Rare sample from dinosaur age found in Wisconsin

River Falls - Millions of years ago, two delicate laurel leaves fluttered to the ground.

Maybe a triceratops brushed its tail against them. Maybe it was a windy day at the eastern edge of the Cretaceous Seaway. Or maybe they were simply at the end of their lives and fell from their perch at a time when the Midwest looked much different than it does now.

The spot where they landed became a time capsule that remained closed until just the right person - a geologist - happened to dig a foundation for a cabin on his western Wisconsin property, noticed the rock and sand looked strange and called the University of Wisconsin-River Falls geology department.

And just like that, the first Cretaceous-period fossils were found in Wisconsin.

This spring, Mike Middleton, a geology professor at the university, and other UW-River Falls scientists presented a paper on the 2007 discovery at a geology conference. The fossils are now part of the geology department's collection at UW-River Falls.

Geologists are atwitter because the Cretaceous period is the same time period when dinosaurs were clomping around these parts. While no dinosaur fossils, bones, tracks, feces or eggs have ever been found in Wisconsin, scientists believe they must have called this area home 65 million to 145 million years ago since it was not underwater.

The reason Dinosaur National Monument is in Colorado / Utah and not Eau Claire or La Crosse is because the giant glacier that inched through here during the Ice Age that ended about 15,000 years ago pretty well carried away any dinosaur evidence.

So barring the discovery of a T. rex skeleton, the recent discovery of imprints left by two leaves from the laurel family is all that experts have of life in Wisconsin during the dinosaur heyday.

Bill Cordua, a UW-River Falls mineralogist, noted that there are very few outcroppings in Wisconsin of the type of rock found at the edge of a farm field in rural River Falls.

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