The Land Before Texas

When dinos roamed the Lone Star State

The Texas Memorial Museum: A Place Dinosaurs Telephone call Home

By Joy Diaz

The Find That Put A Primal Texas Boondocks On The Archaeological Map

By Ryan Poppe

Note: This story has been updated throughout to reflect corrections made upon further consultation with Dr. Michael Collins.

 If you're from Houston, you're a Houstonian, in Austin, you're an Austinite. And in the central Texas metropolis of Leander – you could be a Leanderthal? That unfortunate nickname for residents came well-nigh because of a misconception related to the findings of an archaeological dig a few decades baDr. Michael Collins is a research professor at Texas State University and the chairman of the Gault School of Archaeological Inquiry. He's in his 70s, and has done many archeological digs in his career.

He says, you might not know information technology, merely the dirt beneath your feet is full of insight into what life was like earlier our time on earth.

"What was the climate like, what were plants and animals that were around, all of these sorts of things," Collins says. "Then when nosotros excavate a site, the dirt has information that we demand to recover."

Take a minute to think about the world the way Collins does. Say you're continuing in your backyard. Collins would tell you the layers of segmented soil beneath you are similar a timeline. Each department contains clues about what life was like during those years. And sometimes, those clues tin can provide a whole a whole window into another world. And that certainly is the example at what's called the Wilson-Leonard site, just outside of Austin.

Earlier 1973, the country was part of the Wilson Land and Cattle Company. That year, Collins says archeologists with the Texas Department of Transportation – who were looking to aggrandize a nearby road – uncovered something they weren't expecting. Information technology was a massive prehistoric campground, dating back x,000 years. They found spear tips, grinding stones, and over 150 individual fire pits that were commonly used past Native American tribes during the menses.

A decade later, in 1983, excavators uncovered the burial remains of a woman.

"There were stone tools, at that place were fireplace-like features and so forth and and then on, it was a pretty normal military camp, but then she was buried in a small pit within that," Collins says.

Collins says the squad found the remains in a "flexed" or fetal position and placed in what would have been a shallow grave. The remains dated back to the Archaic period, some 8,000 to ten,000 years ago.

Somewhere along the line, the skeletal remains earned the nickname "LeAnne." The Williamson County Historical Commission website says it was members of the media who outset began to telephone call the remains the "Leanderthal Lady" because of the dig site's proximity to the metropolis of Leander. This nickname contributed to decades of misinformation about the age of the skeleton and what Collins says is akin to racism confronting early Native Americans.

Inside the burying pit, archaeologists also uncovered a shark'southward tooth the woman mayhap wore as a necklace. Archaeologists also found cooking stones – indented rock used to boil water to melt one of the principal food staples for Native Americans of the period, camas – the prairie bloom that produced a starchy bulb like to a small-scale sugariness potato.

"Then they would bake these things and and so they pulverized the cooked camas bulbs into a cake, kind of like a hockey puck, highly nutritious. It is the ultimate trail food," Collins says.

He says the site is an of import glimpse into life in Northward American at the time.

Today, "LeAnne" is a permanent resident of the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory in Austin, or TARL. Associate Facilities Director Jonathan Jarvis says it's the largest archeological repository in the land.

"So say for example, the Wilson-Leonard site, when TxDOT sponsored excavations of that, that was excavated, studied, reported and all of that was brought here to TARL where we house that basically in perpetuity on behalf of the people of the State of Texas," Jarvis says.

Jarvis says storing artifacts from the site – and "LeAnne" – in a secure, climate-controlled surround gives generations to come up the same opportunity to study the materials taken from the dig site.

A 2007 commodity in the Hill Country News follows up on why the land itself where the remains were institute is not open up to the public or still being explored. The newspaper reports the original landowner, Will Wilson Sr., wanted to build an interactive museum, and maintain the ii.5-acre site as an archaeological laboratory. He partnered with the nonprofit Archaeological Conservancy on the project, and the newspaper reports Wilson viewed it every bit a mode to memorialize his late wife.

