The earliest signs of life in Leander
The earliest signs of life in Leander
Written by Amy Stansbury Friday, 07 July 2006
If you take US 183 north of Leander to the South San Gabriel Bridge, park your car to the left of the bridge and go down by the creek bed, you can walk in the footsteps of Leander’s earliest residents – the dinosaurs.
Some Leander locals have known about the dinosaur tracks for decades.
“My mother is in her 90s and was raised here, and I asked her once when the dinosaur footprints were discovered,” former mayor Ken Craven said. “She said she has known about them for as long as she can remember, and she knows her grandparents even knew about them.”
However, Emeritus Professor Dr. Wann Langston, Jr. at the University of Texas Jackson School of Geoscience was the first to formally document the dinosaur tracks in a 1974 technical publication.
There is one set of fossilized dinosaur footprints on the downstream side of the bridge, and another on the opposite side of the creek.
“Tracks do provide us some information on what animals did, how they did it, and possibly how fast they were doing it. For example, we know from their tracks that some kinds of dinosaurs moved in herds,” Langston said.
The tracks have eroded over time, especially the ones in the bed of the river that get covered by running water when the creek rises. Humans have also destroyed some of the tracks by digging them up, ironically in efforts to preserve them.
“One set of prints on the upstream side of the bridge resembles the bottom of a big, circular wash tub and they’re about one yard across in diameter,” said Langston.
There is not much detail in these prints, but they are believed to have been made by a Sauropod, such as a Brontosaur.
The other set of footprints are smaller, three-toed tracks that appear to wander. These are speculated to have been from a very rare carnivorous dinosaur called an Acrocanthosaurus. Only four sets of this dinosaur’s skeletal remains have ever been found and they were in Texas and Oklahoma. They probably traveled in packs, but these tracks in particular don’t indicate that.
These dinosaurs are thought to have walked by the creek bed in Leander more than 100 million years ago.
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