Joseph Barratt's Grave

A gravestone featuring dinosaur tracks — a curious relic of an eccentric 19th-century naturalist

In the graveyard on Washington Street, the grave of Joseph Barratt features a headstone unusually decorated with two objects: a cast of fossil dinosaur tracks, and casts of fossil tree sections from the local Triassic sandstone. Barratt was a physician and naturalist who spent much of his career studying the geological formations of the Connecticut River Valley and arguing — correctly — that the three-toed tracks found in the local red sandstone were made by ancient reptilian animals.

The gravestone is small and easy to miss, but it is a genuine curiosity: a 19th-century scientist so committed to his subject that he had it inscribed on his memorial. Barratt's fossil track casts influenced later researchers who contributed to the science of paleontology. The graveyard itself is worth a brief visit for its general collection of 18th and 19th-century stones.

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A story
Joseph Barratt was a Middletown physician and naturalist who became obsessed with the dinosaur tracks found in the Connecticut River Valley sandstone. He was among the first Americans to take these tracks seriously as evidence of ancient animals. When he died in 1851, he had himself buried with a gravestone featuring casts of the tracks — an eccentric act of scientific self-promotion that has given him more lasting fame than any of his medical work.

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