July 21, 2011 Way back in 1839, no one had any idea what
dinosaur tracks looked like. In fact, the word “dinosaur” did
not even exist yet—the term would be coined by the British
anatomist Richard Owen in 1842. Little wonder, then, that tracks
now readily recognizable as belonging to dinosaurs were once
attributed to prodigious birds and other creatures. Edward
Hitchcock, a New England geologist and theologian, established
the study of dinosaur tracks in North America thanks to the
abundance of trace fossils found in the Connecticut Valley.
People had known about these tracks for a long time—the Lenape
Native American tribe even had legends about them—but it wasn’t
until the mid-1830s that they came under the scrutiny of
naturalists who wanted to know how they were made and what sort
of animals they represented. But Hitchcock and other American
naturalists were not the only ones interested in these fossil
impressions. In 1839, while Hitchcock was pondering his tracks
from New England, the German geologist Carl