A severe drought in the southern United States lowered the level of a river that cuts through the Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas, leaving exposed footprints of reptiles that lived in the region about 113 million years ago.
The information was given by the administration of the place this Tuesday (23), with photos published on social networks. “This is one of the longest sets of dinosaur footprints in the world,” the post reads.
Stephanie Salinas Garcia, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife, told AFP that the marks only became visible due to the drought, which is directly related to climate change.
“Due to the extreme drought conditions in the summer, the river has dried up completely in many places, allowing more trails to be discovered in the park,” he said. “Under normal conditions, these new trails would be submerged and often filled with sediment, making them not visible even underwater.”
Most of the newly revealed footprints, according to the park, would correspond to an adult acrocanthosaurus, weighing 6.3 tons and 4.5 meters tall. The park has tracks of sauroposeidons, animals that weighed up to 44 tons and measured up to 18 meters.
Southwest of Dallas, one of the most important cities in Texas, the Dinosaur Valley park was, millions of years ago, on the edge of an ocean, and the animals left their footprints in the mud at the time.
Amid the climate emergency, extreme droughts like the one in Texas have been repeated elsewhere — as well as the phenomenon of peculiar discoveries. In China, last week, the retreat in the level of the Yangtze River revealed a submerged island in the city of Chongqing, where a trio of 600-year-old Buddhist statues were discovered. In Europe, Nazi German military ships and World War II bombs surfaced on the Danube and Po rivers, respectively.
Scientists attribute these extreme weather events to human-caused climate change. The summer in the Northern Hemisphere has also caused England to see thermometers rise above 40°C for the first time in history, countries like France, Portugal and Spain to suffer forest fires and Mexico to experience, in two thirds of the municipalities, a shortage in the Water supply.
In Texas, the forecast for the next few days is for rain, which will certainly cover the footprints again. “Still, the park will continue to protect these 113 million-year-old marks, not just for this generation,” Garcia said.
