old stories of tracks and scouted out several new discoveries. By 1836, he had identified seven different types of prints, stamped in the mud that later cemented into brownstone. Hitchcock as well interpreted the prints as bird tracks, but he noted that no existing bird (or other creature) had feet to match the tracks in the rock. Hitchcock proposed, therefore, that the tracks were authored by extinct types of birds, probably large running ground birds - not turkeys or Noah's raven. To quote Hitchcock: "The idea, that they belonged to existing species, can be indulged only by those unacquainted with the history of organic remains . "' The current opinion of most geologists is that the tracks actually weren't made by birds, either extant or extinct, but most likely by small dinosaurs like Yaleosaurus. Yet the modern explanation does not detract from the significance of Hitchcock's original theory. To propose that some life- forms had become extinct was to suggest that change had taken place in the Earth, a very different notion from the static view of earth history that was prevalent in the early 1800s.*

Naturally enough, geologists looked to the Bible for an explanation of how some life forms already could have come and gone in just 6000 years. One popular explanation for the strange prints and bones maintained they belonged to creatures that died in the global cataclysm of Noah's flood, their remains preserved in the sediment deposited from the swirling waters of the 40 days' rain. But according to Genesis, Noah put a male and female of every creature on the Ark so that all species might survive the flood and only the wicked of humanity would perish. The Bible therefore says that no extinctions occurred as a result of the flood, implying all fossils should represent living creatures -which was clearly not the case. For many geologists and philosophers, fossils instead

*In a way, modern geology has gone back to the birds. Based on similarities in bone structure and skeleton design, geologists now believe that birds evolved from the dinosaurs. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that many dinosaurs (including some of those that walked Connecticut during the Mesozoic) were merely early, large, featherless, ground-dwelling birds. The footprints of these dinosaurs no doubt resembled those of modern birds. Again, observations in geology seldom change - everyone has always agreed that the prints looked an awful lot like big bird tracks - but the explanations frequently do.

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