2017 Spring Field Trip - Exploring a Real Jurassic Park from the Dawn of the Age of
Dinosaurs in the Connecticut Valley -
April 8, 2017
Description: On this field trip, we explored aspects of the paleontology of the early Mesozoic Hartford Basin in central Connecticut and Massachusetts. There was five stops in total, including those at three museums and two field localities. The museum stops included the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College, which houses the largest collection of Early Jurassic trace fossils in the world; the Springfield Science Museum, where we will see diminutive dinosaur tracks and a one-of- kind arthropod body imprint; and Dinosaur State Park, with its hundreds of footprints of wandering meat-eating dinosaurs. Field stops in Holyoke, Massachusetts were on Mt. Tom, where we discussed the geological context of the Hartford Basin; and at Dinosaur Footprint Reservation, where we saw hundreds of dinosaur tracks going in the same direction. At our stops, we discussed some of the research questions posed by the field trip leaders, who are geologists and vertebrate paleontologists with a wide range of interests. Among the questions addressed included whether or not the maker of the large Eubrontes giganteus tracks was a social animal. In addition, we considered the possibility that Early Jurassic terrestrial food chains were based on piscivory and examine direct evidence of live fish swimming through the playa lakes in which the dinosaurs waded. We also explored the use of deep tracks in determining how dinosaurs moved their legs. Finally, we discussed new technologies being used to map large dinosaur track sites such as Dinosaur Footprint Reservation.
Trip Leaders:
- Patrick Getty, Center for Integrative Geosciences, University of Connecticut
- Paul Olsen, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
- Peter LeTourneau, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
- Stephen Gatesy, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University
- Drew Hyatt, Department of Environmental Earth Sciences, Eastern Connecticut State University
- James Farlow, Department of Geosciences, Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne
- Peter Galton, Professor Emeritus, Department of Biology, University of Bridgeport