By Kelly Melhart, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas
Mar. 31–LAKE GRAPEVINE — Christopher Constable has walked where giants stood.
The 6-year-old from Fort Worth, his twin sister and his mother drove more than 20 miles to Lake Grapevine to see dinosaur footprints, recently exposed by low water levels.
Christopher, who has a keen interest in dinosaurs, was especially excited.
“They’re cool,” he said Wednesday, then crouched and growled in imitation of a dinosaur.
The tracks — imprints several inches deep in sandstone bedrock — are believed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to be those of the hadrosaur, a duckbilled plant-eating dinosaur that lived about 96 million years ago. Dinosaur tracks were first found at the lake in 1982. The footprints that drew Christopher and dozens of other parents and children to a ledge on the north shore were discovered in 1989.
Tracks from a meat-eating dinosaur and smaller birdlike dinosaur tracks have also been found on the north shore, said Southern Methodist University geology professor Louis Jacobs, who takes his students to see the prints each semester. The three types of dinosaurs left their prints within days of one another, walking along the shore of an ancient ocean, he said.
“You can see how their stride in the mud changes when they walk up over a hill,” Jacobs said.
The prints are “rediscovered” about every six years when lake levels drop significantly, said Dan McGregor, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers archeologist for the Fort Worth district office. Lake Grapevine is currently about 6 feet below normal levels.
Corps spokesman Clay Church asked that their exact location not be published, to help preserve them. However, the area has not been blocked off.
“They are a really significant scientific find, and we don’t want people out there messing with them,” he said.
But any effort to deter tourists was not enough for some curious folks. Most heard about the prints through local news broadcasts.
“They’re learning about dinosaurs in school, and I just thought it was something we should see,” said Lisa Bennett, who brought sons Blaze, 4, and Jett, 3 to the lake.
Christopher’s grandparents, Pat and Jim Constable, spent Wednesday morning driving around the lake, searching for the prehistoric prints. When they finally found the tracks, after asking about them at a local marina, the Constables called Christopher’s mother. She took Christopher and his twin sister, Michelle, out of class at North Riverside Elementary School in far north Fort Worth and drove to the lake.
After more than an hour, the adults sat near the tracks and watched the children play near the water.
“It is amazing that as old as it is, you can still find it here in Texas,” Pat Constable said. “The sad part is we had to go through a drought to be able to see something like this.”
A dinosaur resource guide with findings from Lake Grapevine: www.smu.edu/geology/teacher_resource.htm
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Kelly Melhart, (817) 685-3854 [email protected]
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Copyright (c) 2006, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas
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