Texas Flood Volunteer Unearths Mysterious 35-Foot Dinosaur Tracks Hidden for Millions of Years
The tracks were all found on a piece of private property where, in the 1980s, paleontologists had previously confirmed the presence of other dinosaur tracks.
Plans For Further Study Of The Footprints As Travis County Cleanup Continues
Carl Stover/CNNThis isn’t the first time that dinosaur footprints have been revealed by a natural disaster in Texas.
It is not uncommon for dinosaur tracks to be found in Texas and it is equally common for natural disasters to reveal such footprints. A major drought in 2022 revealed a different set of Acrocanthosaurus footprints near Fort Worth, Texas.
“It’s one of those sort of bittersweet things about our job, is that it’s the cataclysmic events that often preserve fossils in the first place and then also are exposing them,” Brown said.
The floods that swept through central Texas in July claimed at least 135 lives and cleanup is still underway.
The discovery and further study of the dinosaur tracks found in Travis County will not impede these cleanup efforts. Brown and a team of paleontologists from the University of Texas surveyed the tracks on August 5 to better inform authorities on how to continue cleanup while preserving and protecting the tracks.
“That’s the sort of the information that we’ve been providing, just trying to identify positively tracks and then sort of set boundaries around them for the cleanup crews to give them some guidance while they’re working in the area,” Brown explained.
Brown is hoping that further study of the footprints will reveal more about the behavior of Acrocanthosaurus. More specifically, paleontologists hope to figure out if the tracks were made by one dinosaur or a group.
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