Thanks to the drought, Friends of Dinosaur Valley State Park have uncovered as many as 80 new dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy River.
Dozens of new dinosaur tracks have been uncovered at Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose.
If something good can come from a drought it's that it gives volunteers with the Friends of Dinosaur Valley State Park the opportunity to search new ground for evidence of dinos.
"The drought is a really scary thing, of course for everybody, and it's not a pleasant thing usually but there are silver linings," said Jeff Davis, superintendent of Dinosaur Valley State Park. "And so for us, that is the river drops down to bone dry and gives us the opportunity to expose tracks that have never been exposed before."
As the water level in the Paluxy River dropped, volunteers and researchers worked to expose and catalog tracks in areas never before searched.
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Independent researcher Glenn Kuban said droughts over the last two summers have provided access to areas they've never been able to look at before.
Davis said one of the track sites recently uncovered has 70 to 80 new tracks that have never before been seen by humans.
"It's, you know, kind of a once-in-a-lifetime event," said Paul Baker, volunteer with Friends of Dinosaur Valley State Park. "And even though they're out there in 110-degree weather, sweating, you can see smiles on their face and they're just really into it."
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Kuban said they're calling one of the new areas "the ballroom" because there are so many different dinosaur tracks going in every which direction that it looks like an ancient dance floor.
Sauropods, therapods, and duck-billed dinosaurs left footprints in the ancient river bed which has since turned to stone.
"It was a vast tidal flat during early Cretaceous times about 113 million years ago," Kuban said. "And when the tide would go out, it would expose probably miles of moist limy mud. And the dinosaurs would come through, making their footprints, more and more layers built up. And over time, the limey mud gradually turned to limestone."
Volunteers are now working to make casts of the new tracks before they are covered again by rain, gravel and mud.
