Glen Rose, Tx

When we were kids my sisters and I would sometimes travel to Fort Worth to spend  a good bit of the summer with Aunt Louise.   Those holidays were always an adventure and one fun activity was a trip to Glen Rose on a hot summer day to swim in the Paluxy River.

The river is shallow during the summer and there are lots of places we could wade across on the smooth hard stones of the riverbed.  And in those stones we would see footprints--of dinosaurs!  Great leviathans of all descriptions walked in that same river millions of years before us. 

But those footprints are pretty much gone now.  Some have eroded away but many were chiseled out and moved to other places like the Smithsonian Museum in Washington.

And some like the one above have been removed by the locals.  This one was reseated in the base of the bandstand in front of the Glen Rose courthouse.  There is a plaque next to the stone that reads...

"This footprint, assigned the ... name Eubrontes Glenrosenis, was originally excavated in 1933 from the main track layer in the Paluxy riverbed in what is now Dinosaur Valley State Park near Glen Rose.....The footprint is that of a three-toed, bipedal, meat-eating dinosaur...whose skeletal remains are found mostly in Texas and Oklahoma....Dinosaur Valley State Park boasts the ancient shoreline of a 113-million-year-old sea and is renowned for some of the best preserved dinosaur footprints in the world."

  Dinosaur Valley State Park educates everyone on that prehistoric era and, even though any tracks are now hard to find,  we can imagine what those creatures must have looked like as they roamed here over 100 million years ago.

I am of two minds on the removal of the tracks.  If they were left in the river they would eventually disappear due to erosion, or vandalism, or from kids like us walking on them. Certainly, by moving the prints to a museum, more people have a chance to see them plus they will be preserved for many more years.  However, can't the same be said about so many ancient artifacts?  It truly bothered me to see a relic from the lost city of Pompeii on display in an art museum in Florida.  That didn't seem right.  Much of the aura of these windows-into-the-past lies in the surroundings where they are found.  And I was very disappointed when those great dinosaur footprints were no longer in that cool, clear riverbed.

Parked along the river I met this couple traveling in an RV much like mine.  They were also remembering and lamenting the demise of the river of long ago. We spent a 1/2 hour comparing rigs.  I have discovered that conversion van people are instantly friends.

Just outside of the town Aunt Louise and I came upon these abandoned buildings....

I love the old stone structures from the early settlements but so many are being deserted, destroyed and dismantled to make room for new strip shopping centers or wider highways.

As I got up close to explore these structures I discovered that many of the stones were petrified wood!

Great chunks of it!

I couldn't help but wonder-- where did all these pieces come from?  I found stones with fossils of shells in them, too, and kept expecting to find one with a dinosaur track as well.

But, I didn't.

 

The petrified wood looked so wood-like (?) I had to keep touching it to reassure myself that it was actually rock hard.
    

 

Then next I wondered why it was all still here and not in someone's rock garden--alongside stepping stones with dinosaur tracks in them.
  

  There is no doubt--these buildings have been abandoned for years (note the tree growing on the inside)....Yet, no one has carried off the stone wood.  Maybe I'll give the Smithsonian a call.

 

It was a beauty, just sitting on that wall waiting for me to take its picture.

In the face of all the contradictory evidence that has been unearthed near here we spied this business....

and though the sign indicated they were open, there was no evidence of customers anywhere.

 

 Even Pat Robertson no longer says the earth is only 6000 years old.

Are the creationists going the same way as the Flat-Earth-Society?