But the plans went due south and the Loma Country News reports Wilson eventually granted the land to his son. The Archaeological Salvation sued to reclaim the land. Ultimately, they lost in court.

The Wilson-Leonard site has returned to pastureland. If not for markers including one from the Texas Historical Commission, there'd be no indication the archeological dig was ever in that location. Its discoveries are at present housed miles away. Who knows what mysteries still lie under the soil.

Scouring The Skies For Well-nigh-Earth Asteroids

An artist's impression of the Chicxulub asteroid impacting the Yucatan peninsula 66 million years ago as pterodactyls fly in the sky in a higher place. Credit: Donald East. Davis/NASA.

An artist'south impression of the Chicxulub asteroid impacting the Yucatan peninsula 66 one thousand thousand years ago as pterodactyls fly in the sky above. Credit: Donald Eastward. Davis/NASA.

Judit Györgyey Ries studies asteroids for a living. That'due south simply what ane does as a research acquaintance at the McDonald Observatory.

"Asteroids are the small buddies, kind of leftover from the formation of the solar system, which are simply going mostly between Jupiter and Mars," Ries says. "But we have some which we call near-Earth asteroids, and that'due south my speciality."

Dr. Judit Györgyey Ries in the control room of the30-inch telescope (aka the 0.8-meter telescope) at the McDonald Observatory. Credit:McDonald Observatory

Dr. Judit Györgyey Ries in the control room of the30-inch telescope (aka the 0.8-meter telescope) at the McDonald Observatory. Credit:McDonald Observatory

Ries says that well-nigh-Earth asteroids can come close enough to the planet to striking it. She knows all abou the near famous near-Earth asteroid in history: it was xv kilometers in size and wiped out the dinosaurs.

"We today do not worry almost dinosaur-killer asteroids," Ries says. "There is nothing on our radar which says something will come in the near futurity."

While that is true, Ries notes that only 110 years agone, an asteroid devastated a marsh in Siberia. We'll never know the number of casualties from this issue. At to the lowest degree not the human ones.

"I'm pretty certain the animals were not so lucky," Ries says. "So, asteroids can actually create quite a havoc."

The destruction wrought by an asteroid doesn't but come from the impact. Ries says that asteroids tin create winds five to six times stronger than any hurricane and cause forest fires past launching molten rocks.

"So, information technology can do damage," Ries says.

Ries looks for new asteroids that are 140 meters or longer. So far, she says there are 700,000 to 800,000 known asteroids.

"If you give me a time in the by or in the future, I can tell you with some precision where to find it," Ries says. "That's what it means to know an asteroid."

Written by Kevin Wheeler.

The Asteroid That Concluded It All. Well, Well-nigh Of It.

University of Texas Institute for GeophysicsResearch Scientist and Mission Co-chief Sean Gulick during the 2016 mission totake samples from the crater of the Chicxulub asteroid that killed allnon-avian dinosaurs 66 meg years ago. Credit: Anna Donlan for Alcaldemagazine.

University of Texas Institute for GeophysicsResearch Scientist and Mission Co-master Sean Gulick during the 2016 mission totake samples from the crater of the Chicxulub asteroid that killed allnon-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Credit: Anna Donlan for Alcaldemagazine.

It was 66 meg years ago that the state of the Earth changed dramatically, all considering of one asteroid – a actually, really fast asteroid.

Sean Gulick, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, "explores the world" as he puts information technology. He's a fellow member of the Department of Geosciences. Recently he'south been studying the Chicxulub affect crater.

Chicxulub is the asteroid that ultimately killed the dinosaurs and 75 percent of life on Earth. It's impact created a wide, flat crater that was nigh twice as large as the altitude from Austin to Houston. This crater is perfectly preserved beneath the bounding main floor, and the  land of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, making information technology ideal to be studied.

