Walking with Dinosaurs in Glen Rose

[GPayton]

So this trip report is a little late in coming, but it's because the week before last was a lot to process! Just saying it was amazing would be an understatement. The Sunday before last I found the Xiphactinus with @Jared C that I've already posted about (and plan to provide an update on as soon as I'm done writing this). On Tuesday I had a job interview at the Waco Mammoth Site, and on Wednesday I got the job! Then I spent the weekend in Glen Rose, joining other volunteers from the Dallas Paleontological Society in helping Glen Kuban clean and map the dinosaur trackways recently uncovered by the horrible drought Texas has been experiencing this summer. 

 

Each of these three by themselves would be a huge highlight on my path to (hopefully) becoming a professional paleontologist, but to have all three happen in the same week? The stars must have aligned! I got more experience doing real paleo work in one week than I've had at any other point in my life, and with the new job and the fish excavation seeming like it'll be soon it looks like there's a lot more to come and I couldn't be happier about it. 

 

On to the trip report! As I said, last weekend I made the trip up to Dinosaur Valley State Park to help with the dinosaur footprints before the rain finally decided to make its way back to Texas and covered them up again. I left before sunrise on Saturday morning so I could arrive before noon while also leaving some extra time to make some stops along the way. I was hoping that I'd have some luck in the Glen Rose formation as my only experience with it before was in exposures of the lower half of the formation in Austin. Unfortunately, I didn't quite do enough research beforehand and ended up skunked - apparently the Upper Glen Rose is notoriously lacking in fossils aside from the famous dinosaur footprints. 

 

For once I was glad that I couldn't help myself when it came to making stops at every good-looking roadcut I saw. The slightly older and much more fossiliferous Comanche Peak formation is exposed almost everywhere you look closer to Waco and I had much better luck there. 

 

Here's a decent-sized Oxytropodiceras I found at one spot but ended up leaving behind since none of the fragments were very large on their own. I still want to find a complete one! 

 

 

By the time I got to Glen Rose I had a nice assortment of irregular echinoids (all Heteraster texanus I believe), gastropods (Tylostoma tumidum and Turritella seriatim-granulata, the latter represented by both external and internal casts), and one bivalve that could be Protocardia that I decided to keep because one side preserved both upper and lower valves and retained the original shell material which isn't very common. Of course, even though I told myself I wouldn't be tempted I did wind up taking home a different Oxytropidoceras fragment. What can I say? I'm a sucker for ammonites! 

 

 

I was hit with a flood of memories when I arrived in Glen Rose. I used to spend a week with my grandparents every summer at their house near Tyler when I was growing up, and they knew how much I liked all things dinosaur-related. When I was seven they took me to Glen Rose for the first time and it completely blew my mind. I liked it so much, in fact, that we went back every summer for the next five years. 

 

I hadn't been back to Dinosaur Valley State Park or the town it calls home in a while before last weekend. A lot was just as I remembered it: the Dairy Queen with its dinosaur mural, the Stone Hut Fossil Shop, and Dinosaur World with its array of concrete (and charmingly inaccurate) dinosaur statues. Even the woefully fossil-barren roadcut that I had begged my grandparents to let me explore once upon a time was right where I had last seen it. 

 

What I definitely didn't remember was the over half a mile long line of cars bumper-to-bumper trying to get into the park! It seemed like the national news coverage of the newly-exposed dinosaur tracks had been bringing people from all over - I saw more than a few license plates that were from out-of-state. As soon as I realized just how long of a wait I was in for I understood why the DPS had asked for people to begin arriving at 9 - both to beat the heat and the lines to get into the park. 

 

One fifty minute wait later and I was finally rolling up to the visitor's center. A sign out front that looked like it had just been set there said that the park was at capacity for the day, and unless visitors had prior reservations they would have to be turned away. I'm sure there were more than a few exhausted parents that were not at all looking forward to the difficult explanation they were going to have to give their dinosaur-obsessed children. 

 

After explaining to a ranger that I was there to help Glen Kuban and the DPS with the track clean-up a very friendly park ranger directed me where to go. On the way to the track site I passed the famous T. rex and Brontosaurus statues that the park was given after their debut at the 1964 New York World's Fair as part of an exhibition put on by the Sinclair Oil Corporation (their logo has been a sauropod for over 100 years!). While many of the tracks at the park are from theropods and sauropods, the park staff are keen to remind visitors that T. rex and Brontosaurus were not the trackmakers. Since their discovery the long-running theory has been that the theropod tracks were made by Acrocanthosaurus and the sauropod tracks by Sauroposeidon. The most famous tracksite is that first studied by American Museum of Natural History paleontologist R. T. Bird, showing a lone Acrocanthosaurus pursuing a herd of Sauroposeidon across the Early Cretaceous coastline. There are also other tracks made by an ornithopod similar to Iguanodon. 

