In 1968, two Livingston High School students heard rumors of dinosaur tracks in a quarry near their neighborhood. Paul Olsen and his friend Tony Lessa hopped on their bikes and raced to the Roseland Quarry to see for themselves.

"I went ballistic," Olsen later recalled.

Over the next few years, Olsen and Lessa dug up more than 1,000 dinosaur, animal and insect tracks dating back to the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic periods. Olsen made a fiberglass cast of a 200-million-year-old footprint left by Eubrontes giganteus — then mailed it straight to President Richard Nixon, hoping to draw attention before the site could be lost to development.

Olsen landed in Life magazine in December 1970 and received a presidential commendation. Soon after, the quarry's most fossil-rich 16 acres were donated to the Essex County Park Commission and became Walter Kidde Dinosaur Park; the rest turned into the Nob Hill apartment complex. In 1971, the National Park Service designated the site a National Natural Landmark — the same year Olsen graduated from Livingston High School. His fiberglass cast eventually landed in Nixon's presidential library, resurfacing decades later in a 2009 National Archives exhibit alongside a giant Gettysburg battlefield map and Shaquille O'Neal's size 22 sneakers.

Olsen earned his Ph.D. at Yale in 1984 and is now the Arthur D. Storke Memorial Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 — a long way from a teenager biking to a quarry on a rumor.

The 16-acre Dinosaur Park sits off Beaufort Avenue at the Roseland-Livingston border, part of the larger Riker Hill complex — but it's not open for self-guided visits. Access is only available through guided tours run by the Essex County Environmental Center, including Family Dinosaur Discovery Field Trips for kids 4 and up, where families hike a mile to the fossil beds and make clay impressions of real Grallator tracks. Cost runs $40 per family or $12-$15 per person. No summer 2026 dates have been confirmed yet; check with the Environmental Center at 973-228-8776 or essexcountyparks.org.