Mysterious Footprints Found on Texas Riverbank May Be Dinosaur Tracks

Someone walking along the Hutto riverbank in central Texas on August 8 spotted something in the mud that stopped them in their tracks — two large, three-toed impressions pressed into the sediment.

The footprints measured roughly 18 and 25 inches long and were spaced about 4 feet apart. The person reported the find and it quickly caught the attention of scientists.

Thomas Adams, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, reviewed photos of the impressions and said they're tridactyl — meaning three-toed — which is consistent with dinosaur tracks. He said the prints could belong to either theropods, the bipedal meat-eating dinosaurs that include Tyrannosaurus rex and Acrocanthosaurus, or ornithopods, a group of plant-eating dinosaurs that also walked on two legs. The two groups left similar three-toed impressions, which is part of what makes identification tricky.

The catch is the condition of the prints. They're weathered, which means the details have degraded enough that Adams can't make a definitive call from photos alone. He'd need to examine them in person to say with any confidence what made them — or whether they're dinosaur tracks at all.

Why Texas Keeps Finding These Things

This isn't a fluke. Central Texas has a long and well-documented history of dinosaur track discoveries, and the reason comes down to geology and weather working together.

Much of central Texas sits atop the Glen Rose Formation — a layer of limestone deposited roughly 110 to 115 million years ago when the region was a shallow coastal sea. That limestone is exactly the kind of rock that preserves dinosaur tracks well. The sediment was soft enough to capture impressions when dinosaurs walked through it, and the calcium carbonate in the environment hardened those impressions over millions of years into stone.

The tracks are always there. What changes is whether you can see them.

Flooding and drought both expose them in different ways. When floodwaters surge, they can strip away layers of sediment and vegetation that have been covering the tracks for decades or centuries — essentially cleaning the slate and revealing what's underneath. Drought does the opposite, pulling water levels down in rivers and creeks until previously submerged tracks emerge from the water. Either way, Texas's volatile climate makes it one of the most productive states in the country for accidental dinosaur track discoveries.

After the devastating July 4, 2025 storms that killed more than 130 people across the Texas Hill Country, volunteers clearing debris in Travis County's Big Sandy Creek area found 15 dinosaur footprints — 18 to 20 inches long, estimated at 110 to 115 million years old — attributed to a large meat-eating dinosaur resembling an Acrocanthosaurus, along with possible tracks from a plant-eating sauropod. Those finds were confirmed by University of Texas paleontologists.

The Window Is Usually Short

One of the frustrating realities of flood and drought-exposed dinosaur tracks is that the same forces that reveal them can just as quickly bury them again. New sediment carried by the next flood can cover a trackway that was visible for only days or weeks. Researchers who want to document a find have to move fast — using photogrammetry, 3D scanning, and detailed mapping to capture what they can before the tracks disappear back into the riverbed.

The Hutto prints haven't been examined in person yet. Whether they turn out to be genuine dinosaur tracks, impressions from modern large birds, or something else entirely will depend on what a paleontologist finds when they get eyes on them directly.

Texas residents who think they've found something unusual along a riverbank after a flood or during dry conditions are encouraged to photograph what they see and report it to a local university or museum. Paleontologists say people often don't realize how common these discoveries are — or that they might be walking past 115-million-year-old footprints on their own property.

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