges, blasting powder and various other provisions that he used on fossil hunting journeys that took him from the Vermont border down to Weathersfield, Conn.

On one of his trips, Marsh is said to have obtained a slab of stone in Gill that was 10 feet long and 6 feet wide and contained 50 perfect tracks.

The traces were originally formed when dinosaurs moving around the area back in the Jurassic period -- 190 million years ago or more -- stepped on muddy or sandy patches and left their tracks, which dried in the hot sun. The area was subject to periodic flooding, so the tracks were often covered by additional layers of sediment, deposited by floodwaters. Over time, these multiple layers were compacted and subjected to pressure, which hardened them and converted them to sandstone.

By 1851, two years before his death, Marsh's collection consisted of nearly 500 slabs of stone, weighing from one ounce to two tons, that had from one to 50 fossil tracks each. The collection also had hundreds of fossil fish and sea shells as well as mineral samples and Indian artifacts.

When Marsh died in 1853 his collection was sold at auction and was scattered, but some of his fossils remain in area collections.

One of the largest collections of trace fossils in the world can be found at Amherst College and was, to a large extent, acquired by Hitchcock.

It was while he served as a professor of chemistry and natural history, and later president of Amherst College, that Hitchcock developed one of the finest collections of fossil track-ways in the world. Among the Amherst College collections are some of the fossils accumulated by Marsh in his travels along the river.

Hitchcock originally concluded that the tracks had been made by giant birds, which he called 'ornithich-nites.' Later, after finding traces of tail-dragging marks, he attributed them to large lizards and gave them names.

One of the most common tracks found in the Pioneer Valley, called Eubrontes by Hitchcock, appears to be a bipedal theropod (meat-eating dinosaur) that may have had a body 5 to 7 yards long. The animals associated with the Eubrontes tracks are believed to date from the Late Triassic Period and thus lived around 200 to 230 million years ago.

Recently, an entirely new branch of paleontology has formed around the study of trace fossils, and local museums are hopeful that this may result in more intense interest in local collections.

Neumann says that plans for coordinating efforts in the Pioneer Valley to increase tourism are based not only on a general interest in dinosaurs, but also on the possibility of drawing in paleontologists to study local collections and the track-ways that can be found along the river.

Jordi Herold, a developer who owns several properties on Bank Row, not far from where Dexter Marsh's first collection was displayed, is loaning the group a number of his windows to post an announcement of the project. 'We will be putting that up (today)& hopefully with some artwork from local resident Al Dray -- who himself discovered some tracks in his work on the Greenfield Energy Park.'

Sarah Doyle, president of the Friends of the Great Falls Discovery Center, is a key member of the project.

Fossil tracks that can still be found undisturbed can be seen in Northfield, Turners Falls, Holyoke, Springfield and parts of Connecticut.

'You can see tracks at the Great Falls Discovery Center in Turners Falls, at Northfield Mountain and I understand that the Natural History Museum in Springfield will be completely reworking their exhibit,' Neumann said.

The Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association also has a small collection of fossilized dinosaur footprints which can be seen when they open in May.

You can reach George Claxton at: gclaxton@recorder.com or (413) 772-0261 Ext. 279

 

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