THE COASTAL PACKET: Why you don't find dinosaur bones in Maine

Sunday, June 7

Why you don't find dinosaur bones in Maine

Jaime McLeod, Sun Journal - Dinosaurs medium and small were likely here in Maine, but evidence is nonexistent thanks to the glaciers.

... No dinosaur fossils have ever been discovered in Maine, and it’s likely none ever will.

“There probably were dinosaurs here — they’ve been found as close by as Nova Scotia and western Massachusetts — but we have no way of knowing for sure,” says Dr. David Work, chief scientist and curator of geology at the Maine State Museum and associate editor of the Journal of Paleontology.

The reason for the dearth of dinosaur remains is a nearly 300-million-year gap in Maine’s fossil record.

The glaciers responsible for carving out Maine’s distinctive craggy landscape during the Pleistocene Epoch — a period between about 2.5 million and 12,000 years ago — abraded more than 400 feet of earth from the state’s surface, scouring away a massive chunk of geological history in the process.

As a result, all of the fossils found in Maine so far date from either the past 12,000 years, after the last glacier receded, or from more than 400 million years ago, during a warm, fertile age called the Devonian Period.

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