LEANDER, Texas (KXAN) — Amid the devastation to the Sandy Creek area of Travis County, Texas, rare fossilized dinosaur tracks may have been uncovered.
Travis County Judge Andy Brown confirmed the discovery during a Travis County Commissioners’ Court meeting Tuesday. “A volunteer reached out to me and sent me a picture, so they’d found some dinosaur prints,” Judge Brown said.
Photos taken by affiliate KXAN viewer Curtis Stover on July 30 show the footprints. They appear to be slightly bigger than a human foot, with three clawed toes.
Judge Brown said the tracks were likely uncovered during the floods. “These, I think, are seen because so many trees got knocked down around it.”
“If there’s any kind of flooding, any kind of heavy erosion, our events where we’re gonna be finding newly uncovered fossils,” said Matthew Brown with the University of Texas in Austin. Brown, a paleontologist, was brought to the scene to investigate the tracks.
“About 115 million years ago, there were several groups of animals that were walking around what was then a beach, and leaving footprints in the mud,” Brown said.
Tracks like these have been seen before in Central Texas. Among the footprints are several larger ones, likely from plant-eaters, and what appears to be a larger carnivore.
“Acrocanthosaurus is a big meat-eating dinosaur about 30 feet long. It would have looked sort of similar to a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but a little bit more slender and longer in the body,” Brown said.
The UT team will bring their photos back to their lab. They’ll use GPS coordinates to determine if these tracks have been found before.
Meanwhile, debris clean-up will continue in the area. Judge Brown said that an advisor will be on site to ensure that large equipment avoids the tracks.
For Brown, the tracks are a good reminder that these ancient creatures once truly lived.
“It’s easy to forget when you’re looking at a bone on a shelf that this was an animal that was walking around, that was interacting with other animals, that had its own life story.”
If you find tracks or other fossils, you can report them to Matthew Brown with the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School Museum of Earth History.
