As floodwaters from the devastating July 4 storms continue to recede across Central Texas, they’ve revealed more than just debris, uncovering fossilized evidence of the region’s ancient past.

On Tuesday, Travis County Judge Andy Brown announced that volunteers working in the Sandy Creek area discovered dinosaur tracks exposed by the flooding.

“If there’s any kind of flooding, any kind of heavy erosion, our events where we’re gonna be finding newly discovered fossils,” said Matthew Brown, a University of Texas at Austin paleontologist who visited the site to examine the prints, in an interview with KXAN. “About 115 million years ago, there were several groups of animals that were walking around what was then a beach, and leaving footprints in the mud.”

The newly uncovered prints include several large tracks likely left by plant-eating dinosaurs, and one that appears to be from a larger carnivore.

“Acrocanthosaurus is a big meat-eating dinosaur about 30 feet long,” Matthew told KXAN. The three-toed dinosaur stood about 15 feet tall and weighed close to seven tons. “It would have looked sort of similar to Tyrannosaurus Rex, but a little more slender and longer in the body.”

Brown and his team plan to bring photos of the tracks back to their lab and use GPS data to determine whether similar tracks have been found before. Judge Brown said someone is on site to help ensure that large equipment used during cleanup avoids the prints.

This isn’t the first time dinosaur tracks have surfaced in Texas in recent years. At Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose, similar prehistoric prints reemerged from the Paluxy River during a severe drought. Those tracks, also believed to be from Acroncanthosaurus, date back around 110 million years. Larger tracks in that area are thought to belong to Sauroposeidon-a 60-foot-tall, 44-ton dinosaur also referred to as Paluxysaurus.

“It’s easy to forget when you’re looking at a bone on a shelf that this was an animal that was walking around, that was interacting with other animals, that had its own life story,” Matthew Brown told KXAN.

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Tracks found in Central Texas are believed to belong to the Acrocanthosaurus dinosaur, which has also left footprints behind in Glen Rose. (Travis County )

Tracks found in Central Texas are believed to belong to the Acrocanthosaurus dinosaur, which has also left footprints behind like this fossil in Glen Rose. (Travis County )

Three-toed tracks previously found in Dinosaur Valley State Park also likely belong to Acrocanthosaurus, a 15-foot-tall dinosaur that weighed close to seven tons. (Paul Baker)

Related video: Girl Discovers 475-Million-Year-Old Fossil At Tennessee Lake. (Wonderbot)

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