Footprints for Sale

Some day soon a Thurberesque suburbanite will come home more harried and pursued than usual, and have a shock. Arrived at his front door, he will notice that during the day his unpredictable spouse has had a large new flagstone laid there. It will not make him feel any better to see on the stone some huge three-toed tracks, a foot or more long. Nobody will have to tell him they are dinosaur tracks--his atavistic hackles will rise at the sight. Inside the house (if his wife has really been doing her stuff) he will be confronted with another petrified spoor, set in a vertical slab under the mantelpiece. At that point in will bounce his wife, to inform him that the footprints are indeed dinosaur tracks, real dinosaur tracks, and cost only $125.

Last week such scenes were becoming possible. For stone slabs bearing dinosaur tracks are actually on the U. S. market. The Nash brothers (George Harlan, 28, and Carlton Snell, 26) of South Hadley, Mass. sell their Triassic wares not only to museums and universities, but also to strong-minded householders. Prices range from $4 to $30 or $40 per track, depending on size and depth.

Shale and sandstone strata bearing dinosaur tracks have been known in Massachusetts' Connecticut Valley region for a long time. The South Hadley bed was found in 1933 by blond, blue-eyed Carlton Nash, who had been fossil-fascinated since childhood. The shale crops out near a wooded, winding road popular with Mount Holyoke College girls and their swains. For six years the brothers kept their secret, then bought two acres from a utility company which owned them. They got to work with broom, sledge and chisel, circulated neat little advertising folders. By last week, nearing the end of their second "season,'' they had removed nearly 2,000 footprints. They would not say how many had been sold, but pronounced business "satisfactory."

The Nashes live in a 200-year-old house with their widowed mother. Their father left them one of the biggest Christmas-tree businesses in the U.S. In winter they stop trading dinosaur tracks, start trading Christmas trees.

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