If you haven’t seen dinosaur footprints before, you may be surprised at how clear they can be, as if they were made yesterday. On the other hand, some are extremely difficult to see, because either they were never perfect in the first place or they have become eroded or broken over time. Tracks were originally created when dinosaurs were walking across the shores of a shallow inland sea. If too wet, the mud would slump back into the depression, just the way it does if you go slogging through a marshy area. If the sand was merely damp, the track would come out shallow and indistinct. But often, the conditions were just right for distinct footprint impressions to dry, solidify, become covered with new layers of sediment, and gradually harden into rock.

Soon after citizens of Greenfield, Massachusetts, first saw tracks in new sidewalk slabs in 1835, they began to notice more and more of them. There had been tracks in church walkways and lying around farmers’ yards all along, but no one had noticed because (1) nobody expected to see footprints in a rock, and (2) they were subtle and very much affected by light: a track in the open may look perfectly obvious one day and seem impossible to find the next, just because the light isn’t at the right strength or angle. When the collection at Amherst College was moved from its old home in a rather dark basement of the old Pratt Museum and into the beautiful new Beneski Museum, it became possible to see delicate markings (in one case, perhaps feather impressions) that had not been seen before, simply because the lighting was so much improved.

You can see dinosaur footprint fossils in the Massachusetts section of the Connecticut River Valley at several places. The oldest and perhaps largest collection anywhere is at the Beneski Museum of Natural History, on the Amherst College campus. It was a professor there, Edward Hitchcock, who made the first scientific studies of dinosaur footprints. This was 7 years before the word “dinosaur” was coined, in England, and decades before the connection between the tracks and dinosaurs was made; Hitchcock always believed he was studying the footprints of extraordinarily large, extinct birds. You can see tracks in situ at the Dinosaur Footprint Reservation near Mt. Tom on Rt. 5 in Holyoke. Also in Holyoke, a grand house museum called Wistariahurst has its driveway paved with dinosaur footprints and fossilized water ripple marks. Memorial Hall Museum, in Deerfield, is housed in the building where Hitchcock and his wife, Orra, taught. An exhibit about the Hitchcocks in a classroom where they taught in the early 1800s includes a few dinosaur footprint fossils. Finally, the Great Falls Discovery Center, Turners Falls, has a fake footprint for visitors to find in its exhibit. They also have a collection of footprint and other fossils that are brought out for special programs.