Liam Driver ’27 shouted in excitement as he picked up a shard of rock out of orange clay and ironstone on an exposed gray hillside.
As his classmates gathered around him, he held out his hand, revealing a sliver of bone in the center of his palm. “That blueish part is what gave it away” as a fossil, he said.
It might have been part of a now-extinct species of lungfish 115 million years ago that, per its name, could also breathe outside of the water. It’s one of many animals and plants that once thrived in a lush early Cretaceous waterway that’s now an unassuming excavation site, tucked away at the end of a long drive of warehouses and office buildings in Laurel, Md.
Luckily for University of Maryland students, the “bone bed”—the most dinosaur fossil-rich site east of the Mississippi River—is just a 25-minute trip up Baltimore Avenue. For Driver and his classmates on a sunny May afternoon, it was a chance to explore a landscape they’d learned about in their historical geology class, taught by Principal Lecturer Thomas Holtz, the program director for Science and Global Change Scholars.