Self-Guided Tour

#1

Welcome to the Heritage Museum of the Texas Hill Country!  The Museum building was once the home of the Thayer family, who built an RV camping park by excavating and leveling off the hill to your right.  Fortunately, they went to just the right level to expose these dinosaur tracks.  The tracks were discovered by their son in 1982 when his Frisbee landed on a footprint. Later, paleontologists from the University of Texas, Mississippi State University, University of New Orleans, and Purdue University documented the site and its 356 individual footprints.  Displayed inside the Museum is a “map” of the tracks, and a copy of the report in book form, “Texas Giants,” is available for sale in the Gift Shop.

The tracks were formed during the Cretaceous Period, about 110 million years ago.  At that time, much of Texas was either under or on a shallow sea's shores, extending up from the Gulf of Mexico.  The tracks were made in a limey mud, which later hardened to form the limestone of the Glen Rose Formation.  The present-day hills around you were formed much later, from 25 to 15 million years ago, through uplifting along the Balcones Fault, and then subsequent erosion.