"Texas was in a fascinating location. Nosotros were merely beyond the ocean and that ways that the dinosaurs hither would've felt the smash wave from the impact," Gulick says. "Probaby many of the dinosaurs, peculiarly in southern Texas, would've been instantly killed by that blastwave coming across the ocean."

That'south because this asteroid was travelling at an incredible speed. Its impact was equal to x billion nuclear bombs. That collision set off a multitude of furnishings: earthquakes, a tsunami far college than those created by plate shifting, a gaseous atmospheric change that lead to years of freezing and the eventual collapse of the food chain.

Written past Sarah Yoakley.

How Barney Became Texas' Well-nigh Popular Dinosaur

Past Joy Diaz

Dinosaur names are sometimes a challenge to pronounce. But in that location'south one Texas dinosaur whose proper name will probably just roll right off your tongue. His proper name is Barney.

Barney is a dinosaur from the imagination – and desperation – of Dallas-native Sheryl Leach. Back in the late 1980s, when her son Patrick was two years former, Leach struggled to proceed him entertained.

"Two-yr-olds are the well-nigh powerful entity on the planet," Leach said.

The child was running Leach ragged! Until "I found a video out of the market called 'We Sing Together' and Patrick merely loved it."

But only for a lilliputian while. Two-year-onetime Patrick wanted more singing and more dancing and Leach only couldn't discover more videos that did the play tricks. She figured if she couldn't find anything in Dallas, Texas, it was likely other parents around the land were struggling too. So, she decided to fill up in the void herself with an original singing and dancing show for kids.

"The birth is the idea of 'how difficult could it exist?'"

Turns out it was actually hard, only not impossible. And despite the challenges of recording videos featuring lots of kids and a behemothic purple dinosaur, PBS took the show when Leach offered it.

Only four years afterwards, Barney became the number one toy on kids' Christmas lists. In a 1992 interview, the president of the Children'south Division at JC Penney, Henry Scott, said he couldn't keep plenty Barney merchandise on the shelves.

"I've been in this business organization for 36 years, the retail business, and I've lived through E.T., I've lived through Cabbage Patch, I've lived through Land Before Time – but I take never seen a miracle such as Barney – nosotros are Barney-mania here at JC Penney," Scott said.

The grownups couldn't explain it. The kids couldn't either, only their faces said it all.

During a 1994, live operation in New York City, Barney took his fourth dimension coming out onstage. And when he did, information technology was like Beatle-mania!

Back in Dallas, Barney creator Sheryl Leach believes Barney was such a hit considering, as a sometime educator, she wanted to make the show good – good fun, good manners, educational and full of diversity.

From the very first season, the bandage included children with different abilities, with dissimilar skin colors and who spoke different languages. You may remember a young Selena Gomez or Demi Lovato singing in Spanish.

Leach's parents were also educators. They taught her early that growing up in Texas meant learning well-nigh Mexico and other cultures.

"And we went back and forth almost yearly, I recall, to Mexico. Then that was instilled in me as a very young thing," Leach said.

Barney too did shows about Canada, our neighbor to the North, only also most Italia, Federal republic of germany, Scotland, Israel, Africa, China, South Korea and Brazil – many of the cultures represented right here in Texas.

With all that exploration, information technology seems Barney yearned to try a place outside of the Lone Star State. In 2001, the prove moved to the U.K. Hit Entertainment purchased the business for $275 million.

The public didn't sympathise this either – Barney was yet a success, so why sell?

"It was really the point that I felt satisfecha, yous know? I really felt satisfied. And I too wanted to exercise other things. So, I felt that – if I thought about Barney equally a child – at that bespeak – that Barney was in college," she said.

Barney is probably the only Texas dinosaur that went to higher!
But similar all other Texas dinos, Barney went extinct. The show's concluding episode taped almost a decade ago, in September of 2009. But its legacy of inclusivity lives on. Afterwards all, the lyrics to the show'southward well-nigh recognizable song says "I beloved you, you love me…."

