Drought Discloses Dinosaur Tracks in Dry River, Texas

Summer 2022 broke weather records all around the world. The hottest summer ever in the UK and many states of the US, and the continent of Europe suffered through two separate heat waves which caused devastating drought, raging wildfires and an increase in heat-related mortality.

Measuring water levels in rivers, lakes and tributaries gives climate scientists an idea of how temperatures of just a few degrees higher affect the natural landscape, plants, and animals and also our most precious and essential resource, fresh water.   

One side effect of extreme drought is the uncovering of monuments, carvings, and fossils that were previously submerged. Whether ancient, prehistoric, or more modern, the exposed monuments are fascinating and can contain valuable clues to the climate of the past.    

No discovery is more exciting than the dinosaur tracks upended this week in Glen Rose, Texas. On the arid stone bed of the Paluxy River is a secret trail of huge footprints and claw marks made by a roaming Acrocanthosaurus, out for a walk some 113 million years ago.

The Acrocanthosaurus once strode the riverbed, standing over 15ft tall and weighing in at 7 tonnes. The massive beast was a bipedal predator, meaning using rear legs to walk, and an apex predator, hunting smaller dinosaurs like sauropods, some 50 million years before the T-Rex.

Hundreds of theropod tracks were found in the area a century ago, many of which are still visible from the riverbanks and accessible when the water levels are low. The park is named Dinosaur Valley State Park for good reason!

Ichnology is the branch of palaeontology that studies fossilised dinosaur tracks and prints. In normal conditions, the prints would be filled with sediment to protect and preserve them. Climatologists are unsure how long the tracks will be visible with heavy rain forecasted.

Dinosaur footprints are not the only thing revealed after long periods of drought. Extremely low water levels on the river Danube exposed an entire flotilla of German warships sunk in WW2. Many still contain explosives and pose a risk to local shipping and the environment.  

Human remains are constantly uncovered by drought. In Spain, a megalithic monument dubbed the Spanish Stonehenge was revealed when dam water dried up, and a trio of Buddhist statues thought to be more than 600 years old surfaced when China's Yangtze River dried up.

Discoveries like this are great for historians but a stark warning of what is to come: widespread crop loss, tree death and danger to human life.

Dinosaurs died out in part because they couldn’t adapt to the changing environment.

Let’s hope humans don't go the same way.