 

 

 

Following the ranger's direction took me through a bumpy stretch of dirt road winding through a pasture on the western side of the park. The track site where I was headed, the Taylor Site, is easily accessible by hiking along the riverbed from the center of the park, but driving there was a lot more difficult. When I finally arrived I could already see crowds of people down in the river. I had never visited this spot before in my previous trips to the park since there were so many other track sites that were more well-advertised, but it seemed like the news coverage was drawing people out to the less-visited areas. 

 

As soon as I made my way down to the riverbed I was blown away. The DPS volunteers had clearly been busy the previous weekend. A huge pile of mud and sediment was stacked to one side, revealing a neat line of giant theropod tracks so pristine it looked like it could have been made only hours before. Thankfully there wasn't an Acrocanthosaurus lurking nearby! 

 

 

Ripple marks were also preserved alongside many of the tracks. 

 

 

I made my way over to the EZ-Up tent some DPS members had set up and introduced myself. It was surreal to meet Glen Kuban, as I remembered reading an article of his when I was only 12 and curious about the "human footprint" controversy. The Taylor Site is actually the exact spot where the misidentifed human trackway is located and so Mr. Kuban generously offered to give me a short guided tour. He was quite the character, full of obvious passion for the tracks he's spent over four decades studying and willing to answer any question asked of him by interested passerby. 

 

I asked him to set me to work and he directed me to the spot where you can see a bunch of people standing in the picture above. It turns out that there is a separate set of tracks preserved very differently from the rest at this location. The tracks were also made by a theropod, but instead of appearing as indentations in the limestone they are instead raised "casts" - the result of infilling with a sturdier sediment than the other tracks close by. When the river eroded away the layers of rock covering up the tracks it also eroded out the weak sediment that had filled many of them; however, the opposite happened to this particular set. The sediment that filled them in after they were first made over 113 million years ago is actually stronger than the limestone that makes up the river bed and is thus much more resistant to the Paluxy River's currents. As Mr. Kuban explained to me, the orange-ish coloring you can just barely see in the picture below is the result of iron present in the sediment that's slowly been oxidizing as it's exposed to the air. 

 

 

I joined several other DPS members who were diligently scrubbing the tracks so that Mr. Kuban could get better photos of them for the grid map he was planning on making of the site. I was told that that was the real reason the effect of the drought had been so significant: all of these footprints had been visible at some point or another, but it had been many decades since they had all been visible at the same time. No "new" tracks were discovered recently despite what the news had been saying. 

 

After several cycles of dumping buckets of river water on the tracks, then sponging them, then scrubbing them, the tracks were finally ready for their headshots, which was then followed by an hour's worth of measurement-taking and documentation. 

 

 

Below is a picture of the dream team at work!  From left to right: Joe (a graduate student from Columbus who knew Mr. Kuban and who flew down just to work on the tracks), me, Murray (a DPS member and volunteer fossil preparer at the Perot Museum in Dallas), and Mr. Kuban, with grid paper and trusty clipboard in hand. 

 

 

I felt guilty not doing much more than scrubbing limestone and holding a tape measure for the rest of the day (not that I wasn't having the time of my life doing it!), as I could imagine just how much work had gone into shoveling and sweeping away all the mud that had been covering the main trackways. Major props to the hard-working members of the DPS that spent the weekend prior doing all that labor in the Texas heat! The tracksite looked amazing, and many of the visitors to the park passing through where we were working agreed. I had to deflect more than a couple of thank yous - what I was doing didn't hold a candle to the mini-excavation that had been done before I ever showed up. 

 

I ended up spending the night in town at the Comfort Inn (behind which forum member @LanceH actually did discover new dinosaur tracks). Although I tried to see them the next morning before I drove back to the park, it seems like the elements haven't been kind to Lance's discovery. The footprints are in a drainage ditch and were preserved in marl that is far weaker than the limestone in the river and so were probably only visible for a couple of years at most. 

 

Sunday was spent sweeping away some of the sediment that had already been moved just in case one of the dinosaur trackways extended to the area underneath it. As it turned out, it did! After that was done I went to another spot in the park with some other volunteers to see if the tracks there needed cleaning as well. This was the tracksite I remembered visiting with my grandparents. It's called the Ballroom because unlike the Taylor Site the tracks here are a mix of overlapping trails that don't form clear pathways. Maybe the Early Cretaceous was characterized by frequent dinosaur dance-offs. The scientific community may never know. 

 

Here's one of the largest Acrocanthosaurus tracks with my size 12 shoe for comparison. The clawmarks at the end of each toe where the theropod dug into the silty earth to keep its balance are still visible after all this time. 

 

 

Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the sauropod tracks, but there were several nice ones at the Ballroom made by a juvenile that showed each of the strange curved toes very clearly. 

 

Speaking of sauropods, the last thing I did in town before I headed back to Waco was try some of the best good old Texas barbecue Glen Rose had to offer at a local joint named Hammond's (not a Jurassic Park reference, but I like to think it was ). Out front was a statue of a sauropod complete with horns, cowprint, and a brandmark that made me ask myself what they would have tasted like if they were still around. 

