Fossilized Stone Arrives At Rapid City Museum

A 3-ton slab of fossilized stone containing footprints of theropod dinosaurs has arrived in the lobby of The Journey Museum in Rapid City.

A large glass door had to be removed to get the 7-square-foot, 14-inch thick limestone slab into the lobby.

After leaving a ranch at the eastern edge of the Black Hills to move to Custer in the 1930s, the slab remained stationary for the next 60 years before moving to the Rapid City Regional Airport, then to a South Dakota School of Mines and Technology lab. It's on loan by the school's Museum of Geology.

The tracks made by the three-toed, carnivorous dinosaur date back to the Cretaceous period and may represent a shoreline of the Western Interior Seaway.