10/06/2026
During my years at FOX 4, Dinosaur Valley State Park near Glen Rose was a place I featured often in my Lone Star Adventures series. It’s also somewhere my family has enjoyed visiting for years. There aren’t many places where you can wade into a Texas river, look down and realize you’re standing in essentially the same spot where a dinosaur walked more than 100 million years ago.
And now Dinosaur Valley has given us another surprise.
Severe drought and unusually low water in the Paluxy River recently gave researchers and volunteers access to areas normally covered by water and sediment. After weeks of work, they documented more than 60 previously unrecorded dinosaur footprints at the park’s Taylor and Baker sites.
Most are believed to have been left by Acrocanthosaurus, a huge meat-eating dinosaur that walked on two legs. Other tracks at Dinosaur Valley are attributed to Sauroposeidon, the enormous long-necked plant eater whose footprints can be more than three feet long. The tracks were made roughly 112 to 113 million years ago, when this part of Texas looked nothing like it does today.
Researchers didn’t simply photograph the newly exposed tracks. Teams spent about four weeks documenting them with photography, video, drones and 3-D mapping so there will be a permanent scientific record after the river covers them again.
And they may have found something particularly unusual.
At the Baker site, researchers discovered claw impressions that could indicate a dinosaur was partially floating in deeper water and pushing itself along the bottom with two limbs at the same time. If that interpretation holds up, the tracks could reveal something new about how these animals moved.
There’s a wonderful historical symmetry to all of this.
A massive flood in 1908 scoured the Paluxy River bed, and the following year 9-year-old George Adams noticed large three-toed tracks in the limestone. Decades later, paleontologist R.T. Bird came to Glen Rose and discovered sauropod tracks. They became enormously important scientifically — the first distinct sauropod trackways ever discovered and evidence that these enormous animals walked on land on all four legs.
Dinosaur Valley State Park eventually opened in 1972 specifically to protect this extraordinary place, and today it is a National Natural Landmark.
That’s part of what I’ve always loved about the park. The Paluxy is beautiful, the hiking is terrific and it’s a wonderful family destination. But those footprints give it something very few places anywhere can duplicate.