And to Sheryl Leach, that's what Texas is – a family that tin come up together through singing, dancing and agreement of each other.

The Armadillo's Texas Roots Reach Back To Ancient Times

On these warm summer nights, I see them ofttimes equally I drive dwelling on FM 803. They sometimes finish, frozen for a few seconds, their eyes reflecting my headlights in an eerie red – and then they dash off into giant clumps of prickly pear, where predators can't follow.

The Spaniards named them armadillos – "the little armored ones." It was a term of affection and all who have lived in this land called Texas e'er since accept been addicted of them. To me, they are the minor animal version of an armored-upwardly Humvee. And they are truly armored. A human being in east Texas shot one with a .38 caliber pistol and the bullet ricocheted off the armadillo's thick plating and striking the human in the face. He recovered. The armadillo could non be found.

They are impressive survivors. In fact, in the land before Texas, 4 one thousand thousand years ago, their distant relatives roamed the earth. The original armadillos, called glyptodons, reached a weight of two tons, nearly the size of a white rhino. Plus, they had club-similar spiky tails. If they were running around Texas today, we wouldn't have roadkill, we'd take motorcar kill. Nosotros'd telephone call them armadigantes – armored giants. Nosotros'd demand thick steel fences for them, probably electrified similar those in the original Jurassic Park movie. Not certain you'd want to get home with the armadillo in such circumstances.

Speaking of Jurassic Park, scientists, perhaps inspired past a scene from that film, compared the fossil remains of aboriginal glyptodons, to our mod armadillos. In 2016, two geneticists analyzed the ancient DNA of a glyptodon, comparing it with that of modern armadillos and found evidence that they are directly related. Why the original was so large or why its descendants became miniaturized is an unsolved mystery.

In Texas, the nine-banded armadillo is the near common, and downward in South America they accept what nosotros at present telephone call "giant armadillos." But they're only 6 feet long if you include the tail, and counterbalance 70 pounds. Withal, if I saw 1 of those around here, I think I would go the other style.

At the other stop of the calibration is the fairy armadillo, likewise from South America. It is simply about four inches long and pink. You could hold it in the palm of your paw. Though our Texas armadillo tin't scroll into a perfect ball, like the Brazilian three-banded 1, it does have this special power: the females give nascency to four identical quadruplets every time, producing as many equally sixteen pups in a lifetime. Bet they're glad they don't have to ship them all to college.

The Texas armadillo – the nine-banded one – has certainly worked its way into iconic status here. There are armadillo t-shirts, tattoos galore, armadillo lamps (no armadillos injure in the making of the lamps), armadillo campers and trailers and armadillo restaurants that don't serve armadillo. Notwithstanding, during the Great Depression, an era many blamed on President Herbert Hoover, nutrient was scarce, and many people in Texas hunted and ate armadillos, calling them "poor man's pork" or "Hoover hogs." Afterwards, people blamed leprosy in Texas on armadillo meat.

No doubt, the best-known armadillo business organisation, open from 1970-1980, was the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin. The nightclub was named after the armadillo in order to commemorate the fact that it was located in the onetime National Baby-sit Armory. Though long out of business, the Armadillo World Headquarters helped lay the foundation for the globe-class live music scene that thrives in Austin today.

To properly award all the positive influences of the armadillo'due south mystique in Texas, the 1995 legislature declared the ix-banded armadillo the official State Small Mammal of Texas. The police reads in part:

WHEREAS: ...The armadillo, is a hardy, pioneering creature that chose to begin migrating hither at about the fourth dimension that Texas became a state; and

WHEREAS: The armadillo possesses many remarkable and unique traits, some of which parallel the attributes that distinguish a true Texan, such as a deep respect and need for the land, the power to alter and suit, and a fierce undying love for freedom; and;

WHEREAS: [The armadillo is] a proud and dogged as the state from which it hails.

