THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Rip Van Winkle Dinosaur

We have heard many scientific misconceptions over the course of our careers. One of them is that there never were any dinosaurs in the Catskills. That’s a classic half-truth. No there never were any dinosaurs roaming our mountains - not ever. But if you reframe the question then you get a very different answer. You see, the places occupied by today’s Catskills have always been here – right here. Our longitudes and our latitudes have been here ever since the planet earth came into existence, about 4 ½ billion years ago.

The stratified rocks that make up the Catskills started coming into existence about 420 million years ago. That was long before the dinosaurs evolved. But starting about 243 million years ago the dinosaurs did appear. And, yes indeed, for the next 179 million years they walked the Earth. What was it like here in the Catskills all that time? Well, we don’t know, but we can make some guesses. Why is it that we don’t know? That’s because there are no sedimentary rocks hereabouts that date back to that time. Sedimentary rocks from the Mesozoic, the time of the dinosaurs, commonly contain a rich record of plant and animal life. If these once-living beings were buried in all those sands, silts and clays then they should have come to be petrified and preserved. They would speak to us about their times and their ecologies.

But none of that happened, that fossil record simply does not exist. So how is it that we can make guesses. Well, the answer to that is that there is a lot preserved in what is not there! Oh boy, what a thing to say, how can that be? Almost all that post Devonian time was a time when there were no seas, nor marine sediments here in the Catskills. The landscapes were just that – landscapes. There was no sedimentation going on, there was only erosion. But if there were landscapes then there must have been land dwelling animals and that gets us to dinosaurs. Look out the nearest window. That’s a spot out there, a longitude and a latitude. It was here during the Mesozoic. Dinosaurs walked across that spot and it’s likely that there were a lot of them – right where you are sitting. That’s something at you should know – don’t you think?

But, in our many explorations, we have indeed come across a dinosaur – right here in the Catskills – today’s Catskills! It’s actually not a living breathing dinosaur, nor is it a fossil. It’s manmade dino, composed of steel. See our photo. It’s a Brontosaurus or an Apatosaurus; we are not sure. It towers above the ground at the Rip Van Winkle Campground in the town of Blue Mountain. That’s on County Rte. 35 and you can see it from the road. Yep, it’s worth the trip.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.