These new and important dinosaur tracks were discovered by
myself (Lance Hall) and Roz Morgan on Friday October 30, 2009 while
visiting Glen Rose's annual "Fossilmania" Event. We are
both members of the Dallas
Paleontological Society. I am also the webmaster for NorthTexasFossils.com
a non-commercial project that documents visually some of our North Texas
paleontology and geology. We didn't stay very long at the Fossilmania event this year because we wanted to explore around Glen Rose for common fossils. We decided to check out a well eroded "drainage ditch" nestled between two commercial properties (Comfort Inn Suites and a large unmarked unfenced lot next to it) and decided to take a peek. We were basically looking for common fossils washing down the ditch. The ditch may have originally been an excavation for a utility line but had been recently widened greatly through erosion. Instead of common fossils we found a dinosaur track! Click Here for a photograph of the locality taken Sept. 26, 2008 BEFORE most of the dirt covering the tracks was washed away. The tracks are located right below the wall in the picture. This photograph was taken through my vehicle window while on delivery. At the time of our discovery only one clearly defined footprint was visible but I questioned it's authenticity given the tourist aspect and location behind a new Hotel. The other tracks were still obscured by dirt. While I can not claim we were the first to see this footprint (probably not) I do know that we discovered them very early after their exposure. Three years earlier in October 2006 the owner of the property (Larry Smith) let people from the Dallas Paleontological Society all over this property with no concern for what they were prospecting for so I do not feel we did anything wrong by looking in a drainage ditch on literally the southwestern border line of this property which was a pending commercial development trying to attract lookers. Because of dire personal events at home I was not able to return to Glen Rose until months later in mid January 2010. |
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On January 13, 2010 the Dallas
Paleontological Society was having a presentation about dinosaurs.
This may sound like the average topic but paleontology involves all
creatures great and small as well as other fields like geology and various
scientific methodologies. This meeting spurred me to revisit
the one track we had left behind in Glen Rose and get digital photographs.
When I arrived in Glen Rose at the ditch I found the amazing dinosaur
trackway show below. Here are more pictures from Jan.
13, 2010 and Roger Fry's documentation on Jan.
24, 2010. (I put water in the footprints to make them more
visible). The hammer in the photographs is solely for scale, not
excavation. While I am hardly an expert on dinosaurs I realized there were two separate "theropod" dinosaur tracks (headed southwest) and possibly some "sauropod" tracks. Here is an excellent illustration that shows what this time period (c. 100-113 million years ago) in Glen Rose looked like and the possible dinosaurs involved. These tracks were created in a massive tidal flats region which encompassed much of the Glen Rose area at this time. The Paluxy River tracks were also created in a tidal flats area. |
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Between January 13 and 15, 2010 I began alerting
many of our local paleontologists and others about this new dinosaur
trackway. The local newspaper was excluded at this time so as to
prevent it getting too public and risk damage or theft of the individual
tracks before real paleontologists could look at them. My attempt
here was to front load all this with legitimate Paleontologists FIRST (not
with self-aggrandizing newspaper stories). I was hoping one of our
local people would want to follow up on these tracks so they could contact
the land owner and make a professional-based appeal to have them studied
and not buried under any pending commercial development. Here is a
list of persons contacted: (updated March 5, 2011)
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This is the TRUE history of these important new
dinosaur tracks! They were discovered in late 2009 and then
documented and reported extensively in January 2010. Here are some rather pointed blog posts about this discovery and the "other guy": |