Dinosaur Tracks
Glen Rose, Somervell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Formed 100,000,000 years ago, tracks of 3 kinds of dinosaurs are preserved in the limestone below Paluxy River. Types include Acrocanthosaurus (a meat-eater), Camptosaurus (plant-eater who left 3-toed bird-like tracks), and Pleurocoelus (a plant-eater who made huge 5-toed prints). For years following their discovery (about 1910), the tracks remained a novelty. When Paluxy River ran low, farmers caught catfish stranded in them. Excavations by a prominent museum and several universities in 1938 brought the tracks to the attention of the world. (1970)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the limestone bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose lie fossilized footprints left by three kinds of dinosaurs roughly a hundred million years ago — a giant meat-eater, a three-toed plant-eater, and a huge five-toed sauropod. Discovered around 1910, the tracks were long a local curiosity; farmers even scooped stranded catfish out of the water-filled prints in dry seasons. Excavations by a major museum and several universities in 1938 finally brought the site worldwide scientific attention.
Why it matters
Glen Rose's trackways are among the most famous dinosaur footprints in the world, a place where deep geologic time surfaces in an ordinary Texas riverbed and helped shape modern understanding of how these animals moved.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Rewind about a hundred million years and the hills around Glen Rose looked nothing like Texas today. In the Early Cretaceous, much of what is now central Texas lay along the edge of a warm, shallow sea. Broad tidal flats and limey mud stretched along the shoreline, and the animals that walked across them left footprints in the soft surface.
Under just the right conditions, those prints were buried by fresh sediment before tides or weather could wipe them away. Over unimaginable spans of time the mud hardened into limestone. Then, much later, the Paluxy River cut down through the rock layers and exposed the footprints again in its own bed.
The human chapter of the story is far more recent. When local people noticed the tracks around 1910, Somervell County was a rural place of farms and small towns, a long way from the world's centers of scientific research. For decades the prints were a local wonder, admired, joked about, and sometimes put to practical use. Wider attention came in the late 1930s, when American paleontology was hungry for dramatic finds and big museums were sending expeditions all over the country.
People & events
Three very different animals walked through this place. Acrocanthosaurus was a large meat-eater, one of the top predators of its time. Camptosaurus, as the marker identifies it, was a plant-eater whose three-toed prints look strikingly like the tracks of a giant bird. The biggest prints belong to the animal the marker calls Pleurocoelus, a long-necked sauropod whose broad, five-toed feet pressed huge depressions into the mud.
Paleontologists have revised how they name the trackmakers since the marker went up, because footprints rarely come with bones attached. That is ordinary science at work, and what the tracks show stays the same: big predators and enormous plant-eaters moving across the same shoreline.
The local chapter has its own charm. For years after the tracks were found, they were a curiosity more than a scientific treasure. When the Paluxy ran low, water pooled in the deep prints, and farmers found catfish stranded inside them, ready to be scooped up. Then, in 1938, a prominent museum and several universities came to excavate. Their work is widely tied to paleontologist Roland T. Bird of the American Museum of Natural History, who documented a famous sauropod trackway here and sent sections of it to museums. That is how a Texas fishing hole became known around the world.
Its place in the American story
Glen Rose's tracks matter because footprints show what skeletons can't: behavior. A bone tells you the size and shape of an animal. A trackway tells you how it moved, how fast it might have walked, and sometimes who it walked with. The sauropod tracks here added real evidence to a long scientific debate about whether these giants could support their own weight on land, or needed water to hold them up.
The 1938 excavations also belong to a larger American story about the great natural history museums, which sent field crews across the country in the early twentieth century and turned regional discoveries into national treasures. Sections of Paluxy trackway left Texas for museum halls, where many visitors who would never see the river got their first look at real dinosaur footprints.
The site also shows how science and public imagination can collide. Over the years some people made claims about the tracks that paleontologists rejected, and the riverbed became a lesson in how evidence gets tested. Today the area is protected and studied, and Glen Rose has become one of the places where Americans of all ages come to stand, quite literally, in the footsteps of dinosaurs.
If you visit
The tracks are in the riverbed, so what you see depends on the river. When the Paluxy runs low and clear, prints can stand out sharply in the pale limestone. After rains the water may cover them, or silt may fill them in. It's worth checking current conditions before you set your heart on a specific trackway.
Go slowly and look for patterns as well as single prints. A line of evenly spaced three-toed impressions is a walking animal, captured stride by stride. The broad, rounded sauropod prints are startling in scale, and kids especially love setting a foot or a hand beside one. Remember the farmers and their stranded catfish, and you'll see why these hollows once looked like part of the river rather than a window into deep time.
Glen Rose works well as a stop on a central Texas road trip, especially for families. Bring sturdy shoes that can handle wet rock, water, and sun protection, and plan time to wander the river and the surrounding hill country. It's one of the rare places where a hundred million years feels close enough to touch.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related events
- · 1938 Paluxy River excavations
Themes & tags
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