back

Artifacts & Documents: Printed Material

"Fossil Footprints," Dexter Marsh, American Journal of Science, November 1848

zoomable artifact image here

Dexter Marsh was finally published in Benjamin Silliman's American Journal of Science in November 1848, when he submitted a letter describing his work with fossil footprints. By this time, he had opened his museum in a room added to his home on Clay Hill in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and Yale's Charles Shepard had provided him with a letter of introduction to an American contact in Russia who might be able to help convey a gift of fossil footprints to Czar Nicholas I. (The attempt was unsuccessful.) Clearly, although he seems to have remained humble, Marsh now saw himself as a man of the world, not merely a manual laborer in small-town New England.

Creator:
Dexter Marsh
Date:
November 1848
Courtesy of:
Archive.Org