History
Originally, the site was part of a 55 acres (22 ha) stone quarry owned by the Kidde company called Roseland Quarry. In 1968, there was a discovery of dinosaur tracks on the quarry. With the news, a 14-year-old, Paul E. Olsen who lived in Livingston, and his friend Tony Lessa started visiting the quarry to study them. Over a period of a few years, they uncovered more than one thousand dinosaur, animal and insect tracks from the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic period.
When the fate of the quarry site became uncertain, the teens came up with a plan to prevent the site from being developed. They made a cast from a footprint of Eubrontes Giganteus and sent that to President Richard Nixon to get support. Eventually, the quarry was split. The most productive portion was preserved and donated to Essex County Park Commission and named after Walter Kidde. The rest of the quarry was later developed into Nob Hill apartments. In June 1971, the preserved site was registered as a National Natural Landmark.
Currently, the site is now part of the Riker Hill Complex along with Riker Hill Art Park and Becker Park. For many years, the public was allowed to collect fossils at the site, but now access to the site is restricted.
Read more about this topic: Riker Hill Fossil Site
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)