I love making unplanned, impromptu stops to check out something new. This weekend I was in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts so I opted to make a short detour to check out some real-life dinosaur footprints.
Along Route 5 near Holyoke, the park itself is rather small but easy to access. There is a small parking area and an easy trail taking you down to the sandstone where the prints are preserved. You can touch them (they are all over the ground) but the park asks you not to take casts of them since it can potentially harm the prints.
The larger “Eubrontes” prints were likely made by ancestors of the great Tyrannosaurus rex, standing 15 feet tall and 20 feet long.
Eubrontes prints refers to dinosaur footprints that have been fossilized, originating in the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic periods. Eubrontes prints are identified by their shape as opposed to the animal that made them. It’s not currently known exactly what made them but it is believed to be similar to Coelophysis or Dilophosaurus. (Wikipedia)
It’s one thing to see a giant dinosaur skeleton in a museum, but quite another to see the footprints out in the wild along the roadside. It brought a sense of reality that really impacted me. These things were real, big, and originally standing exactly where I was at as opposed to some “far away land”.
Really cool.
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