Connecticut River Valley trackways

The finding has the distinction of being among the first known discoveries of dinosaur remains in North America.

They were popularly regarded as bird footprints and they were so identified by the professor of natural history, later president, at Amherst College Edward Hitchcock, beginning in 1836 in articles in the American Journal of Science and in his final work Ichnology of New England (1858).

Huxley believed that birds evolved from an ancestral ratite, and the large Massachusetts tracks seemed to support this.

However, when Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1861 it became apparent that the Connecticut River remains could not be those of birds and have since been reidentified as dinosaurs.

The Moody trackway is now on display at the Amherst College Beneski Museum of Natural History, along with Hitchcock's substantial collection of other specimens.