Laurie E. Jasinski, a native of New Braunfels, Texas, is the author of Hill Country Backroads: Showing the Way in Comal County (TCU Press, 2001). She has written park histories for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and numerous features for popular Texas magazines. Jasinski also worked on the New Handbook of Texas and, recently, researched the Handbook Online edition and the Handbook of Texas Music for the Texas State Historical Association in Austin. She and husband, Gary S. Hickinbotham, live in New Braunfels.

Dinosaur Highway

A History of Dinosaur Valley State Park

By Laurie E. Jasinski

TCU Press

Copyright © 2008 Laurie E. Jasinski
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87565-375-4

Contents

Introduction,
Acknowledgments,
CHAPTER ONE: The Changing Face of North Central Texas,
CHAPTER TWO: Fountains of Youth,
CHAPTER THREE: Making Tracks,
CHAPTER FOUR: Work and Play on Paluxy "Creek",
CHAPTER FIVE: The Dinosaur Hunter and the Texas Village,
CHAPTER SIX: In the Footsteps of the Dinosaurs,
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Fight for Dinosaur Valley,
CHAPTER EIGHT: To Capture a Park—Landscape and Riverscape and Trailway,
CHAPTER NINE: Growing Pains for Dinosaur Valley State Park,
CHAPTER TEN: Maintaining the Dinosaur Highway,
"The Dinosaur Waltz",
Notes and Other Trackways,
Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

The Changing Face of North Central Texas

The crystal green waters of the Paluxy River dance through a carved valley of limestone cliffs that rise above the stream. In the distance, cedar-clad hills profile the rugged landscape, checkered with broad grassy pastures tossed here and there like blankets. For decades the river influenced the lives of the valley's inhabitants with its currents both peaceful and destructive. The waters also exposed the secrets of the riverbed and conjured memories of a long-ago day by revealing dinosaur footprints in the stone—tracks of time. Today visitors splash and play and marvel along this ancient Texas trail that treads through a winding curve of the Paluxy River in a place called Dinosaur Valley State Park.

The park lies on both sides of the Paluxy in Somervell County about four miles west of Glen Rose. Located in North Central Texas about fifty miles southwest of Fort Worth, this park consists of 1,588 acres of river valley and former ranchland. A mild annual average temperature of 65 degrees and rainfall of 32 inches belie extremes in weather that folks have periodically witnessed. Summers sometimes suffer lengthy droughts that greatly reduce the flow of the Paluxy, while during winters, the region may see an occasional dusting of snow.

Geographically, Dinosaur Valley State Park and the Glen Rose vicinity fall within a transitional zone in the Lampasas Cut Plain, part of the Grand Prairies region of Texas. Nestled between the Eastern and Western Cross Timbers, historically the landscape held grassy prairies as well as hardwoods like oak, elm, pecan, walnut, and cottonwood along valley streams, with some groves of scrubby mountain cedar and blackjack. Rugged stairstep topography typifies the terrain, composed of layer upon layer of sedimentary rock. Much of this part of Somervell County consists of limestone of the Lower Cretaceous Glen Rose Formation.

Author John Graves, describing his own "Hard Scrabble" Ranch near the Paluxy, summed up the stark beauty that the territory offers. "To a layman who cares about country," he wrote in Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land, "most of Somervell regardless of what the maps call it looks like a northern counterpart of the Texas Hill Country...." Indeed this Northern Hill Country, a land of transition with woods to the east and plains to the west, has served as a significant crossroads of travel and communication through the ages and ultimately a site of settlement and development.

Dinosaur Valley State Park holds a unique distinction in the Texas State Parks System. Clues to some of the ancient creatures that traversed the territory are literally set in stone here. The dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy riverbed and its tributaries tell of a very different landscape more than one hundred million years in the past, set in the Cretaceous Period of the Mesozoic Era. The Cretaceous Period stretched from approximately 144 to 65 million years ago and included the height of the reign of the dinosaurs.

During the Early Cretaceous, shallow seas alternately submerged and exposed the lands of North Central Texas. As the waters marched and retreated across the flat terrain, different sediments settled in a methodical process that would be evident in the abundant marine fossils discovered by curious hillside picnickers and Sunday explorers in modern times.

The region that would include the future park was part of a broad coastal plain whose edge advanced and receded over time to the ebb and flow of the waters as they gradually reclaimed and relinquished the shoreline. This seaside-scape offered inlet bays, offshore reefs, tidal lagoons, and salt marshes. A green prehistoric forest of conifers, ferns, and small flowering plants rose inland from the beach. And on a day, perhaps about 113 million years ago, "one day not lost to the past," wrote Louis Jacobs in Lone Star Dinosaurs, the ancient creatures walked across the coastal flats. Their feet sank into fine-grained limy mud—firm, but not too hard or too soft—and left perfect footprint impressions. The tracks were exposed long enough to dry and harden and then were quickly infilled and buried under gentle sediments, thus preserving this part of their journey. Millions of years later that "day" (or probably series of days) would live again when flooding river waters would scour away the various rock layers down to that particular stratum of Cretaceous rock, known as Glen Rose Limestone. Three-toed theropod tracks and large elephantine-like sauropod tracks formed an ancient trackway.

The carnivorous theropods of Early Cretaceous North Central Texas stalked along on two three-toed feet. Though paleontologists and ichnologists (those who study footprints and other trace fossils) cannot proclaim with total certainty the specific dinosaur, based on examinations of the prints and the discovery of fossil remains in Oklahoma and Texas, the Glen Rose tracks probably belong to Acrocanthosaurus. This intimidating meat eater left footprints up to two feet in length. Bird-like feet, tipped with sharp menacing claws, supported an imposing animal, perhaps thirty feet long nose to tail and weighing two to three tons. The mobile Acrocanthosaurus traveled an extensive range and used its tail as a counterweight to its large torso and head. The threatening carnosaur harbored deadly efficient serrated teeth and sported a bony ridge that covered the length of its spine. This distant relative of Tyrannosaurus was a formidable predator on the coastal plain.9

Four-legged sauropods also slogged over the ancient terrain. These animals (commonly called brontosaurs in the past) were herbivorous, and the most likely Paluxy track maker was probably Paluxysaurus. Paleontologists have excavated the fossilized bones of sauropods in North Central Texas, and in 2007 the new name of Paluxysaurus was proposed for these animals. The massive creatures, the largest of the Texas dinosaurs, could be fifty feet long and thirty tons in weight or more. The sauropod lumbered along on thickly padded shock absorbent feet—smaller, roughly horseshoe-shaped front feet and much larger, rounded, clawed hindfeet often thirty-six inches or more in length. The extended necks and large bellies of the plant eaters facilitated foraging on trees and other flora in their environment.

A few of the footprints left in the Paluxy riverbed have caused some speculation that they represent a third type of dinosaur, an ornithopod. These were also plant-eating creatures in Texas during the Cretaceous Period. Some of the three-toed prints resemble the ornithopod tracks found in other parts of...