Dinosaur tracks in Texas the latest find as water levels fall

LAS VEGAS • As a punishing drought grips parts of the world this summer, bodies of water have been drying up, exposing submerged World War II relics in Europe, several sets of human remains at Lake Mead outside Las Vegas and even an entire village in Spain.

The latest find as water levels fall: Dinosaur tracks in Texas.

Severe drought conditions at Dinosaur Valley State Park, about 96km south-west of Fort Worth, have exposed dinosaur tracks from around 113 million years ago that were previously hidden underneath the Paluxy River, according to Ms Stephanie Garcia, a spokesman for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

The tracks, which were discovered this month, belonged to the Acrocanthosaurus, which are theropods, or bipedal dinosaurs with three toes and claws on each limb.

The dinosaur would have stood 4.57m tall and weighed close to 7,000kg as an adult. They would have left their tracks in sediment that hardened into what is now limestone, researchers say.

"Due to the excessive drought conditions this past summer, the river dried up completely in most locations, allowing for more tracks to be uncovered in the park," Ms Garcia said.

"Under normal river conditions, these newer tracks are under water and are commonly filled in with sediment, making them buried and not as visible."

The tracks are likely to be buried again by rain this week. But the finding - even if for a brief moment - has excited researchers and the public.

"Tracks being buried under layers of sediment do help protect them from natural weathering and erosion," Ms Garcia said.

Other tracks at Dinosaur Valley State Park belong to a sauropod - a long-necked, small-headed dinosaur, called Sauroposeidon proteles. This species would have stood 18m tall and weighed 44,000kg as an adult.

Dr Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate-palaeontologist and an emeritus professor of earth sciences at Southern Methodist University, saw the tracks last Saturday. He said these uncovered tracks joined paths that were already known, and they now add up to about 150 dinosaur steps.

"Those footprints, they're spectacular because they're deep," he said. "You can see the toenails. There's more than one kind, and there's a lot of them."

Dr Jacobs said the prints signalled there might be more that remained undiscovered. As the river erodes, it will expose more but also erase some others.

Dinosaur tracks collected from the Paluxy River in 1938 are on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

NYTIMES