Dinosaur footprints

Dinosaur Valley State Park is a national park service area hosting easily viewable dinosaur footprints. Much recommended! The park is in Glen Rose, Texas, about 130 km from the Dallas Forth Worth airport, about 1.5 hour drive if there's no traffic. 

I was at the airport because of coming back from a conference in Vancouver, and to my surprise my flights included an 11 hour layover. Well, that was just enough time to rent a car, drive, explore, come back, get through security, etc. Surprisingly tight schedule, in fact, for some reason. The only extra time I took was a lunch break and a bit of shopping.

It was a nice drive to the park, even got to admire the modern day dinosaurs roaming on Texas' fields:

The park is a large area with multiple locations where there's potential to see some tracks. Most (or all?) of the tracks are in a riverbed of a present day river that runs through the area. 113 million years ago the area was a muddy beach of a retreating ocean, and the footprints on that beach petrified onto rock that we can see today. 

The river makes things a bit challenging, however. When I visited they indicated that the footprints may not be visible. There had been rain, and increased water levels and general muddiness of the water hides many of the footprints.

Still, I was able to see and even step my bare foot into some of the river bottom footprints. Such a magnificent experience!

Best location I found for the footprints was at N 32.253129 W 97.818631, short walk from one of the park's parking lots.

The official home page of the Dinosaur Valley State Park is here. See more information also here. The wikipedia entry is here, also worth reading for the hoax around founding also human footprints in the same area, purportedly proving that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. This is obviously not true.

Access to the park is just 8$, well worth it obviously. You may wish to reserve a visit, the park visitor limits may fill in easily. Also, as noted the viewing conditions vary.

It is also interesting that just before entering the park, over-religious Texans have put up a "Creation Evidence Museum", this one purportedly showing evidence of divine creation of the earth six thousand years ago. Again, not so... there may have been creation, but clearly there's been evolution on earth for a much longer time, including periods of animals such as dinosaurs that are extinct today.

Thanks to Tero (and indirectly, Robert and Jean) for telling me about this place!

The park:

Photos of footprints:

Texas driving:

More exploration stories in the Planetskier blog series at Blogspot. The photos and text (c) 2024 by Jari Arkko.