Floodwaters tore through Central Texas and revealed 15 hidden treasures buried in the ground for over 100 million years

In the summer of 2025, catastrophic flooding hit Central Texas. As the waters receded and the cleanup crews moved in, one volunteer saw something nobody expected: a trail of giant, three-toed impressions pressed into freshly exposed limestone along Sandy Creek. They were not only big but also ancient, some 110 to 115 million years old.

Since then, at least 15 footprints have been confirmed at the site, all of which measure somewhere between 18 and 20 inches across. What a storm tore open, scientists are racing to save.

How a footprint lasts for 110 million years
To understand why this find is important, it helps to know what a fossil footprint is. Unlike bones or teeth, a footprint is what paleontologists call a trace fossil, a record of behavior, not anatomy. It doesn't tell you what an animal was made of; it tells you where it was and what it was doing.


Central Texas was on the edge of a shallow inland sea in the Early Cretaceous. The dinosaurs moved heavily over the soft lime-rich mud near the shore, each step pressing their weight into it. If the sediment was deposited quickly enough, before waves or the wind could wash away the impressions, the mud hardened into stone over millions of years, preserving the print like a mold.

The Geological Society of America’s 2022 study of the Glen Rose Formation suggests that the very flooding events that appear so destructive may actually have been responsible for preserving tracks like these in the first place. Floodwaters can immobilize mud layers and seal impressions before erosion gets to them. It’s a curious kind of irony that a flood may have preserved the prints in the first place, and a flood, 110 million years later, is what brought them to light.

Who made these tracks, and why are scientists being careful
Based on the size and three-toed shape of the prints, paleontologist Matthew Brown and lab manager Kenneth Bader at the University of Texas at Austin believe the prints were likely made by a theropod, a two-legged predator. It was probably something like Acrocanthosaurus, a carnivore that could grow to 35 feet long and roamed this part of North America during the Cretaceous.

Some other nearby impressions could also be Paluxysaurus, the long-necked plant-eater that’s the official state dinosaur of Texas. If that identification is correct, it would indicate that more than one species was traveling along the same stretch of ancient shoreline, leaving overlapping clues about who shared that landscape.

There is a good reason for scientists to be cautious about such identifications. A footprint does not have a tag. Researchers have to match track shapes to known foot structures from skeletons found in the same geological layers, and even then, the answer is often “probably,” not “definitely.”

Why is it a race against time to document this site
The site is on private land on Sandy Creek, so details have been kept to a minimum, but researchers have made it clear that they don’t have time on their side. The fine surface details on fossil tracks can disappear quickly once the wind, rain, and heavy machinery of cleanup operations move through. The documentation window is tiny.

That is why 3D imaging is one of the most important tools in modern paleontology today. In a landmark study published in PLOS ONE in 2014, Falkingham, Bates, and Farlow were able to digitally reconstruct the famous Paluxy River dinosaur trackway in full 3D, using photographs taken decades earlier, before the site was excavated. Meanwhile, parts of that original trackway had been lost or damaged. The digital record was all that was left. The paper argued that photogrammetry is not simply a convenience, but for fragile fossil sites may be the only lasting record that survives.

That’s what the Sandy Creek team is doing. Mapping, scanning, and modeling, before the site changes again.

Texas has been doing this for a long time
Texas has a long history of dinosaur tracks. Visitors to Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose already can walk near fossil prints in the Paluxy River bed, though the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department says they aren’t always visible, as water levels and sediment can obscure them again at any time.

About 75 previously buried footprints appeared in the same park after an extreme drought in the summer of 2023 lowered water levels so much. And now, two years later, a flood has done the same thing by completely different means.

Ron Tykoski, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, described the Sandy Creek find as "another data point" in building out the picture of what these animals were actually like. The landscape, he's basically saying, is still talking, and every now and then an extreme weather event makes us pay attention.