Poachers prey on dinosaur trail

GILL -- The crime scene was stark: chisel marks in shale, a pile of discarded stones, and a distinctive gap where a poacher had chipped out a three-toed footprint left by a dinosaur some 200 million years ago.

The Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts is one of the world's richest sources of prehistoric dinosaur tracks, fossilized prints that have yielded important clues to how dinosaurs walked, ran, and lived together. But it is also a hotbed of geological theft. The dinosaur tracks here have been systematically looted over the years as poachers take advantage of their remote location to chip the prints out of rock illegally and sell them to unscrupulous -- or unaware -- collectors.

Worried that online sales are making it easier for poachers to sell their goods, lawmakers, geologists, and police are searching for ways to find these looters and stop them. The state Legislature may vote on a bill this fall to create a commission to study raising fines for fossil theft and come up with ways to better protect the tracks, other fossils, and Native American artifacts across the state.

''These [tracks are] something right out of Hollywood, right out of Jurassic Park, but they're real," said Peter V. Kocot, a Democrat from Northampton, who filed the bill last year. ''These fossils are part of Massachusetts and the history of this country. And right now fines are so low, it is well worth the price to take them."

Dinosaur tracks enjoy a brisk trade among collectors. Though illegal to take from public land, they are legal to take from private lands and be owned. They sell regularly at mineral shows and on eBay, changing hands for anywhere from $20 to tens of thousands of dollars.

With so much money to be made, environmental police and geologists have long been frustrated in their attempts to preserve such a distinctive natural legacy. In 1980, the tracks were declared the official state fossil of Massachusetts. But the fine for stealing them is only about $50, and the tracks, some as tiny as a thumbprint, are in areas so remote that police cannot stand guard over them. Even if police find a fossil track being sold on eBay or at a flea market, it can be almost impossible to prove it was poached from public land. There are no reliable statistics on theft -- the only way to know that public tracks are disappearing are the reports from geologists and teachers who return to the sites year after year, and find some gone.

''They are disappearing from the places that are set aside so our children can look at them," said David Kinner, a state environmental police officer who testified at the State House earlier this year about the issue. Environmental police staffing, he says, is so stretched that officers rarely have time to monitor fossils, which have traditionally been a low priority.

Sometimes the crime is obvious. Eighteen months ago, one poacher was caught with a raptor print worth an estimated $10,000 after a Gill police officer saw him and a friend scrambling up a steep embankment carrying two bags filled with rocks and chiseling tools. The man, Karl Piela of Chicopee, told Sergeant Christopher Redmond he was collecting rocks for a fireplace, but Redmond looked at the rocks, carefully laid in the back of Piela's car, and saw the footprints they bore. Piela, it turned out, sold dinosaur tracks on eBay. But most of the time the poachers are not so easy to find.

The dinosaur tracks in the Connecticut Valley date from about 180 million to 210 million years ago, left in the mud when the valley was a rift in the ancient supercontinent Pangea. They first came to public attention in the early 1800s, when a 12-year-old farmer's son in South Hadley dug up a reddish rock that had small, three-toed footprints. The prints were first thought to be the marks of ancient birds, and in the 1830s, the president of Amherst College, Edward Hitchcock, began cataloging and collecting them, creating an impressive library of prints now in the college's Pratt Museum. Nearly a century and a half later, his research served as the foundation for a 1972 paper that noted some dinosaurs were probably gregarious and traveled together, according to Patrick Getty, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst studying dinosaur tracks.

While no one can be certain which dinosaurs made the prints, paleontologists believe the largest -- more than a foot in length -- may have been made by Dilophosaurus, a 20-foot-long meat-eater. Many other prints, some made by tiny, cat-sized dinosaurs, are so small they are easy to miss.

Not long after the tracks were discovered, a market was born. In the 1800s, as tracks were unearthed in rock quarries, nearby residents began buying them to use in fireplaces or on walkways. In 1927, one of Holyoke's wealthiest families bought two giant slabs of the tracks to help line their driveway -- footprints that still greet visitors to their Wistariahurst mansion, now a museum.

Today, the tracks help support a cottage industry selling tracks legally removed from private land. Nash Dinoland, in South Hadley, is a privately owned roadside attraction. Public officials and nonprofit groups have also set aside areas for the public to view the prints, such as a Trustees of Reservations site in Holyoke and Connecticut's Dinosaur State Park.

Northeast Generation Company, a large landowner along the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts, encourages the public to look at the dinosaur prints and fish fossils on its land, but says it prosecutes any poachers. Piela was caught on the company's land. ''We want the fossils to remain here," said company official John Howard, as he picked his way over layers of shale last week to examine where poachers have chiseled out fossils.

The Massachusetts bill introduced by Kocot last year could be passed as early as the end of the year, and received a favorable recommendation from the joint Natural Resources Committee. It calls for a new commission to come up with better protections for fossils and artifacts. Kocot would like to see the state buy land where some of the more notable tracks are found -- or, at the least, build a fence around them to deter looting. Geologists and paleontologists, meanwhile, just want more signs near fossils warning people that stealing them is illegal and can trigger stiff fines. While some believe advertising the locations of fossils might encourage poaching, Kocot and others believe the public can help stand guard over them.

''These tracks are a treasure for everyone in the valley -- people come from all over to see them," said Mark Leckie, a professor in the department of geosciences at UMass-Amherst. ''And what makes them such a treasure is that they are accessible."

Beth Daley can be reached by email at bdaley@globe.com