MANY YEARS AGO, while a "geology student" myself (NYU) and (originally) headed (I thought) for a career maybe in paleontology - I, too, made an interesting fossil find - and not all that far, either, from Attleboro - in fact in the same series of (famous) Triassic Redbeds as the current find. I had stumbled upon a farmer's small, private quarry for slab-stones used about his farm... on the floor of which (never noted by him)... was a splendid collection of exposed Anchisaur tracks! (Anchisaurs were early dinosaurs and stood maybe six feet or so tall - for all the world like big gawky chickens if you will - great bipedal runners... they lived in the Highlands bordering the great trough of the then-Connecticut Valley - itself a sort of Gobi-like desert across which they sometimes ran (just like chickens in the old Minstrel Shows: "To get to the other side") whenever occasional rains wetted the surface and thus the ground recorded their tracks...). Actually, samples of these tracks had been collected as far back as Colonial times in New England (!) - one Asa (?) Hitchcock I think was maybe his name (my records not at hand and my memory going daily...) and he of course in keeping with the Zeitgeist of the times - declared them the tracks of "giant antediluvian birds" and all.. thus preserving general decorum as it were, and the sanctity of Scripture and all that stuff...
I took a number of plaster casts of the tracks I found and filed them away at home. A local woman came by one day (she had seen me going into the woods with a sack of plaster over my shoulder and buckets of water and her curiosity got the better of her...). It turned out (Serendipity has ever been the "key" to my life...!) that she was no less than the daughter (grand-daughter maybe?) of one Williston - a prominent American 19th Century geologist/paleontologist as she gave me to understand - who had once actually lived thereabouts. She told me then that in fact, a town in Florida had been named after him in his honor - which meant nothing particular to me then (geologist OR this misbegotten state...). Now years later, up to my wahzoo in Latins, blacks, 'gators, bugs and redneck yahoos... I can confirm her claim to fame for such a town....
Anyhow, some few years later, now a graduate, with a (then a brand new concept) "Creative Writing" degree from NYU's august English Department - I was hired on as an Editor for Plastics World ... a trade magazine serving that industry. In due course I came to know (a lot!) about vacuum-forming (by jinkies!) and many other techniques for molding and shaping synthetics (what we in the trade - ahem! - called the layman's gnarly "plastics"...)
Sigh...
One day a dude showed up at the office who was part owner of a vacuum-forming plant (I believe up in Mass.). We talked and somehow I told him of my dinosaur track finds. He became quite interested - and wondered if he might borrow one and see if he could maybe vacuum-form it in sheet vinyl and then knock out maybe couple dozen and blank them out of the sheet with a dinker-die and all that - and thus reproduce same in quantity (for a foreseen curio and putative "naturalist" and nature-lovers market, etc. etc.)
Thus was "Plas-Trax" born. I took out ads in rockhound journals and around, and for a while - orders trickled in. I developed a wood frame for the items and in the production mold had scarfed in a legend naming the item, the locale, age, and other particulars. It made an interesting wall plaque. However, somewhat like the famed Sourcer's Apprentice, perhaps - he and I anticipated a flood of entries... and so we turned to bigtime, and began to make plastic dinosaur tracks on a grand scale. Each was framed by hand of course, and boxed and kept ready for mailing to buyers. Somehow the market got saturated early on - and orders dropped way off. But my partner was ever the optimist and kept turning out carloads of ...plastic dinosaur tracks.
Finally we saw the hand writing on the wall (or more properly the footprints climbing up same, perhaps...) and cried: "Enough a-ready!" My partner absconded or vanished or something and I was left with several thousand (maybe??? wha'?) boxed "Plas-Trax". About that time, I married my first wife and had to move out of my parent's home. My dad - who always took dim view of my escapades - announced that I had better take my Plas-Trax horde along with me. But one night when no one was about - I went down into his cellar and moved the whole stash in under his dining room (which was sort of walled-off crawl space he didn't even know about...)
Done deal!
But sure enough - in time he discovered my stash and raised objection! Jeezul! What to do? By now I lived in distant city, had kids, and my "dinosaur days" were fast receding behind me. About that time though (Serendipity again!), the State of Connecticut opened up a new State Park: no less than "Dinosaur State Park" up the Connecticut River somewhere (near Middletown, I think it is (that fading memory again...). The big draw was another quarry some builder had opened with hundreds of these same tracks exposed and the State decided to capitalize on same and stabilize it, and make it a big park.
Complete with concessionaire, no less. (At which point a lightbulb went off in my brain...). I got in touch with the dude running same. Conversation went something like this... "Hi!"..."Hi!" (pause)... "What all you selling there in your concession?."...."Oh, we got pizza, candy bars, gimcracks for the kids - postcards of dinosaurs like what they say once lived here... stuff like that."...(more pause)... "No kidding?" (pause)... then "Hey! How would you like to have about 1000 neatly boxed plastic dinosaur tracks, ready for mailing - you could sell over the counter there?"...(Another pause)... "You kidding, buddy? Hey! If there were something like that around, I could retire young...!"
Done deal...!
And that is how I got out of the dinosaur bizz at last.
At risk of gilding the lily here... I will just add that once long before - while still at NYU - I re-visted a site where we used to go (I went to the Manhattan campus) over the river in New Jersey... it was just over the Geo. Washington Bridge, and was a great big municipal dump and quarry dug into the backside of the Palisade Sill... and it was called the "Granerton Quarry" - something like that. Near the contact zone for the bottom of the Sill, was a layer which contained occasional fossils of Diplurus newarkii... an early member of the Coelacanths or famous lobed-fin fishes (sometimes called the "living fossils" - from the first one ever found dredged up - alive - once off coast of South Africa around 1938 I think it was...). It was these bits and pieces we used to collect and once, on a return trip alone to the site - I had the great good luck to find a very rare whole specimen and remove it! A note even appeared in Scientific American magazine once some time later... and I have it yet in keeping in storage back in CT... and have made arrangements to leave same to the AMNH in NYC when I myself, at last also join that happy fossil band someday...
bernie
(Who, by way of closing these anecdotal wanderings and ramblings, offers up the following stanza from Langdon Smith's epic poem..."Evolution" (1895):