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dinosaurs

The bottom of the Paluxy River holds dinosaur tracks from millions of years ago.

In an area of Texas between Austin and Dallas, there's a riverbed that holds real, honest-to-goodness dinosaur footprints, bringing out the 5-year-old in all of us.

How did they get there, you ask? When dinosaurs roamed the area 113 million years ago, the land was at the edge of a tidal sea. Shells from crustaceans that lived in the sea created calcium carbonate deposits, forming a lime-rich mud that was the perfect consistency to preserve the tracks of dinosaurs that occasionally crossed the tidal flats.

Since then, the dinosaur tracks have been preserved under layers of sediment and silt. They were first discovered in 1909 by a young boy named George Adams, who found some odd three-toed tracks in a limestone riverbed. But it wasn't until 1937 that paleontologist R.T. Bird explored the area and recognized multiple trackways from therapods and sauropods whose footprints had been preserved almost perfectly under layers of mud.


Today, these trackways can be viewed in Dinosaur Valley State Park. The Paluxy River regularly has dry spots that allow some tracks to be seen at different times, but, according to ABC News, the drought in Texas has revealed tracks that even the park rangers haven't been able to see in at least 20 years.

To be clear, the footprints don't appear looking like this when the river dries up. Workers and volunteers have to meticulously clear away the dry mud and sediment with water, leaf blowers and brooms so that the definition of the tracks becomes visible in the limestone. But once they do, they look like something straight out of a movie.

The tracks above are found at the Taylor site, one of multiple track viewing sites in the park.

"The Paluxy River has pretty much gone dry this drought," a worker shared in a video posted on the Friends of Dinosaur Valley State Park Facebook page. "What's cool about the river is what you'll find in the river. Sweep a little bit of the dirt and dust away and this is what you'll find…dinosaur tracks. You see claw marks. These are awesome, awesome tracks. They are normally underwater so you normally don't get to see these."

The revealing of these particular tracks is exciting for researchers, who are mapping the dinosaur trackways in the park. Park Superintendent Jeff Davis told ABC News that the tracks at the Taylor site are possibly the longest tracks made by a single dinosaur in North America. Tracks that aren't usually visible in other sites have also been revealed in this drought, enabling people to see exactly where these enormous creatures walked millions and millions of years ago.

Drought isn't a good thing, but dinosaur tracks are an interesting silver lining. For more information about how these tracks came to be, visit the Dinosaur Valley State Park website.

What's the best thing you've ever found on a hike? I can almost certainly guarantee that Jude Sparks has got you beat.

Jude Sparks and his amazing find. Is it uncouth to be a little jealous? Photo via Peter Houde.

In November 2016, then-9-year-old Jude Sparks was hiking with his parents and younger brothers in the desert outside Las Cruces, New Mexico. The kids had walkie-talkies and as Jude dashed away to hide from his younger brothers, he tripped and fell, plowing nearly face first into a weird looking rock.


The rock was mottled, shiny, and dark. It looked like fossilized wood, he told The New York Times. On second glance, though, he realized it wasn't wood. It was teeth.

An entire jawbone, in fact, nearly as large as Sparks himself, was half-buried in the dry, desert soil.

Sparks had stumbled across something amazing — the fossil of a gigantic ancient creature.

At first they didn't know what they were looking at. Sparks' younger brother Hunter thought it was a cow skull. His parents suspected elephant. They snapped a quick cell phone picture and, when they got home, got in touch with New Mexico State University biology professor Peter Houde.

Houde immediately recognized the bizarre jaw as part of a stegomastodon — an ancient elephant cousin and a part of a truly amazing group of animals.

The rock Sparks had tripped on was actually the tip of the elephantine creature's tusk.

[rebelmouse-image 19529496 dam="1" original_size="750x429" caption="A reconstruction of what the animal might have looked like. Image by Margret Flinsch/Wikimedia Commons." expand=1]A reconstruction of what the animal might have looked like. Image by Margret Flinsch/Wikimedia Commons.

Stegomastodons were not elephants, though they did look like them. They're not a type of mammoth either. Instead, they're what's known as a gomphothere, an offshoot of the elephant family tree.

The skull Sparks found was about 1.2 million years old, though other gomphotheres are known to have lived quite recently. The first people to visit North America might have even sunk their teeth into roast gomphothere steaks.

Jude's discovery turned up one of New Mexico's most complete stegomastodons ever.

Professor Houde enlisted about a dozen students to excavate the creature and bring it back to the college for examination, preservation, and hopefully, display.

"I have every hope and expectation that this specimen will ultimately end up on exhibit and this little boy will be able to show his friends and even his own children, 'look what I found right here in Las Cruces,'" said Houde in a press release. They also found the rest of the creature's skull nearby.

Professor Houde shows off the tusk and lower jaw of Sparks' find. Photo by NMSU/Andres Leighton.

Houde said Sparks' timing was critical to their find. Recent rains had washed out the soil around the fossil, letting the top of the jawbone peek out like a hidden treasure. (If you're looking for fossils yourself, after a storm is a good time to go exploring.)

Just as Sparks literally tripped over a a scientific discovery, amateurs and accidents contribute to science all the time.

Discoveries don't just happen at multimillion-dollar laboratories. They're often the result of just a keen eye and curious mind. Velcro, penicillin, and microwaves were all happy accidents.

Of course, it was good that Sparks left the actual excavation up to professionals. Fossils can be surprisingly fragile. Plus, the skull was technically on private land, so the university had to work out permit rights before digging.

It just goes to show, though, if you keep your eyes open, you never know what you'll find right under your feet.

When 4-year-old Jackson started a "dinosaur garden" in his front yard, he never intended to make a political statement.

Jackson's dad, Bill Rebeck, says Jackson was helping a neighbor with his own garden one day outside their Capitol Hill home when the neighbor gave him a handful of plastic dinosaur toys. Overjoyed, Jackson ran home and grabbed a few of his own, then posed them all outside.

The dinosaurs stayed there for months, eventually becoming a staple of the neighborhood.


"People move them around all the time," Bill Rebeck says. "They say they go out of their way to walk by the dinosaurs."

When Bill met someone one day who didn't live anywhere near them, and even she knew about the dinosaurs, he knew the family had reached a tipping point.

"After the election, we were trying to do something with our frustration with our country," Bill says. "My wife said, 'We should have our dinosaurs protesting.'"

After all, people knew them! Despite being inanimate pieces of plastic, Jackson's dinosaurs had a platform.

So whether his wife, Andria, was joking or not, Bill says almost immediately he had four or five great ideas for dinosaur protest signs.

The family quickly got to work.

Photo by Bill Rebeck, used with permission.

The dinosaur protest quickly caught the attention of people in the neighborhood. And then, the world.

A neighbor tweeted some photos of the display, and they went viral in a heartbeat.

Signs like, "Climate change = Extinction" and "Dinosaurs for science!" were a massive hit.

Bill didn't realize what was happening until a neighbor he barely knew knocked on his door and said a reporter was looking for him.

"I think people would laugh at my lack of sophistication on social media," he says.

He also wants to clarify he and his wife aren't forcing Jackson into any political stances. But, as parents, they're very worried about the state of the world.

"I'm torn between this feeling of being horrified about our country and finding it so ridiculous that it's hard to take seriously," he says, adding that he sees Trump's climate change denial as a terrifying red flag.

"For me, the only thing I can do is make plastic dinosaurs talk."

But judging by the reaction on social media, it sure looks like people are listening.