Over 300 million years ago, long before the time of the dinosaurs, giant amphibians hopped along the sandy shores of Pennsylvania. At least, that was what Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter James Ross explained to readers of the newspaper’s November 28th, 1948 issue.

The inspiration for the report was a set of strange tracks found in the Elk County woods not far from Pittsburgh. Bizarre scratches in stone had been discovered a week and a half before by Mike Kosinski, brother to preparator James Kosinski at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and it was by that route that J. LeRoy Kay – a paleontology curator at the institution – found out about the weird traces.

Exactly what sort of creature created the tracks