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About Edward B. Hitchcock:
Like so many early geologists and fossil hunters, Edward B. Hitchcock was a man of religion: he started his career as a pastor of the Congregationalist Church, then joined Amherst College as (variously) a professor of chemistry, natural history, theology and geology. His importance to paleontology is that he was the first person to seriously study dinosaur footprints and trackmarks, collecting thousands of specimens from the Connecticut Valley of New England.
Unfortunately, Hitchcock was born too soon to recognize the footprints as belonging to dinosaurs (which hadn’t technically been "discovered" yet, though their fossils were well known). He attributed the fossilized footprints to enormous birds that roamed North America in prehistoric times--not a bad guess, since we now know that birds are the living descendants of dinosaurs!
