Dinosaur Park in Laurel, Maryland serves as an outdoor laboratory where the public can work alongside paleontologists to help uncover the past by finding fossils from the Cretaceous Period.
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The corridor between Washington, DC and Baltimore has one of the most important dinosaur fossil sites east of the Mississippi River. The fossils were discovered in 1858, when miners working in open pit siderite mines found some large bones.
Siderite is an iron carbonate mineral that was used to produce iron in many furnaces located throughout Prince George's County in Maryland. Fossil collecting at the mine site continued until the iron industry died out and mining stopped in the early twentieth century.
In October of 2009, the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission established a dinosaur park and protected the site from development and unrestricted collecting. The park is located in Laurel, Maryland between some industrial buildings and a residential neighborhood.
The dinosaur park is not impressive. It is just a field that has a small roofed exhibit area where dinosaur bones and petrified wood are displayed. The park has no permanent restrooms, but there is a portable toilet on-site. There is also a small picnic area, but the park has no water or other amenities.
There is a hill where visitors can look for fossils. This is a very busy site when a group of school children come to visit. Visitors are not allowed to take animal fossils from the premises, but for significant finds, the name of the person who found it is associated with the fossil. Large fossils are sent to the Smithsonian Institution.
Paleontologist Dr. Peter Kranz gives lectures about the era of the dinosaurs. Dinosaur Park preserves fossils from the early Cretaceous Period, about 115 million years ago. Access to the fossil site is always supervised. Digging is prohibited. Only surface fossils may be collected when the area is open during the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of the month when paleontologists and volunteers help visitors to interpret fossil deposits. The best time to discover fossils is after a heavy rainstorm exposes a new surface.
The group of prehistoric animals known as dinosaurs was first recognized in 1842 by British anatomist Richard Owen based on very fragmentary fossils found in England. However, it was not until more complete dinosaur fossils were found in the United States that scientists were able to reconstruct the appearance and diversity of extinct animals, such as ancient turtles, crocodiles, and several dinosaur species.
The name dinosaur, meaning "terrible lizard", was coined by paleontologist Sir Richard Owen in 1842. Just 16 years later, in 1858, workers in Maryland mining the iron ore deposits discovered fossilized bones that were later identified as belonging to a dinosaur. Christopher Johnston from the Maryland Academy of Sciences named the dinosaur Astrodon for the starburst pattern in the cross-section of its teeth. The species name johnstoni was later added to reflect Johnston's contribution.
Astrodon was an enormous sauropod dinosaur. The name sauropod means lizard foot. Astrodon was a large, plant-eating quadruped with a long neck, long tail, small head, and massive limbs. Adult Astrodons were 18 meters, or 60 feet, long and weighed several tons. They reproduced by laying eggs. The large size of Astrodon was confirmed when a thigh bone measuring six feet was uncovered in 1991 in the dinosaur park deposits.
During the early Cretaceous Period, starting approximately 130 million years ago, a geologic formation consisting of sand, gravel and clay was laid down extending from southern Delaware across Washington, DC and into northern Virginia. Central Maryland was a flat coastal plain with winding rivers. Sharp bends in the rivers became detached and formed curved lakes called oxbows. Dinosaur Park is a remnant of one such oxbow. When the area flooded, logs and dead animals which drifted downstream into the oxbow became trapped and were covered with sediment when the water receded. The carcasses and trees embedded in clay slowly became the fossils that are found in Dinosaur Park today.
The exhibits at Dinosaur park include the bones of various extinct animals of the Cretaceous period. Most of the exhibits have descriptions that provide some scientific background about the items in the collection, and if you have any questions, you can always ask one of the persons taking care of the exhibits.
In addition to dinosaur fossils, Dinosaur Park is an important site for its preservation of fossilized plants. Flowering plants did not exist for most of the time that dinosaurs lived. However, the fossil bearing clay layers that were forming at Dinosaur Park contain some of the earliest flowering plants that appear in the fossil record. The majority of the plants in the Cretaceous forests consisted of cypress-like trees, medium sized tree ferns, ginkgoes, cycad-like plants, low ferns, mosses, horsetails and club mosses. The swampy areas had some plants like water lilies. Similar types of plants are cultivated in the garden at the entrance of the park.
Although visitors are not allowed to take animal fossils from the dinosaur park, they are allowed to take home fossilized wood, which is a crumbly low grade of coal called lignite. A visit to Dinosaur park in Laurel, Maryland is a worthwhile learning experience.
