In 1998, Dr. Barbara Smith Grandstaff was on the site of what would become K. Hovnanian’s Four Seasons at Great Notch Spa & Club managing the excavation of dinosaur prints. Below her is the cover of our August 2004 magazine. At left, the print being readied for shipping to the NJ State Museum in Trenton.
from dinosaurs to reptile to insects.” Laskowich had discovered his first dinosaur tracks in 1973 near what is now Yogi Berra Stadium on the campus of Montclair State University. “Before they played baseball,” Laskowich said, “that field belonged to the dinosaurs. There were so many tracks, it looked like they were doing a square dance.” While actually located outside the city overlooking Valley Road, the mountains that once stood on the quarry were of great significance to Clifton. History says that in 1867, Mrs. Charles D. Spencer, while helping a committee choose a name for their home, looked up to the rock cliffs and announced: “There are your cliffs and the name shall be Clifton.” When the city was incorporated in 1917, the name stuck. What Mrs. Spencer didn’t know was buried below those cliffs were prehistoric treasures yet to be uncovered. On that day in 2010, Laskowich looked down and found a foot-long eubrontes track, a fossilized footprint
dating from the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic (an earlier find in May 1998 had also yielded a eubrontes track). Laskowich’s find is believed to be from a dilophosaurus, a dinosaur from the early stage of the Jurassic period. “Providence placed it there,” Laskowich told The Record after the discovery. “When the area was blasted, it could have gotten destroyed. I saw it in a boulder pile, it was upside down. The caterpillar bulldozers might have rolled over the top of these boulders, making this rock useless [scientifically]. There are so very few tracks of that size in New Jersey.” As The Record described in a story of the find: “The image on it is clear and it is on a stone containing lava, sandstone and metamorphic rocks – all factors that can provide an abundance of information about life and conditions then.” What Laskowich discovered was a three-toed claw footprint of what was believed to be a 25 ft., 1,000 lb. monster that lived 220 to 190 million years ago – a monster that was a screenwriter’s dream. Significant City Clifton has always been proud of its history. For some 1,200 years, the Lenni-Lenape tribe of the Algonquin nation occupied the lands in and around Clifton until white settlers arrived in the 1600s. Clifton would become a land of farms, and its owners would play an often forgotten, but still signif-
Clifton Merchant • August 2015
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