AMHERST, MASS. (WHDH) - A pre-historic find for a paleontology professor here in Massachusetts.
Mount Holyoke College professor Mark McMenamin took home a pile of rocks left over from a construction project at UMass Amherst — with permission — for his wife to use in her garden.
“Sadly I had to take down a 100-foot sugar maple tree that was getting old and threatening the house. So I was splitting the wood one evening and with one of the blows, a rock rolled off the top of the pile and landed at my feet,” McMenamin said. “In the late evening light, I noticed it had a very strange texture compared to the other stones.”
Testing and research uncovered a fossil of an elbow bone that belonged to a 30-foot long dinosaur from the Jurassic period called a Neotheropod. The fossil is roughly 200 million years old.
“They were the first really gigantic land predators on Earth,” he said. “Nothing else had really reached that size up to that point and this one from Amherst seems to be the largest of the lot.”
This is a very significant find that may hold future clues about how these creatures lived in the area, according to McMenamin.
“I just can’t get over that in paleontology, we have these relics of the past that are so ancient and yet are telling us our backstory so it’s a great experience,” he said.
He hopes to build a display at the Granby Dinosaur museum with the fossil as the centerpiece.
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