Dinosaur footprints revealed by Texas floods offer glimpse into prehistoric past

AUSTIN, Texas — When July’s historic floods ripped through Central Texas, they didn’t just sweep away homes and trees.

Along Sandy Creek, volunteers spotted something extraordinary emerging from the mud: a trail of footprints pressed into stone that were 115 million years old.

“The dinosaur tracks at Sandy Creek were uncovered during debris removal after the floods,” explained Matthew Brown, director of the Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections at UT’s Jackson School Museum of Earth History.

They were found by volunteers working with Travis County on private property, and one of our primary goals was making sure heavy equipment wouldn’t damage the tracks. Everyone, the property owners, the county, the contractors, was working together to protect them.

These weren’t just any tracks.

They belonged to an Acrocanthosaurus, a meat-eating dinosaur stalking a mudflat when much of East Texas was covered by a shallow sea.

“When you’re standing there today, looking at the tree line, you can almost envision this dinosaur having just disappeared ahead of you,” Brown said.

It’s easy to think of fossils as static objects in a museum, but footprints remind us these were living animals, walking around, interacting with their environment.

That immediacy is what makes trackways so scientifically valuable.

“Tracks are some of the only evidence we have of behavior,” Brown noted. “They can tell us if animals moved together in herds or if a predator was stalking prey. It’s direct evidence of what these animals were doing when they were alive.”

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While the discovery made headlines, Brown says it’s part of a much larger picture.

Central Texas, far from the deserts of Big Bend or West Texas, is teeming with fossils.

“People are often surprised to learn that we find fossils just as frequently here in the Austin area,” he said.

Downtown’s Elephant Room jazz club, for instance, got its name after mammoth bones were unearthed while workers excavated its basement in the 1980s.

Many of these finds end up just a few miles north of downtown at UT’s J.J. Pickle Research Campus.

Spread across 475 acres near the Domain, the facility houses between one and two million fossils, including Ice Age mammoths and saber-toothed cats, as well as marine reptiles that once swam where Austin now stands.

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“The collections here were begun in the 1850s,” Brown said. “Now we’ve got about 180 years of collecting across the state. We have fossils that span about 250 million years of Texas history.”

Now we’ve got about 180 years of collecting across the state. We have fossils that span about 250 million years of Texas history.

He gestures to shelves stacked with plaster field jackets, blocks of rock collected in the 1940s under a Works Progress Administration program.

“We’ll periodically open these,” he explained, “but the longer we wait, the better the technology becomes. Some of these have been sealed for nearly 100 years, waiting for tools that won’t damage them.”

Other specimens tell more immediate stories.

Brown holds a reconstruction of a Deinosuchus jaw, the prehistoric crocodile that grew to be 40 feet long.

“They would have eaten whatever they wanted,” he said with a smile, “including small dinosaurs.”

On another table, hundreds of mammoth wrist and ankle bones sit in neat rows, each measured by students to unlock clues about Ice Age life.

Today, Brown’s team uses digital models and 3D scanning to record trackways, such as those found in Sandy Creek, without removing them from the ground.

“It allows us to study them in their full natural context while leaving them protected,” he said.

Floods may bury and uncover sites repeatedly, giving researchers new opportunities to analyze them with each technological advance.

But Brown is quick to remind that fossils aren’t just data points for scientists. They are part of Texas’s shared heritage.

“Being a public institution, these fossils belong to all Texans,” he said.

When you see fossils in a museum, you’re usually seeing one or two percent of what’s actually held. Coming behind the scenes shows the process, and that these aren’t just rocks. They’re evidence of life.

EDITOR NOTE: #TBT or Turning Back Time is an award-winning series of stories by CBS Austin This Morning Anchor John-Carlos Estrada. The series will focus on the history of Central Texas and its impact on the community. If you want to share a story idea with him, email him (jcestrada@cbsaustin.com) or message him on social media via Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, BlueSky, or Instagram.