Photo Credit: Courtesy of Donald K. Creveling
Imagine dinosaurs roaming where a local park now stands with swamps and forests blanketing the landscape instead of slides and swings. Sound unrealistic? In Laurel, Md., it is not too far of a stretch. In fact, those who don’t believe it may want to search for the fossils to prove it at the Dinosaur Park.
The bedroom community located between Washington D.C. and Baltimore sits on a unique geological formation called the Arundel Formation, which is composed of iron-bearing clays that were formed 110-million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, when the area was delta-like, similar to the environment of southern Louisiana today. Historically a source iron ore, the clays were mined and the ore was processed as cast iron and steel. Laurel’s powerful Snowden Family made their wealth from the iron industry from the late 1600s until the mid-1800s.
But along with the iron ore was another resource—dinosaur bones!