What’sinaStep? dinosaur footprints

By jon gerlach

building stone starting in the 1700s. Many foundations and walls around town are made of the stuff, including the famous Stone Wall on the Fredericksburg Battlefield.

At one time it was once just sand, silt and clay that had washed in from the then-younger and much taller Appalachian Mountains. These sediments were deposited along braided stream channels that ran through the Fredericksburg area. Dinosaurs roamed all over this landscape, leaving their tracks everywhere, before the sediment turned to stone, making the footprints permanent Teeth and bones were rarely preserved in this environment, and tracks are all that's left.

Artwork courtesy of the Fredericksburg Area Museum Stomp:FXBC

Fredericksburg Area Museum

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There's abundant evidence that dinosaurs lived right here in Fredericksburg. It's written in the rocks. Not their fossilized skeletons, but trace fossils that record the creatures' comings and goings. Footprints found in the rocks around Fredericksburg have been traced to a dizzying array of dinosaurs including therapods, sauropods, ankylosaurs and ornithopods. They are more fully explored in the scientific article T he Lower Cretaceous Patuxent Formation Ichnofauna of Virginia, by Robert E Weems and Jon M Bachman, which is available online.

Evidence of dinosaurs is found locally in Rappahannock Freestone, our local variant of Aquia Sandstone, which occurs in several outcrops along the Rappahannock River here in Fredericksburg. It was quarried for

Located just downriver from City Dock is the site where scientists found the largest dinosaur footprint in Virginia, around 18 inches long This print was made by a multi-ton sauropod that stretched nearly 60 feet from the tip of its snout to the end of its tail. That's roughly the distance between the pitcher's mound and home plate at the Virginia Credit Union Stadium. Much larger than any land animal alive today.

Casts of dinosaur footprints found at local sites are on display through 2026 at the Fredericksburg Area Museum in the STOMP FXBC dinosaur exhibit sponsored by Fort, LLC. I hope you'll check it out, it's simply amazing.

So … what's in a Step? Here, a moment in time frozen for eternity in the rocks around us.

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