RESOLVED: That the 74th Legislature of the Country of Texas hereby . . . designate(south) the armadillo as the official Minor State Mammal of Texas.

The Texas Longhorn was made the Official Big State Mammal in the same legislation.

And and so nosotros also have the unofficial honoring of the little armored ones in a famous song written by Gary P. Nunn. So the Armadillo is distinguished by legislation, protected by police force, and immortalized in song. Is Texas a great country or what?

Kids Share Their All-time (And Worst) Dinosaur Jokes

Grady Hicks

Grady Hicks

Grady Hicks loves dinosaurs. From stegosauruses to "Jurassic Park," he Austin-native 5th-grader knows all that there is to know about our prehistoric friends. He knows and then much that he was willing to share some of his favorite dinosaur jokes with Texas Standard.

Like for instance:

What practise you become when you mix dinosaurs with pigs?

What type of dinosaur would Harry Potter be?

Shayna is in the fifth class and is new to Texas. Her family unit recently motility to Austin from California.

Here'southward an example of her prehistoric humor:

What practise dinosaurs use to make their hot dogs?

What is a dinosaurs least favorite reindeer?

Heed in the actor to a higher place for the punchlines.

How Jurassic Park Helped Inspire A Generation Of Paleontologists

By Rachel Osier Lindley & Laura Rice

With its latest iteration, "The Fallen Kingdom," the Jurassic Park movie franchise seems far from extinct. Only 25 years agone, moviegoers had never seen annihilation quite similar those Jurassic dinosaurs onscreen. The moving-picture show captured the imagination of a generation of kids—some of them graduating into paleontology as adults.

And what nosotros know near dinosaurs has changed dramatically since 1993, says Academy of Edinburgh Paleontologist Steve Brusatte. He is the author of the recently-released bestseller "The Rise and Autumn of the Dinosaurs: A New History of the Lost World."

Brusette saw "Jurassic Park" in the theater as a child, and has at present named more than than 15 new species of dinosaurs.

"I do retrieve seeing the moving-picture show when I was 9 years-quondam, dorsum in 1993, only the spectacle of the summer blockbuster, and seeing these dinosaurs onscreen," he says. "And this was such a new view of dinosaurs, so unlike from their image in all the textbooks and library books that I had in school. You know, it blew me away. Information technology's amazing considering there's many people like me out there, people that saw the film when we were immature, and it motivated us in one way or some other to become paleontologists. It just inspires u.s.a. and then much, it got usa and then enthused virtually these fantastic animals, that we dedicated our lives to information technology."

He says there's a straight line between the movie and today's dinosaur scientific discipline.

"And this is why, now, 25 years later on, we're in the center of this most exciting time in the entire history of dinosaur inquiry, because in that location are more people than fifty-fifty before going out, looking for dinosaur bones all effectually the world," he says.

Scientists are now discovering approximately 50 new species of dinosaur per year, and have been for a decade.

"It's wild, isn't it?" Brusette says. "I mean, that number sounds make believe, it sounds like it's incommunicable, correct, that once a week somebody'southward finding a new dinosaur merely it'due south absolutely true... And then nosotros are right in the center of this very heady time of discovery."

Another reason for the explosion of discoveries is that many countries are expanding their paleontological inquiry.

"So many of the most important new discoveries are coming from places like China and Argentina and Brazil, these enormous countries that are opening up to the globe, that are developing, that are building their own universities, their own museums, and are training their own young scientists who are going out and looking for dinosaurs."

At the aforementioned time, technology has been improving rapidly.

"Developments in things like CAT scanning and 3D computer modeling and really high-powered microscopes, those kinds of new tools are helping us to study dinosaurs in ways that we would take thought impossible just a generation ago, and they're giving us new insight into what dinosaurs were actually like every bit real animals, what they looked similar, how they moved, how they ate, how they grew upwards," Brusette says.

Simply one matter applied science hasn't changed is how scientists find fossils.

