Dinosaur Valley State Park makes an impression with prints, river for swimming

From Statesman.com: Dinosaur Valley State Park makes an impression with prints, river for swimming
GLEN ROSE — After negotiating a steep trail, sofa-sized boulders and slippery mud, I did what most folks do when they finally spy the footlong dinosaur tracks stamped into the Paluxy riverbed: I stuck my hand in one to see how it measured up.

Yep, the Acrocanthosaurus that made them could have squashed me pretty easily.

That 20- to 30-foot beast, a smaller relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex, made the prints millions of years ago. They remained hidden until 1908, when a 9-year-old boy named George Adams happened upon some of the three-toed tracks in a tributary of the Paluxy River, then reported them to his school principal. About the same time, Charlie Moss, who was looking for the perfect spot to plant a moonshine still, found some more tracks in the main bed of the river.

Can you imagine?

Other than some impressed school kids and moonshiners, and a report by a paleontologist from Southern Methodist University a few years later, the initial reaction to the discovery was relatively subdued.

It wasn't until fossil hunter R.T. Bird found the dinner plate-sized prints of a bigger dinosaur now called the Paluxysaurus jonesi in 1937 that Glen Rose became famous for its dinosaur tracks. Bird theorized that the Acrocanthosaurus was stalking the lumbering, long-necked, plant-eating Paluxysaurus as it strolled along the shoreline, nibbling palm-like trees and conifers.

Lucky for us, the chase (which remains just a theory but makes for fun pondering) was preserved in the mud of a shallow sea that covered Texas 113 million years ago.

Today, you can splash in the Paluxy River at Dinosaur Valley State Park while you ogle some tracks that look like they were made by a gigantic chicken and others that look like someone pressed the sawed-off end of a telephone pole into the ground. Then you can camp, picnic, hike or ride your mountain bike through the 1,525-acre park, which opened in 1972.

The grounds are home to some of the best preserved dinosaur tracks in the world. Some of them were removed and are on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where I saw them during a visit last month. (Other tracks from Glen Rose are on display in a building outside the Texas Memorial Museum on the University of Texas campus.)

Rangers note that the park's collection of trackways is constantly changing — as the river erodes dinosaur prints that are already exposed, it carves away softer stone, revealing new ones.

The trackways — series of prints made by the animals as they moved along the shore — changed a lot of what scientists thought they knew about certain types of dinosaurs.

For one, they learned that sauropods like the Paluxysaurus, a 20-ton, 70-foot school bus of a dinosaur, traveled in groups, with adults on the outside and younger ones in the middle. They also learned that the towering creatures, which had necks up to 26 feet long, walked on all four feet on land. Until then, they assumed they stayed in the surf, where the water could help support the weight of their massive bodies. It's all so perfectly Texan, isn't it?

Things are always bigger in the Lone Star State, so it's no wonder the Texas Legislature proclaimed the Paluxysaurus jonesi the official dinosaur of Texas in 2009.

If you visit the park, don't be fooled by the 70-foot avocado green Apatosaurus and 45-foot mud brown Tyrannosaurus rex that stand guard outside the park's headquarters building.

They aren't exactly native.

They're refugees from the 1964 World's Fair in New York City.

pleblanc@statesman.com; 445-3994


If you go...

Dinosaur Valley State Park is just northwest of Glen Rose at 1629 Park Road 59; 254-897-4588. Entry fee is $5 per day, per adult; free for children 12 and younger. Camping is $25 per night for sites with electric and water hookups; $15 per night for primitive hike-in sites.