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:
“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)