Where the Paluxy River now winds through the North Texas Hill 
Country, the great lizards of prehistory once roamed, leaving their 
impressive footprints deep in the limy sludge of what would become 
the earth's Cretaceous layer. It wouldn't be until a spring day in 
1909, however, when young George Adams went splashing along the 
creekbed, that chance and shifting sediments would reveal these 
stony traces of an ancient past.

    Young Adams's first discovery of dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy 
River Valley, near the small community of Glen Rose, Texas, came 
more than one hundred million years after the reign of the dinosaurs. 
During this prehistoric era, herds of lumbering "sauropods" and tri-
toed, carnivorous "theropods" made their way along what was then 
an ancient "dinosaur highway." Today, their long-ago footsteps are 
immortalized in the limestone of the riverbed, arousing the curiosity 
of picnickers and paleontologists alike. Indeed, nearly a century after 
their first discovery, the "stony oddities" of Somervell County 
continue to draw Saturday-afternoon tourists, renowned scholars, and 
dinosaur enthusiasts from across the nation and around the globe.

    In her careful and colorful history of Dinosaur Valley State Park, 
Jasinski deftly interweaves millennia of geological time with local 
legend, old photographs, and quirky anecdotes of the people who 
have called the valley home. Beginning with the valley's "first 
visitors"—the dinosaurs—Jasinski traces the area's history through 
to the decades of the twentieth century, when new track sites 
continued to be discovered, and visitors and locals continued to 
leave their own material imprint upon the changing landscape. The 
book reaches its culmination in the account of the hard-won battle 
fought by Somervell residents and officials during the latter decades 
of the century to secure Dinosaur Valley's preservation as a state 
park.

_________________________________________________________

LAURIE E. JASINSKI  is the author of Hill Country Backroads: 
Showing the Way in Comal County (TCU Press, 2001). She has 
written park histories for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department 
and numerous features for popular Texas magazines. She and 
husband Gary S. Hickinbotham live in New Braunfels.



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