Abstract

Coelophysis was an ostrich-like, meat-eating dinosaur that scurried about, leaving crisscrossing trackways on mud flats, in southeastern New York State about 200 million years ago. At that time the region was semi-tropical and hosted a bizarre array of amphibians, reptiles, and plants while experiencing crustal unrest in the form of basin settling, earthquakes, faults, and intrusions and outpourings of lava. This upsetting activity accompanied the split of a previously welded "continent" (tectonic plate), giving birth to separate North American and Afro-Eurasian plates and the still-spreading Atlantic Ocean in between.