Glen Rose schoolboy George Adams may have been playing hooky in 1909 when he spied footprints in the Paluxy River bed that resembled a gigantic bird’s. Nevertheless, he notified his school’s principal, who later wrote that Adams “went to the blackboard and drew some tracks.” “I was impressed, and we set out immediately for Wheeler Branch…There they were! No doubt about it—dinosaur tracks!”

That discovery inspired many others, including Peter Rose’s work in 2007 as a Southern Methodist University graduate student. By searching the same river as Adams’ initial discovery 100 years early, Rose identified the Paluxysaurus, eventually leading to the designation of the state dinosaur as Paluxysaurus Jonesi. The creature had been a 60-foot-long, 30-ton plant-eating beast. “Peter Rose’s research has found that it is a new genus and a new species,” said Aaron Pan, Fort Worth Museum of Science History’s curator at the time. “This dinosaur is unique to Texas and it is the most abundant dinosaur fossil found in the Glen Rose area.”

Before the 2009 designation, Texas legislators in 1997 unknowingly picked the wrong dinosaur species as our state dinosaur. With Rose’s 2007 identification, the Legislature’s mistake was corrected and, perhaps more importantly, a new chapter in Texas paleontology was written.

“Through the insightful work of Texas-based scientists, the tracks and bones of the large quadrupedal sauropod found in the Lone Star State are now clearly known to be those of the species Paluxysaurus Jonesi,” reads the 2009 Resolution filed by State Representative Charles Geren of Fort Worth. “Given the importance of the paleontological discoveries that have taken place in Texas, it is indeed appropriate that the designation of our state dinosaur keep pace with the latest scientific development.”