The Yale Peabody Museum Dinosaur Footprint Block/Slab from Dinosaur State Park, Rocky Hill, Connecticut

In 2019, West Haven High School in Connecticut donated a large block or slab of rock containing five or six dinosaur footprints to the Yale Peabody Museum. The slab was one of many uncovered in 1966 and 1967 during the exposure of dinosaur tracks at a site in Rocky Hill that became Dinosaur State Park. The footprints are preserved as natural casts on the underside of the arkosic sandstone that formed from sediment that filled in the footprints and covered the actual tracklayer. Preservation of the footprints varies, but one of them is well enough preserved to be assigned to the theropod dinosaur ichnogenus Eubrontes, a second is very likely Eubrontes as well, and a third, smaller, faintly impressed footprint may be Anchisauripus. No two footprints can be assigned to the same trackway, and the prints show different orientations, indicating that they were made by different animals. Thus, some of the natural casts of footprints in the undersurface of tracksite-covering slabs at Dinosaur State Park have the potential to yield ichnotaxonomic information, even if the natural casts can no longer be matched up with the actual tracks of which they are topographically negative copies.