Connecticut Dinosaur Trips

Selected excerpts from Great Day Trips in the Connecticut Valley of the Dinosaurs, by Brendan Hanrahan.

Copyright © Perry Heights Press, 2004

This material may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher Perry Heights Press.

WNPR Faith Middleton Show Interview

Dinosaur State Park, Rocky Hill

Go back 200 million years, to early in the Age of Dinosaurs, when the Connecticut Valley was home to thriving populations of dinosaurs, and make your own plaster casts of dinosaur footprints!

Under the dome, you will find hundreds of dinosaur footprints made by mid-sized meat-eating theropod dinosaurs as they hungrily searched this ancient lakeshore, looking to snap up anything that moved.

There are life-like restorations of four dinosaurs like those that known from the valley, including plant-eating prosauropod and ornithischian dinosaurs, and two varieties of theropod dinosaurs.

The park has a remarkable collection of local dinosaur footprints, such as Anomoepus, Otozoum, Grallator, and the state fossil, Eubrontes.

Outside, the park is planted with a nationally ranked arboretum filled with plants like those that dinosaurs would have known.

Of course, you can't go home without making your own plaster cast of a dinosaur footprint. The park's casting area may be the most kid-friendly spot in the whole state, and not even parents can resist its charms!

Yale Peabody Museum, New Haven

The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History is a great place to see restorations of the most spectacular dinosaurs of the past, but it's also a place where leading edge ideas about dinosaurs can be explored.

Recent discoveries show some dinosaurs may have been feathered, like birds. Bird-like features were first recognized in the valley's dinosaur footprints in the 1840s, and the connection between dinosaurs and birds was proven by scientists at the Peabody in the 1970s and '80s.

Similarities between local theropod dinosaur footprints and the foot of an extinct, ostrich-like bird, Dinornis, can be seen at the Peabody.

Bones of the bird's foot, seen in a skeleton at one end of the Great Hall of Dinosaurs, seem a perfect match with Eubrontes footprints at the other.

Also in the Hall is a spectacular display of Deinonychus, a dangerous looking theropod dinosaur. Nearby is a cast of a fossil of Archaeopteryx, the earliest bird, found to have features similar to theropod dinosaurs like Deinonychus.

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