Fred Farris pressed his hand on a brownish gray slab at the Virginia Living Museum, showing the print left by a dinosaur’s foot.
“You can’t ever prove what dinosaur left this,” said Farris, the museum’s strategic planning director. “We don’t have the bones or the body.”
No dinosaur bones have been found in Virginia. But footprints like the one at the museum in Newport News – a three-toed imprint that likely belonged to a fast carnivore – are relatively common.
“That’s their gift to us,” Farris said. “They left their footprints.”
Hampton Roads boasts a host of fossilized plants and creatures not quite as old as dinosaurs but just as interesting. Shells, whale bones and shark teeth from up to 5 million years ago often surface, surprising watermen and beachgoers.
Did creatures from the dinosaur era roam Hampton Roads? Probably, but the evidence is buried deep underground — roughly 300 feet down — Farris said.
Other prehistoric creatures, however, did leave their marks.
Shells, sharks and mammoths, oh my!
One of the living museum’s most remarkable acquisitions is also its most recent.
Much of a mastodon – a large mammal related to mammoths and elephants – was found over several years in Yorktown and is at the museum awaiting restoration.
In 1983, a brick mason was hunting when he spotted a large tooth in a creek, The Washington Post reported. He got a College of William & Mary geologist involved, who soon found other bones from the creature’s ribs, jaw and foot in the same area.
The bones belonged to a mastodon that died at least 12,000 years ago with a toothache, according to the Post story.
Finding more than a tusk – in this case almost a third of the animal – is rare, Farris said.
“I think it’s only the second or third ever found in Virginia,” he said. “It’s not unusual to find ice age stuff here. What’s unusual is to find a bunch of it preserved together.”
Mastodons weighed around the same as an elephant, up to 6 tons, and “ate Christmas trees,” which sprouted all over the then-icy region.
The museum will clean and study the bones before displaying them, likely in a couple years.
When the supercontinent Pangaea formed almost 300 million years ago, the East Coast and Africa were pressed together, creating the Blue Ridge Mountains, Farris said.
As the continents moved apart, lakes formed and dinosaurs trekked through and left tracks in muddy areas. Seawater filled eastern Virginia, which became part of the Atlantic Ocean. For much of its history, Tidewater was underwater, a warm, shallow coral reef only 50 to 100 feet deep.
Walk along a fossil-rich waterway like the James River and you’ll see fossils so common they barely stand out. Riverbanks with a middle layer of protruding shells sandwiched under chunks of sand.
“People don’t know they’re fossils; they see ‘Oh, there’s shells,’” Farris said. “Those are the fossils that make our area so famous.”
The living museum has a few local fossils: an ancient manatee’s rib bone, a whale’s backbone, a species of scallop named for Thomas Jefferson and, of course, shark teeth.
Some sharks, like the famed megalodon, were the size of a school bus and ate whales.
“That’s the shark that swam in your neighborhood.”
Then there are the creatures that lived here more recently, geologically speaking, when glacial periods shifted the area back and forth between land and water.
“Dinosaurs are neat. But these ice age animals are just as incredible,” Farris said. “And those are animals that people did see, people did overlap with.”
Fossils found in Virginia
Lots of fossilized creatures have been found in Virginia. The map below displays the fossil record compiled by scientists with the public Paleobiology Database, and is not comprehensive.
Fossils are listed by their biological family classification. A fossil listed under the family Elephantidae, for example, could include a variety of that mammal family’s species, including mammoths and mastodons.
Click or hover over the geologic intervals and the circles below to learn more about the timeframes and findings in Virginia.
Dinosaur bones
So what about those dinosaurs?
They left lots of footprints in central and northern Virginia when Pangaea broke up and formed valleys with muddy water, Farris said.
While those conditions were ripe for the prints, they were also adverse for preserving bones, said Alex Hastings, assistant curator of paleontology at the Virginia Museum of National History in Martinsville.
“Different kinds of circumstances go into making fossil bones versus a fossil floor,” Hastings said. Virginia had the “right circumstances for a foot record but not great for bone. Typically you don’t have both.”
Those muddy areas, a mix of sediment from lake surfaces, allow deposition quickly and gently enough to lock in footprints but don’t allow for the accumulation of bone, he said.
The footprints discovered in Virginia were mainly left by big two-legged, three-toed dinosaurs. The print on display at the living museum is called Kayentapus. It was likely left by a dinosaur like the Allosaurus, Farris said, but that can never be verified.
Speaking from the excavation site of a dinosaur footprint in Culpeper, Hastings said finding bones and teeth in Virginia is rare enough, but finding a dinosaur bone would be quite a challenge.
“It’s not impossible by any means,” he said. “I’m still holding out hope for Virginia to have a dinosaur bone.”
A window to the past
Ben Richard, a park manager at Chippokes State Park in Surry, said visitors often stroll through the park looking for fossils.
The state’s rules say the fossils must remain on-site, but people can take home any shark teeth they find.
“That’s a pretty popular pastime,” Richard said, whether it’s hobbyists, families or people looking to make some unconventional jewelry.
The park’s office manager, George Lewis, has collected them for years.
It’s a way for people, young and old, to connect with the area in which they live, Farris said.
He tries to teach children who visit the museum that the fossils are more than just a historical trophy.
“They help us interpret the past.”
