If you spend any amount of time in the town of Wimberly, Texas locals will be sure to mention the flood that happened in 2015. 13 people died and 350 homes were destroyed. However, there was a silver lining to the flood, a large number of fossils, including dinosaur footprints were discovered in the Blanco River. These footprints were discovered when the City of Blanco GIS manager was reviewing aerial photographs. From the photographs, we can clearly see the footprints of a four-legged dinosaur (or sauropod). Based on the distance between the front feet, foot size, time at which the tracks where made, and stride length it’s like that the tracks belong to Paluxysaurus Jonesi, or as anyone who has watched the land before time would call it, a longneck. It’s actually the state dinosaur of Texas. The footprints are located on federal owned land that you can only access with a ranger and I’m not sure if the public can visit. I was able to visit through the master naturalist program. Here is a link to other dinosaur footprint site in Texas you can visit though.

There were a ton of other fossils the rangers pointed out to us as well. The most mind-blowing to me was a microfossil. At one point we were walking in some small gravel and the ranger told us to look down. Turns out we were actually walking on millions of microfossils of a former unicellular organism that lived in the ocean. The sheer number of them was astounding. The concept of microfossils is pretty crazy too. Researchers can actually find microfossils of plankton or pollen and learn a lot about what past environments where like.