About 120 million years ago in what would become North Texas, a herd of sauropod dinosaurs, adults with their young, wandered along a coastal river delta, leaving footprints in the wet lime sediments.
At a later time, a group of theropods or carnosaurs followed the same path.
Silts and clay filtered in and filled the tracks, hardening into two layers of limestone & shale sediments. The Paluxy River unearthed the preserved trackways about 1 million years ago.
The area is now Dinosaur Valley State Park, one of the best preserved trackways from the Cretaceous. You'll need to wade out to see some of the tracks in the Paluxy, some as big across as 3 ft (1 m).
There were also preserved dino fossils found nearby of Sauroposeidon, previously called Paluxysaurus jonesi (found on the Jones Ranch in the Paluxy Riverbed). The Paluxysaurus is the State Dinosaur of Texas.
It's believed to have been the tallest dinosaur ever to exist & possibly largest, as befits the state that honors it.
It may have been able to raise its neck to 55 ft (17 m) high, as tall as a six story building & it may have weighed 60 tons.
Also nearby you'll see Carl Baugh's 'Creation Evidence Museum', embarrassingly almost as popular as the park. It's here because of a misunderstanding/fraud: what appears to be human footprints within the fresh trackway of the dino, suggesting co-existence of humans & dinos.
It was later that analysis showed that the metatarsal of a theropod plus erosion produced what looks like a human footprint.
Note:
(left) museum when I first visited in 1998
(right) museum today.
The descendant of George Adams, who discovered the "human footprint", admitted that in order to supplement their income during the Great Depression, they were making & selling fake fossils (including footprints), some of which ended up in Baugh's Creation Evidence Museum.
Just wanted to share.
Pictured: historical photo of a WPA worker's child. They brought in WPA workers to cut and transfer parts of the trackway to museums in NY, Austin and DC.
Fin.
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