“The Bones From the Well”

Well, Well, Well…
The First Scientifically Described Dinosaur Bones found in North America, East Windsor
December 2023

In 2014, I visited The Academy Museum in East Windsor. It’s a slightly better than average town history museum with all the usual stuff, but tucked away in a corner I was startled to find a display about and early 19th-century dinosaur fossil that was found in town.

Here’s what I wrote back then:

I hope you’re sitting down, because I’m about to blow your mind… The earliest verifiable discovery of dinosaur bones in North America was in… East Windsor. For real. Fragments of the forelimbs of a small plant-eating dinosaur that lived early in the of the Age of Dinosaurs were found here. The discovery was (and is) called “The Bones from the Well.” They were first unearthed in 1818, but sat around for decades until famed Yale paleontologist O. C. Marsh declared them dinosaurian.

But no one cared. Not then, and unfortunately, not so much even now. The original bones still languish in a basement at Yale – and despite some efforts of East Windsor locals, that’s where they’ll stay.

Enter Nancy Masters and the town’s Warehouse Point Library. After failing to get the original fossils from Yale, an effort was undertaken to commemorate the important finding. Ms. Masters’ property was the site where the bones were first discovered in 1818, and she served over 25 years on the library’s board.

Don’t feel bad if you were unaware of this hugely important piece of American scientific history. Few in Connecticut, let alone the world, have ever heard of The Bones From the Well.

The original bones are called what they are called because farmer Solomon Ellsworth, Jr. found them while digging a well. Ellsworth couldn’t identify the tiny forelimbs and tail fragments and no one had even heard of dinosaurs in 1818. I have no idea what compelled this guy to collect and protect the fossilized bone fragments and to get them down to Yale though.

The actual fossils have been the subject of continual study from the time they were first unearthed in 1818. They sat unremarked upon until 1896 when famed Yale Peabody Museum curator O. C. Marsh first pronounced the bones to be those of a prosauropod dinosaur—a delay that contributed to the bones languishing in obscurity ever since.

Despite the fact that Benjamin Silliman first published accounts of the discovery of the bones in his American Journal of Science in 1820. Later, Marsh examined the fossils and deduced that they were from a small sauropodomorph, a herbivorous ancestor of large, long-necked sauropods such as Apatosaurus. He dubbed the specimen Anchisaurus, which means “near lizard.” Studies of these fossils have continued and as recently as 2004 paleontologist Adam Yates published another study of them. Yet, the discovery remains fairly forgotten.

Because of the original delay in publication, the honor of having made the first scientific description of dinosaurs went instead to some clown named Sir Richard Owen – an Englishman who was regarded as a mad scientist. Owen first coined the term dinosaur (fearfully great reptile) in 1842, based on fossils found in Britain.

(Okay, to be fair to Owen, he had an extraordinary ability to reconstruct previously unknown animals, as he did with a six-foot tall extinct bird known as Dinornis with nothing more than a six-inch fragment of its leg bone.)

Anyway, back to the present day. Thanks to The Library Association at Warehouse Point and its supporters, such as the aforementioned Nancy Masters, (casts of) The Bones from the Well can be found in East Windsor again–for the first time in nearly two hundred years. The casts were originally displayed in 2007 at the library and a stylized wooden sculpture of the dinosaur created by artist Gordon E. Carter, which has become the logo for the library.

If you visit, the display is to the right just inside the main entrance. A small garden near the library’s parking lot has a slab of stone with several dinosaur footprints visible on its surface and casts are also on display at Dinosaur State Park Museum in Rocky Hill, near the side door to the auditorium. The actual fossils remain in the collection of the Peabody.

Another fun fact if you happen to find yourself at the Warehouse Point Library, is that they have several carousels full of free mass market paperbacks, making this one of my favorite libraries in the whole state. (I realize library books are all free to borrow, but these are free to own if I wasn’t clear.)

Some content above is from Atlas Obscura