Dinosaur State Park and Arboretum
Near Hartford, Connecticut
In nineteen sixty-six, a state construction crew was grading land in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, for a new building, and their bulldozer hit rock. Beneath the surface was a sandstone slab covered in hundreds of three-toed dinosaur tracks, left by a three-toed meat-eating dinosaur, probably something like Dilophosaurus, more than two hundred million years ago. Workers stopped the project, scientists arrived, and the site became Dinosaur State Park in nineteen sixty-eight.
A geodesic dome now covers roughly five hundred of the tracks, among the largest such track sites in North America. The park also offers something unusual: you can make your own plaster cast of a real dinosaur footprint to take home. Connecticut in the Jurassic was a warm floodplain at the edge of a rift valley, and the animals that crossed it left their mark in rock that was waiting, just a few feet down, for someone with a bulldozer to find it.
