Paleontology in Pennsylvania
Local Delaware people used to smoke mixtures of fossil bones and tobacco for good luck and to have wishes granted.
Around this time Hadrosaurus foulkii of neighboring New Jersey became the first mounted dinosaur skeleton exhibit at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
[3] During the Late Ordovician Pennsylvania was home to brachiopods, bryozoans, crinoids, graptolites, mollusks, pelecypods, starfish, and trilobites.
A gap in the rock record spans the remainder of the Paleozoic after the end of the Carboniferous because local sediments were being eroded away faster than they were being deposited.
[15] One legend told among the Delaware Indians describes the discovery of a fragment of bone left by a monster that had once been killing people near modern Philadelphia in either Pennsylvania or eastern New Jersey.
When the hunting party brought the piece of bone back to the village, a wise man encouraged them to set out and find more of the monsters remains.
He said that smoking fragments of the bone with tobacco in a small clay spoon could grant wishes like good health for one's children, longevity, or successful hunting.
[16] The area where the Delaware hunters supposedly found the ancient bones is the same general region as the earliest dinosaur discoveries in North America.
[18] One of the earliest notable events in Pennsylvania paleontology was the October 5th, 1787 presentation by Caspar Wistar and Timothy Matlack of a probable dinosaur metatarsal discovered in Late Cretaceous rocks near Woodbury Creek in New Jersey as "'a large thigh bone'" to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
[19] During the Industrial Revolution, Carboniferous-aged coal deposits in Pennsylvania were the sites of serendipitous discoveries of early fossil tetrapod trackways.
Such discoveries generally occur when the excavation of coal mines removes the rock underlying the trackway, leaving it exposed on the tunnel's ceiling.
[20] In 1868 Joseph Leidy worked with artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to mount Hadrosaurus foulkii for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
[25] One of the first major fossil finds of the 20th century in Pennsylvania was the 1902 discovery of dinosaur tracks at a fisher's Quarry near Graterford in Montgomery County.
[23] Another prominent early 1900s discovery was a lower jaw from the amphibian Calamops was discovered in the Late Triassic Stockton Formation at Holicong.
[27] Bradford Willard of the Pennsylvania Topographic and Geologic Survey discovered a dinosaur footprint in 1934 near New Cumberland while Route 111 was being widened.
[27] That same year, Elmer R. Haile Jr. collected Late Triassic fossil footprints from the Trostle Quarry near York Springs in Adams County.
[27] Another major 1937 discovery was the Atreipus prints found in the Late Triassic Gettysburg Formation rock at York Springs.
[28] Early in the mid-twentieth century came the 1952 Whilhelm Bock referred some of the Squirrel Hill footprints to the dinosaur ichnogenus Grallator, while the other reptile tracks he didn't think were dinosaurian.
[26] That same year Bock described the new ichnospecies Anchisauripus gwynnedensis from Late Triassic rocks exposed at the Reading Railroad at Gwynned.
