The Missing Ammosaurus

In the fall of 1884, when he heard that dinosaur remains had been discovered in a stone quarry near Manchester, Conn., Yale University's Othniel Charles Marsh, a pioneering paleontologist, rushed off to see for himself. Sure enough, there were the fossilized bones of a small (7-ft.-long) creature that was later identified as Ammosaurus major, an inhabitant of the area 200 million years ago. But Marsh was already too late. The dinosaur's front half had already been carted away; the brownstone in which the fossils were encased had been cut into blocks and cemented into a new highway bridge.

For years, no one made any effort to recover the missing bones, and the location of the bridge was eventually forgotten. But in 1967, when Yale Paleontologist John H. Ostrom learned that a new highway was being built through Manchester, he decided to revive the search. After surveying more than 60 bridges in the Manchester area, he ultimately narrowed the hunt to a single 40-ft. span across a small brook on the outskirts of town. Last summer, when the highway builders decided that the old bridge's time had come. Ostrom and his scientific team were ready.

As the wreckers went to work, so did the fossil hunters. They hosed and washed more than 300 suspect stones, chipped at them with hammer and chisel and then examined every square inch of visible surface. By the second day, they had found two large blocks, weighing about 500 Ibs. each, that showed distinct fossil markings. Back in New Haven, Ostrom made precise measurements. Though the fossil bones still must be carefully removed from their brownstone encasement. Ostrom is now convinced that the long search is over. One of the visible bones, he says, is an almost sure match to half of an Ammosaurus thigh bone recovered by Marsh 85 years ago.