BANGOR DAILY NEWS • February 19, 2024
There aren’t any dinosaur fossils and almost no giant mammal fossils to be found in Maine. In fact, there aren’t any fossils to be found in Maine at all, dating from a period of about 360 million years ago until around 1 million years ago. Why? Almost all the fossils were scoured away by glaciers. Prior to that, Maine was subject to near-constant erosion for hundreds of millions of years. The “newer” fossils found in Maine tend to date from the last 12,000 years. They largely consist of shells of marine invertebrates, though a handful of whale, seal and walrus fossils have also been found — as well as a wooly mammoth tooth found off the coast of Scarborough in 1959, and a mastodon tusk found off of Cushing in 2006. There probably were dinosaurs roaming what is now Maine, but all the evidence was scoured away by the slow march of geologic time.