Submitted by Leona Baker of the Historical Society of Salisbury Township

Note: Some of the information here has been extracted from Joan Lorenz's "A History of Salisbury Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania." It is Lorenz who, while gathering that history, also gathered together history-minded members of the community to form what became the Historical Society of Salisbury Township, which is celebrating its 23rd anniversary this year.

Lorenz's book stated, "Salisbury Township was created in 1729, however its geological history goes back to the time when the area was an inland sea just beginning to form the limestone trap, quartzite, granite, gneiss and shales that make up our rolling tableland between the Welsh Mountains and the Gap Hills."

Imagine this southeastern region of Pennsylvania long ago as the seas receded. It began to change to a sub-tropical hot and humid climate during the Jurassic Age. The dinosaurs that had lumbered about North America during hotter, drier centuries changed, too. The huge bird-like coelurosaur adapted living in the hot, humid swamps of Pennsylvania. Modern discoveries have revealed that this creature had primitive feathers. In fact, this large early "bird" is considered to be the forefather of even the tiny house wren of today.

When Lorenz was researching her book, she was told about a petrified footprint that had lain in the spring of the Spring Garden Hotel. Years before, John Price from the North Museum, which is part of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, had examined that footprint and declared it was the imprint of an ostrich-like coelurosaur from the late Jurassic Era. Clara Hamilton of Spring Garden then donated the footprint to the museum for safekeeping.

Hearing of this connection to the local distant past, Lorenz, accompanied by Melvin Robinson and John Oberholser, who was a Salisbury Township supervisor at the time, visited the North Museum to look at the footprint firsthand. They also saw the mammoth tooth originally found in White Horse by an unknown person while digging a ditch. This tooth has been identified as being from the Pleistocene Era, which included the last Ice Age, even earlier than the footprint.

The North Museum agreed to create plaster casts of these two bits of the area's ancient history. Today, the historical society displays these replicas in its glass case at the Salisbury Township Building, 5581 Old Philadelphia Pike, Gap, for all visitors. And the North Museum, as part of its student STEM program, has a geology study kit that includes Salisbury Township's mammoth molar.

As residents walk and drive throughout the township, think of the bones of the extinct creatures that still lie beneath their feet. Who will be the next to find a dinosaur bone or tooth?