15 footprints of a 35-foot-long dinosaur that lived in Texas found among flood debris

You don’t usually expect to find the past just waiting to be revealed under flood wreckage, but in Texas this month, that’s exactly what happened. Among splintered trees and the shells of washed-out homes, a volunteer clearing debris stumbled on something stranger than wreckage: 15 giant, three-clawed footprints set into white limestone, each the size of a dinner plate.

Paleontologists quickly confirmed they belonged to a predator resembling Acrocanthosaurus – a 35-foot-long carnivore that prowled the region more than 110 million years ago.

“The tracks that are unambiguously dinosaurs were left by meat-eating dinosaurs similar to Acrocanthosaurus,” said Matthew Brown of the University of Texas’s Jackson School Museum of Earth History, speaking to CNN. Here’s a look at the beast:

How old are the Texas dinosaur footprints?

The footprints are preserved in the Glen Rose Formation, a layer of limestone running through Central Texas that dates to the Early Cretaceous period, roughly 110 to 115 million years ago. Each track measures about 18 to 20 inches long, sunk firmly into what was once a muddy shoreline.

The July flooding that devastated Texas Hill Country – killing at least 135 people – tore away the soil and gravel that had covered the prints for centuries. In Travis County, Sandy Creek swelled to 20 feet, stripping trees from the ground and sweeping houses from their foundations. That violent surge also stripped back the rock, revealing the fossilized path of a dinosaur that last walked there when Texas was a shallow coastal plain.

What happens to the dino tracks now?

Officials face the unusual task of preserving paleontological history in the middle of a disaster recovery zone. Cleanup crews are being told to avoid heavy equipment around the site, to keep the footprints from being crushed in the process.

More work is ahead. Brown and his team plan to return with 3D imaging tools to map the site and determine whether the tracks belong to one animal or several moving together. For now, they serve as a reminder, not the first, of what lies hidden beneath familiar ground.

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