Tracking Prehistory

The mere idea of a footprint might not strike many as monstrous. Specify a dinosaur footprint, though, and that impression will probably shift. Dinosaurs, after Barney and Dinosaur Train, have become some of our friendliest monsters, lovable pets for the Pebbles and Bam-Bams within us all. Their fossilized prints are tourist attractions; at the Dinosaur Footprints Nature Reserve in Massachusetts, or Dinosaur State Park in Connecticut, visitors view Eubrontes giganteus, tracks from the early Jurassic period, now the official state fossil of Connecticut. Yet despite their usefulness for geological tourism and pedagogical fantasy, dinosaurs remain monstrous: alien and remote, sometimes massive, sometimes ferocious, and always, for all their familiarity, inaccessible.

That footprints can linger for millions of years after their creators have vanished stands as a fearsome reminder of our own impermanence. The estrangement impelled by the prehistoric footprint highlights its monstrosity as a matter of time, and time itself as always potentially monstrous. The track’s deeply sedimented time unsettles through its intrusion into our own—an uncomfortable proximity shadowing endurance with evanescence, duration with annihilation.

The study of prehistoric footprints, a subfield of paleontology, began in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1834, the footprints of an unknown beast, dubbed Chirotherium, were sighted near Saxony. In 1835, hundreds of prehistoric tracks were found in the Connecticut River Valley; analyzed most assiduously by the geologist-theologian Edward Hitchcock, the tracks captivated geologists on both sides of the Atlantic. Fossilized footprints had been sighted before, but their emergence as geological phenomena required prior theorizations of deep time and of extinction by James Hutton and Georges Cuvier, respectively.

Recognizing prehistory’s footprints, then, meant not only reckoning with a massive hole in time but also abandoning both biblical time frames and beliefs in species continuity, undermining ideas central to Western knowledge. Much—perhaps too much—has been made of Christian consternation over how geological time disrupted religious time. More, however, could be said about how prehistoric time disrupted itself, about the challenges posed by its massive unevenness, gaps, and weightiness, often so intense that the modern quest for stability through scientific selfknowledge might seem like a game of chance played in deep time. Prehistory entered the nineteenth century as, in effect, its dispossession.

Is it possible to write a history of a time that dispossesses, one monstrous in its implications? If so, it would draw upon the complex historicity of monstrosity. Cultural-studies accounts endow the monster with an historical specificity: far from transcending time, monsters emerge from and reflect their constitutive conditions. But to say that the monster, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen observes, is “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment” is also to show the multiplicity and uncertainty of moments: the zeitgeist that re/births the monster is itself monstrous, a “Time Ghost” haunted by its own alterity; it “inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again.”¹ It persists, Cohen affirms, without identity, repeatedly returning as an interruption of particular presents; hence the study of monsters “must concern itself with strings of cultural moments, connected by a logic that always threatens to shift.”² If Cohen is right about how the monster displaces the moment it embodies, exposing its not-one-ness, we can recognize the monstrous time revealed by the dinosaur track as invoking, in turn, an interrupted historiography, a gathering of immensely dispersed moments that resist resolution into a singular narrative.

The long-extinct beasts that fascinated the nineteenth century were not the first to haunt the obscurity of the deep past. Dragons and krakens, basilisks and titans competed for that position long before geology entered the field. Yet if there have always been creatures whose origins lie in the dim recesses of time, their nineteenth-century manifestations interrupted the present differently thanks to the fractures they, authorized by science, signaled.

Geologists sought to ameliorate the trauma of the geological timescale by subsuming it under the law of progress, finding confirmation for the present order in the deep past. The process of stratigraphy, developed in the early...