Lot 163

Large Cretaceous Hadrosaur Dinosaur Coal Mine Footprint Cast

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Lot 163
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Large Cretaceous Hadrosaur Dinosaur Coal Mine Footprint Cast
Large Cretaceous Hadrosaur Dinosaur Coal Mine Footprint Cast
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Large Cretaceous Hadrosaur Dinosaur Coal Mine Footprint Cast

Estimate: $2,000 - $3,000

Starting Bid: $1,000

(0 Bids)
by Artemis Fine Arts
June 25, 2026 9:00 AM MDT (In Progress)
Live Auction
686 S. Taylor Avenue
Suite 108
Louisville, CO, US 80027

Ca. 78998000 - 78997950 BCE. North America, Western Interior Basin, Late Cretaceous, Campanian Stage. A natural cast of a hadrosaur footprint, lifted from the ceiling of a Cretaceous coal mine and bearing the trace of a single moment some seventy-five million years deep. The duck-billed maker, likely Prosaurolophus or a closely related hadrosaurine, pressed its broad padded sole into the saturated peat of a Western Interior swamp during the Campanian Stage of the Late Cretaceous. Before the spongy peat could rebound to its undisturbed state, an overbank flood deposited fine silt into the depression and sealed it. Across the long quiet of geological time the peat compressed into coal, the silt hardened into sandstone, and the footprint inverted itself, hanging downward as a sculptural protrusion from the strata above the seam. The Blackhawk Formation of east-central Utah and the Mesaverde Group of western Colorado yielded thousands of such casts during the active mining decades of the twentieth century, the great hadrosaur herds of North America writing their passage in negative.

Coal miners knew these protrusions intimately, calling them 'lumps' or 'carbuncles' long before paleontologists recognized them as biological in origin. They chiseled them down for safety, since an unsupported cast could weigh several hundred pounds and fall without warning. The wide three-lobed outline of a hadrosaur pes is the most familiar morphology recovered from the seams, the fleshy padded foot of these herbivores leaving impressions broader than long, with short rounded digital terminations rather than the slender clawed prints left by theropods such as Albertosaurus.

Hadrosaurs were the great gregarious browsers of the Late Cretaceous, moving in herds along the cypress-strewn swamp forests that fringed the Western Interior Seaway. Their trackways in coal mine ceilings sometimes preserve entire walking columns aligned in parallel, as if the herd traveled at leisurely pace and paused to feed at the bases of standing trees. To examine this cast is to read a moment of behavior held in stone, an artifact that is at once fossil, sculpture, and the trace of a movement long extinguished.

Hadrosaur track casts of this magnitude have grown increasingly scarce on the market. Most fell to the mine floor and shattered before recovery, and the finest examples tend to descend from cabinet collections assembled while the Utah and Colorado coal seams were still in active production. The present specimen carries the gravity of deep geological time and the quiet drama of a single footstep recovered intact across some seventy-five million years of earth history.

Provenance: Private Hagar collection, Wildwood, Missouri, USA

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Item # 202237

  • Condition: Very Good. Very good condition. Repaired with some small parts reattached. Losses and chipping in areas. Otherwise, nice presentation.

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Bid Increments
From: To: Increments:
$0 $299 $25
$300 $999 $50
$1,000 $1,999 $100
$2,000 $4,999 $250
$5,000 $9,999 $500
$10,000 $19,999 $1,000
$20,000 $49,999 $2,500
$50,000 $99,999 $5,000
$100,000 $199,999 $10,000
$200,000 + $20,000