Dinosaur Footprints Reservation

They were formed during the Early Jurassic period (approximately 200 million years ago) when what is now the Connecticut River Valley was a subtropical region filled with lakes and swamps.

This area was first studied by Edward Hitchcock, the Amherst College professor who advanced the revolutionary notion that rather than being cold-blooded reptiles, dinosaurs were more like a sort of "reptilian bird."

In the 1930s, a Springfield, Massachusetts newspaper poked fun at this notion by referring to the animals that left the fossilized footprints as "the Giant Turkeys of Prof.

[3] The late John Ostrom of Yale University mapped the site and reported finding 134 tracks preserved in the sandstone beds in a seminal paper he wrote on dinosaur gregariousness.

The parallel orientation of the Eubrontes giganteus trackways and the supposed lack of a physical barrier led Ostrom to the conclusion that the large animals were gregarious and traveled in a "herd, pack, or flock."

Smith College professor William J. Miller wrote in his Geological History of the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts:The largest numbers by far have been found at various localities in the general direction of Turner's Falls and South Hadley.

Besides the clearly formed dinosaur tracks, visitors can see imprints left by prehistoric plants, invertebrate trace fossils and delicate ripple marks of an ancient pool preserved in stone near the river's west bank.