Preserving Footprints

Turtles and frogs frequent this shallow pond in the wooded Amherst College Sanctuary. In winter, the pond is known to freeze solid enough for wheeled vehicles to plow.

Sometimes the tracks of animals including muskrat and deer can be seen in the mud adjacent to this pond. As the loose sediments harden to become rock (in a process called lithification), the footprints can be preserved and become part of the fossil record. The Hitchcock Ichnology Collection at the Beneski Museum of Natural History exhibits tracks left by dinosaurs and other critters that roamed the Amherst area approximately 190 million years ago.

Hitchcock Ichnology Collection

A Rainy Day in the Jurassic

The slab pictured here records the footprints of a little critter as it trekked across some mud in the rain. After the mud dried and hardened, layer after layer after layer of sediment accumulated on top. Then, many years of deposition and hardening later, the pile of sediment lithified, becoming the sedimentary rock you see here. To learn more about this slab, watch the segment A Rainy Day in the Jurassic on dinotracksdiscovery.org/special/feature/ featuring Beneski’s Museum Educator Fred Venne.