Texans Protect Dinosaur Tracks Town Is Being Mum For Fear Of Vandalism

They were nature’s secret for millions of years, but now tongues are wagging about the dinosaur tracks uncovered by flooding in June.

Municipal officials in Boerne, Texas, about 20 miles north of San Antonio, kept quiet about the discovery for three weeks fearing the site on city-owned property would be vandalized.

“We’re frightened that someone is going to go out there and chisel them up,” said Chris Turk, city planning director, who agreed to discuss the tracks only if the location was not revealed.

Only a hint of toes are visible, but the pattern of the indentations in the limestone makes it clear that something very large ambled across the landscape here.

Paleontologists say the three-toed creatures that left the 20-inch-wide by 4-inch-deep prints could have been carnivores called acrocanthosaurus, or vegetarians known as tenotosaurus.

“You can’t tell exactly what creature made them,” said Mike Hawthorne, who published a 1990 study of dinosaur tracks in Texas while at Baylor University.

“They were big dinosaurs, weighing tons, but they weren’t the biggest,” said Hawthorne, who was among several specialists who began studying the Boerne tracks on July 11.

“There have been tracks found west of San Antonio and around New Braunfels, but they haven’t been found in this specific area before,” Hawthorne said.

The tracks were discovered June 21, and some city and county officials were informed about a week later. The officials agreed not to reveal the discovery until the city decided what to do about the site.

Some officials were incredulous when told about the discovery.

“It looked like a pot hole to me,” Kendall County Judge Bill Gooden said. “I’ve got a bunch of roads out here, and I’ll take you out there where they’ve been running up and down the roads.

“I don’t really believe there was dinosaurs, if you get right down to it,” he said.

The flooding in Boerne also unearthed a trail of smaller tracks, each measuring about 10 inches in diameter, in the same area as the larger tracks.

“These are interesting because of the mixture of sizes of tracks,” said Rena Bonem, a Baylor University geology professor. “Also, there is one trackway which suggests that the dinosaur saw something and suddenly changed directions.”

She said the tracks were likely left in a tidal flat, or marsh, between 70 million and 80 million years ago.