New dinosaur tracks emerge in Texas park as drought causes water to recede #texas #drought #NEWS

New dinosaur tracks emerge in Texas park as drought causes water to recede #texas #drought #NEWS #usanewstoday #usa #usatoday #texasnews #texasdrought

News Content:
Drought Exposes Dinosaur Tracks in Texas!
The 113 million-year-old footprints were largely made by the carnivorous Acrocanthosaurus.
Across the world, vanishing waters from drought conditions have revealed a myriad of previously hidden objects and artifacts in the last couple of weeks alone. In Europe, dozens of Nazi warships appeared in the Danube when water levels dropped. Receding waters in China’s Yangtze River uncovered three Buddhist statues. And human bodies and sunken ships have turned up in Nevada’s Lake Mead. Now, a severe drought in Texas has revealed 113-million-year-old dinosaur tracks in Dinosaur Valley State Park. The prints are usually covered by the Paluxy River, the last time they were visible was in the year 2000, according to BBC News.
"The river dried up completely in most locations, allowing for more tracks to be uncovered here in the park," the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said in a statement, per N P R’s Wynne Davis. "Under normal river conditions, these newer tracks are under water and are commonly filled in with sediment, making them buried and not as visible.”
Most of the tracks belong to the carnivorous Acrocanthosaurus, which lived about 115 to 105 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous period. These dinosaurs walked on two legs and had three toes with claws on each foot. They weighed up to 7 tons and stood some 15 feet tall. The recently revealed tracks are called the "Lone Ranger trackway,” consisting of about 140 tracks from one individual, 60 of which were visible when the river water disappeared, park superintendent Jeff Davis tells BBC News. Other tracks were left by Sauroposeidon, a 60-foot-tall dinosaur weighing 44 tons.
“Those footprints—they’re spectacular because they’re deep,” Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University, tells the New York Times’ April Rubin. “You can see the toenails. There’s more than one kind, and there’s a lot of them.”
All the park’s dinosaur tracks are preserved in limestone, which protects them to some degree, park spokesperson Stephanie Garcia tells the Times. When covered by silt and sediment, the prints are protected, but eventually, officials expect weathering and erosion will destroy them. “We do anticipate and know there to be more tracks that are buried to this day,” write park officials in a Facebook comment. “So while we will lose the tracks we currently have, more will be discovered in the process!”

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