Massachusetts State Fossil

Dinosaur Tracks

Adopted in 1980.

The state legislature declared "dinosaur tracks" the Massachusetts state fossil in 1980.

The Dinosaur Tracks in Massachusetts, which were made over 200 million years ago. In Granby, the prints of a theropod dinosaur fifty feet in length from head to tail (the first record of a theropod of such magnitude), were found.

The first dinosaur tracks in Massachusetts were discovered in 1802, and more have been discovered during the subsequent two centuries. The Dinosaur Footprint Reservation at Mt. Tom near Holyoke preserves a particularly good trackway record.

The Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts is one of the world's richest sources of prehistoric dinosaur tracks, fossilized prints that have yielded important clues to how dinosaurs walked, ran, and lived together. But it is also a hotbed of geological theft. The dinosaur tracks here have been systematically looted over the years as poachers take advantage of their remote location to chip the prints out of rock illegally and sell them to unscrupulous -- or unaware -- collectors.

The dinosaur tracks in the Connecticut Valley date from about 180 million to 210 million years ago, left in the mud when the valley was a rift in the ancient supercontinent Pangea. They first came to public attention in the early 1800s, when a 12-year-old farmer's son in South Hadley dug up a reddish rock that had small, three-toed footprints. The prints were first thought to be the marks of ancient birds, and in the 1830s, the president of Amherst College, Edward Hitchcock, began cataloging and collecting them, creating an impressive library of prints now in the college's Pratt Museum. Nearly a century and a half later, his research served as the foundation for a 1972 paper that noted some dinosaurs were probably gregarious and traveled together, according to Patrick Getty, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst studying dinosaur tracks.

While no one can be certain which dinosaurs made the prints, paleontologists believe the largest -- more than a foot in length -- may have been made by Dilophosaurus, a 20-foot-long meat-eater. Many other prints, some made by tiny, cat-sized dinosaurs, are so small they are easy to miss.