The Paluxy River, also known as Paluxy Creek, is a river in the U.S. state of Texas. It is a tributary of the Brazos River. It is formed by the convergence of the North Paluxy River and the South Paluxy River near Bluff Dale, Texas in Erath County and flows a distance of before joining the Brazos just to the east of Glen Rose, Texas in south central Somervell County.
It is best known for numerous dinosaur footprints found in its bed near Glen Rose at the Dinosaur Valley State Park. The Paluxy River became famous for controversy in the early 1930s when locals found dinosaur and supposed human footprints in the same rock layer in the Glen Rose Formation, which were widely publicized as evidence against the geological time scale and in favor of young-Earth creationism. However, these anachronistic "human" footprints have been determined to be elongated dinosaur tracks, river scour marks, and hoaxes.
Paluxy trackways
thumb|Dinosaur track by the river
Many dinosaur trackways and footprints have been discovered in the riverbed. The tracks were first observed by a local schoolboy (George Adams) at the beginning of the 20th Century; the boy's teacher recognised the tracks as dinosaur tracks. Large-scale scientific excavation and documentation was first carried out by paleontologist Roland T. Bird from 1935. The tracks were found in Lower Cretaceous limestone of the Glen Rose Formation.
One of the most well-known discoveries made by Bird was the "chase sequence", which contains the tracks of a herd of sauropods and at least one theropod that appears to follow the herd. These well-preserved tracks were excavated and removed from the riverbed by Bird's team slab by slab; portions of the trackways were then reassembled at the Texas Science and Natural History Museum in Austin as well as at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This idea became widely known especially due to the 1970 film "Footprints in Stone" by Stanley Taylor; one of the most human-like trackways has been dubbed the "Taylor trail".
Some of these tracks were fake, carved by locals to sell during the Great Depression.
Digital recreation
thumb|Digital fly through over the trackway
In 2014, a digital model was made of the chase sequence trackways from photographs taken in 1940 by Bird. The photographs were used to create the digital reconstruction of the tracks as they were in 1940, before excavations. Though the reconstruction shows high variations in quality in different parts of the model, it provides a good demonstration of historical photogrammetry used to model deteriorated sites and specimens.
See also
- Dinosaur Valley State Park
- Glen Rose Formation
- List of Texas rivers
- List of topics characterized as pseudoscience
- Paluxy, Texas