GREENFIELD — Richard D. Little’s armored mud balls have been around for 200 million years, give or take, but the semi-retired geology professor can’t help wondering what will happen to them after he is gone.
Fifty years ago, Little, now professor emeritus at Greenfield Community College, identified the geological formations in a stone wall at Unity Park in Montague’s village of Turners Falls as something left over and preserved from the Jurassic period.
Armored mud balls were “known in the geological literature,” he said, but he was the first to find them in this part of the world.
In 1982, he arranged for the rocks to be brought to the college for study and permanent exhibit. Since their discovery, Little has devoted his academic career to the study of the mud balls and promoting them as part of the region’s distinctive geological profile.
“I’m committed to educating people about these things,” he said. “And it came to me as I got older, I realized, Who is really going to do that once I’m not here?”
That is why he is waging a campaign to have the armored mud ball designated an official Massachusetts state symbol, right up there with the mayflower as the official state flower, the black-capped chickadee as the official state bird, and Boston cream pie as the official state dessert.
It’s not a terrific leap to say the state needs an official prehistoric mud ball because, earlier this year, Beacon Hill recognized Podokesaurus holyokensis, a dinosaur fossil found in 1910 near Mount Holyoke, as the official state dinosaur.
Armored mud balls are themselves a rare geological phenomenon left over from the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs walked the Earth.
They can be formed any time a large chunk of dirt or clay falls into a fast-moving stream. The churning of the current turns it into a smooth, round shape, and little bits of gravel, rocks and debris get packed into the surface of the mud.
“A dinosaur could have watched it go down the stream,” he said.
A mud ball, armored or otherwise, tends to have a short lifespan, which is why there are so few of them, Little said. What makes mud balls special is that, shortly after they were formed, they were buried in sediment and over time the sediment was lithified, or turned to stone. This, in turn, preserved the mud balls for 200 million years as stone within stone.
Little says armored mud balls from the Jurassic period are exceptionally rare. There are maybe 10 locations in the world where they are known to be found, and most of these are hard to reach, according to the professor.
None are as easy to get to as his samples in the Geology Path at the Bob Pura Outdoor Learning Center, located steps from parking lot F at Greenfield Community College.
“These things are just unheard of. There are only a few places in the world where they have ever been found,” he said.
One of those places is the Connecticut River Valley, according to Little. The same point is made by the ballcap on his head, which has a drawing of a mud ball and the words “Jurassic Armored Mud Balls — Only in Franklin County.”
Originally from California, Little got hired at GCC in 1969. Once he arrived in Western Massachusetts, he began to explore the region’s geological scene.
In the early 1970s he went to Unity Park, where he came across some stone abutments for the Old Red Bridge, which spanned the Connecticut River until being torn down in 1938. He said he got out of his car to go for a walk when he came face to face with an armored mud ball in a rock wall 5 feet off the ground.
“I walked up three steps and said, ‘Look! That’s an armored mud ball!’” he remembered.
The rock had come from a Deerfield quarry when the bridge was constructed in the late 1870s. If anyone noticed the particular pattern inside the rock at the time, they failed to write it down.
Little would come to learn a few years later that for all of Western Massachusetts’ rich geological history, he was the first geologist in the region to find one of the mud balls.
“We’ve had a lot of geologists work up and down the Connecticut River Valley, but no one had ever discovered these in (here),” he said. “So I am the discoverer in the Connecticut River valley of armored mud balls.”
On the college’s Geology Path, anyone can see, touch and learn about the armored mud balls, as well as several other local finds, including a glacier-churned quartzite boulder found in Sunderland, a marble boulder found in Lee and lava rocks found in a Deerfield quarry that were left over from the continental drift some 200 million years ago.
Contained inside the 100-foot path near the main campus building, he said, is the history of the entire world.
There are seven other locations throughout Franklin County known to have mud balls, including sites in the towns of Deerfield and Gill. Astute mud ball detectives can even find them in the rocks on the edge of the Stop & Shop parking lot in Greenfield.
A year ago, Little watched with interest as state Rep. Jack Lewis, D-Framingham, introduced a bill to give the Podokesaurus holyokensis its due. The bill was approved by the state Legislature and signed into law in May.
Little said he has reached out to Lewis and to Reps. Sean Garballey, D-Arlington, and Paul Mark, D-Peru. Garballey is a former student of one of Little’s colleagues and mud ball collaborators, Thomas Vaughn, a geosciences lecturer at Northeastern University. Mark’s district includes Greenfield.
No bill can be introduced before the start of the new legislative session in January. In the meantime, Little is ramping up the publicity. Little has a website, and his petition on Petitions.net has so far generated 284 signatures.
Reached for comment, Mark said, “I know Professor Little has been doing a lot of work educating people about the armored mud balls.”
He said Little has spoken to him and to a few other legislators about filing legislation to get them recognized as a state symbol.
“I look forward to working closely with my colleagues in the regional delegation to try to get this special recognition for our area into law,” Mark said.
The state’s list of official symbols is long and varied. If Massachusetts can have an official state polka, wouldn’t there be room for the official state Jurassic armored mud ball?
Actually, Little said, if approved, the mud balls would be the official state “sedimentary structure.” As a technical note, anything preserved in lithified sediment, be it fossils, insects, raindrops or mud balls, is considered a sedimentary structure, he said.
“So, instead of saying the state armored mud ball — which would be OK with me — someone suggested let’s call it a sedimentary structure,” he said.
Little, who still teaches at the college on an adjunct basis, said he has learned over his academic career that there is no better place in the world to study geology than Western Massachusetts.
“This is the best place to study geology because we have such diversity and it’s so accessible,” he said.
People are amazed whenever he explains what mud balls are and how long ago they were created, Little added.
“When they learn the story, and they actually see them, you can just see the excitement and the smiles,” he said. “It’s great science and it’s great education. It’s a really unique look into this little bit of time during the age of the dinosaurs.”
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