23 November 2003
Dinosaur State Park
If you click on the photographs and then click on the icon, you can view them in full size. In 1966, the state of Connecticut was building a new office building. While they were bulldozing for the new building, they found 2,000 dinosaur tracks in a rock face buried under the ground (Wow!). Instead of building the office building, they built a museum. The museum is a dome which covers 500 of the 2,000 tracks. The state recovered the other 1,500 tracks.
Rocky Hill, Connecticut
Paleontologists have never found a dinosaur skeleton to go with the tracks. The tracks are named separately from known dinosaur species. They are called Eubrontes—that's the Connecticut state dinosaur. Paleontologists think that the dinosaur that made the tracks was a carnivorous dinosaur that was the same size as Dilophosaurus. The tracks are 10 to 16 inches long. The dinosaur had a BIG stride! The tracks are 3.5 to 4.5 feet apart.
Inside the musuem there is a walkway around the tracks and a Triassic Period Diorama. You can also run into Dilophosaurus. If you're not careful...it might bite your head!
There are also displays about dinosaurs and the different time periods when dinos lived. In the summer you can make plaster casts of the tracks. But since we were there in November, we didn't get to do it (note to mom and dad, take us back during the summer!).
We learned what the Connecticut River Valley looked like when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The rock with the tracks is a fossil. The dinosaurs walked over mud along the river 200 million years ago. The mud became fossilized sandstone over a long period of time.
As you walk around the fossil tracks, you hear a tape playing "dinosaur sounds" and thunder and rain sounds. There are streaks of light that look like lightning. Bridget says the first time she went there (several years ago when she was very little), she screamed 'cause the thunder sounds scared her!
In the discovery room we saw a bearded dragon. They are natives of Australia and Papua New Guinea. They are reptiles, but they aren't descendants of or exactly like dinosaurs. But their skin is probaly similar to a dinosaurs. This bearded dragon was named "Rocky." He was very cool.
We also did an activity in the discovery room. We put together a puzzle of a Velociraptor. It was a HUGE puzzle, but it was easy because the pieces were huge too! The whole family worked on the puzzle together.
After we did the puzzle, we went outside. There are a lot of hiking trails in the park, but it was getting late so we didn't go hiking. We did go to the timeline sidewalk. The beginning of earth is at the bottom of the picture on the right. Robert and I are standing at the place on the timeline where humans first appear on earth!
The link to the state park is:
Dinosaur State Park
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This web page was produced by Bridget, copyright 2004.