Dinosaur Highway

Back in July the first stop on our road trip was Dinosaur Valley State Park just outside Glen Rose, Texas, where I picked up an autographed copy of Laurie Jasinski's book on the park entitled Dinosaur Highway. When I started reading it last month I was surprised to discover that it was exactly what is purported to be in the subtitle, "a History of Dinosaur Valley State Park". I had expected it to merely include Natural History, but that was merely the subject of the first chapter! The rest of the book takes the reader from precolonial days through Spanish and then Texas history.

Jasiniski is that rare historian who takes the time to research local history in an exhaustive manner, including the interviews of many witnesses of events from the 20th century. She even has photographs of these now elderly people alongside personal photos they themselves took as the events unfolded studying the dinosaur tracks on Paluxy Creek.

Perhaps I should back up and say something about Dinosaur Valley. The park straddles the Paluxy Creek a short drive to the southwest of Fort Worth. The creekbed is solid limestone covered by shifting sands. This is the Glen Rose Limestone, in which is embedded trackways of at least three kinds of dinosaur footprints: theropods, sauropods and ornithopods. The Glen Rose Limestone is exposed at Paluxy Creek, but the trackways extend for perhaps thousands of km² below the surface. For example, Jasinski relates in the book that, in digging the foundation of the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant, trackways were discovered 50 feet below the surface in the limestone layer.

The other thing about limstone is that it leads to karst topography - sinkholes, caves, blue holes and such. In the park along the creek is one such blue hole, where the cool underground waters meet the warmer ones flowing along the creekbed. I'm not sure how deep it is; we didn't venture a swim. Signage throughout the park warned of the brain-eating amoeba which can enter through the nose being in these waters. This did not stop a number of hispanic families who were also enjoying the park from indulging though. I felt a little bit silly defering to the advice of likely overcautious park staff rather than these locals, but did not let that distract us too much from our scientific mission there.

According to Jasinski, trackways were not the first fossils to interest farmers who came there in the 19th and early 20th centuries. That honor goes to the abundant petrified wood in the area, which was useful as a building material. Dinosaur Highway includes several photos of these buildings, although I did not notice any during our trip there.

The trackways attracted some attention from tourists and theropod footprints where removed from the creekbed to sell for a number of years until R. T. Bird from the American Museum of Natural History came and realized what the locals thought of as potholes where actual saurpod tracks - the first ever discovered! Bird's work there in the late 1930s and early 1940s settled a number controversies about the animals regarding their gait and aquaticness.

The interesting thing is that the work was funded in part by Sinclair Oil. Anyone who's driven around out West will immediately recognize their trademark green dinosaur. In the 1950s the company build some giant dinosaur sculptures for the World's Fair, touring them around the country afterward for publicity. When Dinosaur Valley became a state park, a couple of them were donated to the park to put on display. People found them exciting in the mid-20th century, but today they just look kinda lame standing in a field near the park entrance.

Jasinski also does not shy away from telling the tale of creationists who assert & falsify human tracks in the same Glen Rose Limestone where the dinosaur tracks are found. If you visit the park you can't help but pass their large signs on the road in. It is amazing how far people will bend evidence to suit their beliefs. Alas, it is a facet of humanity none of us are really immune from.

After the founding of the park, Jasinski relates how an old friend of mine enters the story in 1980 to rekindle research on dinosaur footprints. Okay, so I have never met James O. Farlow in person, but his and M. K. Brett-Surman's The Complete Dinosaur was my formal introduction to paleontology back in 1998. Nearly two decades later it is still a reference I keep coming back to. Surely enough, when I picked it up again tonight, there is plenty about the tracks in the Paluxy creekbed, including a photo of Bird's excavation of sauorpod trackways.

Hopefully many others will follow in Jasinski's path writing great local history.