R.T. Bird Site

Though discovered many years before, the tracks at Dinosaur Valley were not made famous until a fateful encounter in November of 1938, when Roland T. Bird (R.T. Bird) of the American Museum of Natural History entered a trading post near Gallup, New Mexico, and came across his first encounter with the Paluxy River dinosaur tracks. These were obviously carvings being sold, however in Bird's mind they had to have been inspired somehow, and he was pointed in the direction of Glen Rose, Texas. Bird had no formal education in paleontology, but loved fossils and traveled the U.S. searching for them.

He arrived in Glen Rose in his chartreuse Buick and was amazed to find three-toed tracks belonging to a theropod, and even more astonished to find the large saucer-shaped tracks that he identified as belonging to a sauropod. Bird made a cast of one of the massive sauropod tracks, attached it to the top of his car, and headed for New York City to share his findings with others.

Bird and a large crew worked for the next two years excavating the trails of sauropod and theropod tracks. They used sandbags to hold back the river, and sledgehammers and chisels to remove the precious trackways. The trackways were broken up into many pieces and then coated with plaster-dipped burlap sacks for protection during transportation. They were then numbered, to be put back together at a later time.

The removed trackways showed parallel trails of sauropod tracks, indicating herding behavior, closely followed by theropod tracks, indicating predatory behavior. When the sauropod tracks would turn, so did the theropod tracks. In one instance, a theropod track was imprinted in a sauropod track showing that the predator had reached its prey.

Individual blocks of trackway were loaded into Bird's Buick and were hauled to the nearest railroad station in Walnut Springs, Texas for shipment to New York. In total, three sections of trackway were removed. Today, one lies under the sauropod exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, one at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and one at the University of Texas in Austin.

*Information gathered from "Dinosaur Highway" written by Laurie E. Jasinski. This book and many others are for sale at the park gift shop.