Dinosaurs began to be recognized by paleontologists as the creatures that they were in the early 1800s. In 1895, the Provincial Annals included a note about the local community and the scientific field of paleontology:
“These few days past the men have been removing two large slabs from Avenue side walk. One is destined for the Johns Hopkins’s University, the other for our own cabinet. Prof. Mitchell of the Mountain [Mount St. Mary’s University] is the one who is securing these singular geological specimens. They have long been objects of the Sisters’ curiosity & comment as they promenade up and down the Avenue in summer evening recreation. They bear the impression of many feet of different kinds & sizes, pre-historic creatures that lived O many & many age ago! The Professor’s interest in our quarry from where these slabs were taken led him. His opinion is that all this land round about ages & ages ago formed an estuary, the mountains were its shores.”
The slabs documented by Dr. James A. Mitchell were the first dinosaur prints from Maryland to be announced in a scientific publication.
In the spirit of this time period, the cabinet referred to was a “cabinet of curiosities,” sort of a predecessor to a modern-day museum exhibit. It was housed in the Burlando Building of St. Joseph’s Academy, the school thatthe Daughters operated. Later, it was on display, in a deep historical anachronism, in the Stone House on campus where the community had begun in 1809.
Dr. Mitchell made sketches of the slabs. Then the slabs went missing.
In 1990, a group of maintenance workers discovered a slab in a crate with fossilized footprints in an old barn on campus. The search was sparked by Dr. Peter Kranz, who was tracking Mitchell’s work from 100 years before. In 1998, the slab was put on permanent display in the Maryland Science Center. Before it was moved from Emmitsburg to Baltimore, the Sisters and employees in Emmitsburg could see it for themselves, privately and up close.
The Maryland Science Center performed their own analysis on the footprints, identifying them as coming from:
“several dinosaurs who walked across it during the Triassic period, 210 million years ago. Scientists are not certain exactly which type of dinosaur made the tracks….They were small, plant-eating dinosaurs, about the size of a turkey. They were ornithischian dinosaurs, and had hip skeletons somewhat like that of birds [This time period in the 1990s is when the theory of dinosaur to bird evolution started to receive wide acceptance]. They usually walked on two legs (‘bi-pedal’), but occasionally dropped down to walk on four legs part of the time.”
With the level of excitement of such a find, it was natural to assume that the same tracks that Mitchell and the Sisters set eyes on in the 1890s had been rediscovered. However, based on his sketches, this is not the same slab, but an entirely different set of fossilized dinosaur tracks. It appears the slab once sent to Johns Hopkins has been lost as well.
The discovery and transfer of the fossils were widely covered in the local media, and they went on display at the Maryland Science Center in the aftermath of the first two Jurassic Park films. They remain on display now in the “Dinosaur Mysteries” exhibit.
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