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:
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)