 

 

And that was it for my weekend! It was incredibly fun to visit one of my favorite places in the world again after so long away, and even more rewarding of an experience to get to do some real paleontology work with people that I was able to learn a lot from. Hopefully it won't be the last time- I think I'd like to make a habit of this sort of thing. Now to get to work on that fish update! 

 

- Graham 

 

Edited September 6, 2022 by GPayton

[Coco]

Very interesting report. Unfortunately your first three photos are invisible, the links are broken. You can repeat your message for a few hours.

 

Coco

[GPayton]

3 minutes ago, Coco said:

Very interesting report. Unfortunately your first three photos are invisible, the links are broken. You can repeat your message for a few hours.

 

Coco

 Thank you! Are they still invisible when you refresh the page? I noticed they didn't upload properly when the post first went up and so I deleted them and then put them back in. They're showing up on my end now but I'm not sure if it'll be that way for everyone else. 

Edited September 6, 2022 by GPayton

[Coco]

This works for the first two, but not for the third link.

 

Coco

[GPayton]

4 minutes ago, Coco said:

This works for the first two, but not for the third link.

 

Coco

 

How does it look now? I converted them to JPGs and reuploaded them.

[Mikrogeophagus]

Nice report! I've been seeing those prints all over the place. Also, congratz on the job at the Mammoth Site! I actually went there earlier this summer and was amazed. If I'm ever driving through Waco I might drop by to say hello.

 

Not to get your hopes up, but I've seen on this forum that people have found Acrocanthosaurus teeth in the Glen Rose Fm I believe somewhere around there as well as other amazing things. With a lot of research, scouting, and luck you could find some crazy stuff though there's no guarantees  . As for Oxytropidoceras, I saw tons of them in the Goodland Fm on a DPS trip. I'm not sure how prolific they are in other localities, but if complete Oxys are your goal maybe try looking in the Goodland.

[GPayton]

I'd love to get the chance to meet another member of the forum from Texas! If you ever plan on coming by again definitely shoot me a message. 

 

2 minutes ago, EPIKLULSXDDDDD said:

Not to get your hopes up, but I've seen on this forum that people have found Acrocanthosaurus teeth in the Glen Rose Fm I believe somewhere around there as well as other amazing things. With a lot of research, scouting, and luck you could find some crazy stuff though there's no guarantees  . 

 

Mr. Kuban actually told me something similar. He said that the rock layers in the riverbed are ordered in a very specific way. Big limestone slabs, like the one that was originally covering up the footprints (and which you can now see the broken edges of at the beginning of the bank in my pictures), and the one that the footprints themselves were preserved in, sandwich much thinner layers of soft marl. Apparently the Acrocanthosaurus material has been found in that particular layer where it crops up in other places. I'd love to explore it myself sometime if I could find one of those exposures on a map. 

 

8 minutes ago, EPIKLULSXDDDDD said:

As for Oxytropidoceras, I saw tons of them in the Goodland Fm on a DPS trip. I'm not sure how prolific they are in other localities, but if complete Oxys are your goal maybe try looking in the Goodland.

 

I read recently that the Goodland is actually the North Texas equivalent of the Comanche Peak Formation, so it makes a lot of sense that both would be loaded with Oxytropidoceras. I have no trouble spotting them as they're all over the place everywhere you look, the problem is finding one that's complete or just recently starting to erode out of the formation. Unfortunately they seem to be crumble incredibly easily after just a couple days out in the weather. Obviously you've had better luck than me! 

[Coco]

1 hour ago, GPayton said:

 Thank you! Are they still invisible when you refresh the page? I noticed they didn't upload properly when the post first went up and so I deleted them and then put them back in. They're showing up on my end now but I'm not sure if it'll be that way for everyone else. 

Yes, it works !

 

Coco

[siteseer]

In case anyone is interested and doesn't know, Roland T. Bird wrote about his time working for Barnum Brown and the American Museum of Natural History in "Bones for Barnum Brown: Adventures of a Dinosaur Hunter (Texas Christian University Press, 1985).  It's a great book about an interesting episode in the history of paleontology.  It's not just about dinosaurs.

[digit]

Wonderful trip report with evocative images. Thanks for taking us along.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Jared C]

Congrats on the mammoth site job! Crossing my fingers you find some Acrocanthosaurus materiel in the future

[PaleoPastels]

On 9/6/2022 at 2:11 AM, GPayton said:

I'd love to get the chance to meet another member of the forum from Texas! 

 
If you ever plan on coming to NSR or Post Oak let me know! Im up here in Princeton, TX (Near Mckinney) pretty close to two great fossil sites and minutes from the Heard.  I also really want to meet other Texas forum members! I remember you said in another thread you want to find shark teeth- I’m someone who can definitely help you find the nice ones. I’m apparently a shark tooth magnet and happy to use my “gift”.  

 

Lovely report and so cool at the activities you got to do! Congrats on the new job, I love to see people succeed in the science field!  I actually have yet to visit Glen Rose dino park but planned on taking my family there next month on their special day to see dinosaur tracks as well as look for ammonites in the Goodland on the way back! I also have yet to go to a DPS meet so good for you getting to help out with that- I’m jealous! Thats amazing.