Volunteers clearing the aftermath of historic floods in Texas found something completely unexpected amid the mud and debris: dinosaur tracks from an ancient era.
Paleontologists say that the huge tracks, 15 in total, are likely to have belonged to a large predator that lived 115 million years ago.
An Ancient Predator Revealed
Travis County in northwest Texas was ruined by early July 2025 floods that killed 135 people. The 18-to-20-inch prints, each bearing three claws, were found in the county’s Sandy Creek area, imprinted into pitted limestone formations unearthed by the tides. The tracks may have come from Acrocanthosaurus, a roughly 35-foot-long bipedal carnivore.
The tracks date back to around the same time as Acrocanthosaurus, which lived roughly 115 million to 105 million years ago during the early Cretaceous period.
With a Greek name meaning “high-spined lizard,” Acrocanthosaurus was around 40 feet long and 13 feet tall. With these dinosaur dimensions, the predator was smaller than Tyrannosaurus Rex, but also lived 50 million years earlier.
At the time, Acrocanthosaurus was North America’s largest predator. It weighed about as much as a bus. Paleontologists have recovered only a few fossil specimens of Acrocanthosaurus, making this discovery even more significant.
Read More: 66 Dinosaur Footprints Found on Rock at an Australian High School
New Technologies Reveal Fossil Secrets
The prints were found laid in a criss-crossing pattern that a group of dinosaurs may have imprinted while on the move. The site is just 200 miles south of the fossil hotspot Dinosaur Valley State Park, and dinosaur tracks are a semi-regular finding in the region.
While dinosaur researchers had previously studied the Sandy Creek area, there are no more advanced technologies to aid in their fossil finds.
According to Matthew Brown, a paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin, the latest tools would hopefully reveal more secrets from the new prints.
The colossal storm surges seen in July prompted the normally arid Sandy Creek to swell more than 20 feet, washing away gravel, dirt, and trees that covered the tracks.
Brown has been advising local officials on how to preserve the unearthed prints best — he told CNN that he has heard reports of other dinosaur tracks revealed by the storm. He intends to return to the area soon with his imaging devices to determine precisely how many ancient beasts left the prints that would outlast them by millennia.
Read More: 113 Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Tracks Uncovered In Texas Drought
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. Paleobiology and geographic range of the large-bodied Cretaceous theropod dinosaur Acrocanthosaurus atokensis
- CNN. The Texas floods washed away debris and dirt. They also uncovered 100-million-year-old dinosaur tracks
