Track Site #2/ Main Track Area

Address: 
1629 Park Rd. 59, Glen Rose, Texas, 76043

Welcome to track area #2, the main track viewing area in the park. Here you will see examples of two types of dinosaurs that left trackways in the Paluxy River.

The three-toed tracks belong to a two-legged, meat eating carnosaur called Acrocanthosaurus. The name translates to "high spined lizard" due to the elongated spines on its backbones that were probably enclosed in a ridge of muscle creating a sail down its back. Most scientists believe this was used for temperature regulation, as the animal was most likely cold-blooded. Acrocanthosaurus was 30-40 feet long, 13 feet tall and weighed between 6,000 and 11,000 pounds! He had large, sharp, dagger-shaped teeth and sickle shaped claws designed for ripping apart an enemy or potential prey organism, in this case the Paluxysaurus.

The large, saucer-shaped dinosaur tracks belong to the plant-eating, four-legged giant Paluxysaurus. Paluxysaurus was 60-70 feet long, half of which consisted of the neck and tail. It stood 13 feet tall at the hip and weighed anywhere from 88,000 to 99,000 pounds! From evaluating the trackways in the river, scientists have determined that Paluxysaurus probably traveled in herds, with adults on the outside flanks and juveniles contained in the middle.

Fossil trackways provide information about a trackmaker's activities that skeletal remains do not. For example, the Glen Rose tracks were the first evidence that sauropods could walk on land with their bodies unsupported by water buoyancy.

The Glen Rose tracks became the cornerstone for modern theories about social behavior among dinosaurs. Scientists now know that many kinds of dinosaurs traveled and grazed in herds or hunted in packs. No modern reptile exhibits such behavior.

Scientists now think that dinosaurs were active, efficient, social animals behaving much like modern birds and mammals. Although the degree of behavioral similarity is uncertain, the image of the dinosaur as just a clumsy, dull-witted reptile has been changed.