Texas state dinosaur. (original) (raw)

We also don't know for sure how the tracks have been preserved for all these millions of years. One theory is that a violent storm blew across the shoreline a few days before the dinosaurs left their footprints on the land, creating a series of lime-laden mudflats. The shore turned to stone, leaving behind the rocks we see in the park today, including the ones with the dinosaur prints. Maybe it happened just that way. We don't know for sure.

The American Museum of Natural History put some of the tracks on view, and the Texas Memorial Museum on the University of Texas campus displayed some others. Paleontologists initially identified the tracks as belonging to an herbivorous dino name Pleurocoeleus, a mild-mannered vegetarian giant about 50 feet long and tipping the scales at 20 tons, give or take a ton or two. In 1997, the state legislature passed a resolution designating Pleurocoeleus as the state dinosaur.

One thing we do know - now - is that the dinosaurs running away from the sauropod weren't Pleurocoeleus. Nope. The former state dinosaur of Texas was actually a resident of Maryland and never made it to Texas.

The changing of the guard in the Texas dinosaur hierarchy started in 2007, when Peter Rose, then at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, disputed the long-held identity of the Paluxy River sauropod. Rose took a close look at sauropod bones at the Jones Ranch near Glen Rose and determined that the bones he found there didn't match the Pleurocoeleus bones first found in Maryland in the late 1800s.

Rose surmised that the bones belonged to a completely new genus and species, and he renamed the Paluxy River sauropods Paluxysaurus jonesi in honor of the river and the Jones Ranch. He saw the original identification as an honest mistake.

"At the time sauropod tracks and bones were first discovered in Texas, only Pleurocoeleus was known from North America for this particular time period," Rose told LiveScience in 2009. "In 1974, Wann Langston, Jr. described some sauropod fossils from Central Texas that he determined to be similar enough to those from Maryland that he referred them to genus Pleurocoeleus."

In January of 2009, State Rep. Charles Geren (R-Fort Worth), acting on behalf of the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, introduced a resolution to name the Paluxysaurus the new state dinosaur. Representatives Mike Hamilton and Mark Homer showed up in dinosaur suits to make some kind of point, though Hamilton compromised the cause by mixing up the words "extinct" and "instinct."

Representative Dan Gattis opposed the bill and cited international fourth-grade spelling bee and grammar rules, claiming "the author can't even spell or pronounce all the words in his resolution." The resolution passed by a vote of 132-1, and Texas ended up with a new state dinosaur.

That much we know.