AUSTIN, Texas — When July’s historic floods ripped through Central Texas, they didn’t just sweep away homes and trees.
Along Sandy Creek, volunteers spotted something extraordinary emerging from the mud: a trail of footprints pressed into stone that were 115 million years old.
“The dinosaur tracks at Sandy Creek were uncovered during debris removal after the floods,” explained Matthew Brown, director of the Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections at UT’s Jackson School Museum of Earth History.
They were found by volunteers working with Travis County on private property, and one of our primary goals was making sure heavy equipment wouldn’t damage the tracks. Everyone, the property owners, the county, the contractors, was working together to protect them…