You can just feel it in your bones.
"What you have here is a 41-acre piece that has a very unique fossil deposit from the Cretaceous period, about 110 million years old," says Donald Crevling, an archeologist with the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC).
"This is probably the most significant deposit related to dinosaurs east of the Mississippi River."
The deposits, he explains, were found in the mid 1800s, when the area served as an iron mine that yielded "strange bones." It functioned as an ironworks until about 1920, he adds, before the land shifted for use as a clay mine. The space produced bricks until 2000.
The idea for the unique park was hatched after a Texas developer, the Jackson-Shaw Company, turned the property over to the M-NCPPC, the public agency that owns and operates recreational outlets in Prince George's and Montgomery counties.
Getting up close and personal with clay became headline-grabbing shortly after the park opened in October 2009. Almost as if included in a movie script, a school-age girl from suburban Virginia stumbled across a small bone—perhaps a vertebra from a raptor's tail—that scientists believe was spawned during the Cretaceous period. The piece wound up at the Smithsonian.
Then, almost exactly one year later, lightning struck again.
Aidan Eisenstadt, a 10-year-old from Elkridge, showed up one afternoon with his dad and sister for some serious recon. Not five minutes passed before the precocious youngster hit pay dirt and found a jawbone.
Informed that it was, indeed, rare, he let loose a hearty, "Yeah!" remembers Aidan, whose favorite subject is math, who owns a book called What Is a Fossil? and who religiously tunes into "Dinosaur Train" on TV.
Uncovering the jawbone, he says, involved "just using our hands. It was right on the surface."
But Aidan isn't the only member of the family whose efforts in the muck bore fruit that day. Younger sister Maggie, 3, "found a rock with an imprint of a shell in it."
Not surprisingly, Aidan has his heart and mind set on a career as an entomologist or a paleontologist. His final word to fossil hunters out there: "If you find something," he promises, "then you'll be happy."
"The park is a work in progress," says Peter Kranz, an onsite paleontologist who helps kids find fossilized treasure, adding that “the number and value of the fossils the visitors have recovered is astonishing.
“There are other parks in the area where you can collect fossils, but not from the period the dinosaurs lived.”
Kranz, who holds a doctorate in geophysical science from the University of Chicago, is soon interrupted by a young, wide-eyed digger, who presents the scientist with a potential discovery.
Kranz, wearing a T-shirt labeled “Maryland's First Citizen” and emblazoned with an image of a dinosaur, evaluates the child’s find.
"This is just a stick, not a fossil,” he declares, before telling another youngster, “That's a piece of clay. The clay has to stay. You can't take that."
While visitors munch on dinosaur-shaped cookies and sip bottled water, Elizabeth Dougherty and son Jacob, 10, focus on finding what lies beneath.
"We've been digging very hard and we're sure we've found something," says Elizabeth confidently.
"I have a passion for anything that's old, and this certainly fits into that category."
Dinosaur Park, located on Mid Atlantic Boulevard in South Laurel, is open on the first and third Saturday of each month from noon-4 p.m. The park also offers educational programs. Call 301-627-7755 for more information.
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