A professor of geology at Amherst College, Edward Hitchcock was also one of the leading paleontologists of the nineteenth century. His interest in the stony remnants of early life was prompted by curiosity about the fossilized dinosaur footprints found throughout the Connecticut River valley. Aeons ago, it seemed, the valley had been home to extremely large creatures, whose descendants had completely disappeared into the mists of time.

Or had they? Hitchcock was one of the key figures in making the link between dinosaurs and modern-day birds. He spotted telling morphological similarities between the reptiles who had left their footprints in the Mesozoic mud of central Massachusetts and the birds that inhabited his Amherst garden. Ichnology of New England, the book he prepared on his paleontological research, is a pathbreaking study of dinosaur morphology. It is also among the very first works published in the United States to use photographs (here reproduced as lithographs) as the basis for some of its illustrations.

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