"It's however an erstwhile-fashioned game of merely going out, and walking around and looking really intensely at the rocks, and looking for fossils that fashion," Brusette says.

Thanks to these new discoveries, we practise know that there are quite a few historical inaccuracies in the Jurassic Park franchise.

"The biggest one of all really is that the dinosaurs still, in the new film, are shown every bit these green, scaly overgrown lizard-type of animals," Brusette says. "And in reality, we now know that a lot of dinosaurs had feathers. And dinosaurs were much more similar birds in the fashion they behaved, but also the fashion they looked. And that wasn't actually known back in 1993 when the outset film came out. It was only a few years later that the very first plume-covered dinosaur fossil was found in China. Just at present, 25 years later, nosotros know that so many dinosaurs had feathers."

Only that doesn't prevent Brusette from standing to love the moving picture, or from recognizing its power.

"You know, I love the Jurassic Park films," he says, "especially the first ane, and I call back information technology was the most important affair that ever happened to paleontology, because it made dinosaurs into these popular civilisation superstars."

Written by Rachel Taube.

Who Had A Head Five Feet Long, And Ate Everything? Deinosuchus Riograndensis.

By Carlos Morales

When yous walk into the Fossil exhibit at Big Curve National Park, you'll quickly spot a giant skull. It's well-nigh 5 anxiety long, posed with jaws wide open. And it'southward been completely bronzed.

This late cretaceous-era attic belongs to an aboriginal predator called deinosuchus riograndensis.

I see Big Curve visitor Misty Benham, staring at the skull too. While Benham hadn't heard of the ancient creature earlier, she'southward pretty familiar with what paleontologists say are its distant relatives

"Thank god we weren't alive at the same time," Benham says. "Like I have issues only living in Florida and the size of the alligators that live there and just existence impressed that they truly are everywhere. And then that, I don't know If I would want to live in the same time period."

Deinosuchus puts even your largest Florida gator to shame. If you've seen

the 1999 monster movie "Lake Placid," yous know what we're talking most.

"He was 30 feet right? He had to exist."

"Well, at present maybe somebody's happy I brought my big gun."

Don Corrick is a geologist at Large Bend National Park.

"That was deinosuchus! Yeah, yes. There's some Hollywood to it of course. But yep they're using deinosuchus in that motion-picture show," he says.

He says, yeah, the picture is over-the-top...but it really undersold the size of deinosuchus.

"It would exist the top predator in the ancient swamps of big bend. It'd exist 39, 40 feet long, xvi,000 pounds," Corrick says.

The remains of jitney-sized deinosuchus take been found in several states that were once underwater – places similar Utah and Wyoming. And, of course, Texas' Big Bend region, where we head out into the field.

In his olive-green National Park compatible, Corrick stands in what he says used to be an estuary. It's now a dusty, open field, littered with native shrubs and what look like milky-colored rocks, worn over time. These are fossils, Corrick says.

"And every bit you walk forth that's what you detect, the crumbs of ancient life...."

He spots something. "There'south a deinosuchus tooth. This is kind of a smaller ane," Corrick says.

He slowly picks upwards the the chipped tooth and places information technology in the palm of his hand. He turns it over, analyzing it. He thinks it was probably from the front of the creature's mouth, where its teeth were long and were used to catch prey. Towards the back of its jaw, the teeth were blunt --

congenital for crushing. Paleontologists guess that deinosuchus' bite packed more than force than that of a t-rex.

Paleontologist David Schwimmer – yeah, similar the actor who played a paleontologist on

"Friends" – says their diet was varied.

"Evidently it ate anything. From turtles to dinosaurs," Schwimmer says.

Schwimmer has studied deinosuchus for iii decades. He says the giant crocodylian was an indiscriminate predator – most likely approaching the shore slowly, nearly invisible to its would-exist prey. And then, in the glimmer of an eye, it'd thrust out of the water and chomp down on nearby critters.

"We phone call this opportunistic eating," Schwimmer says. "You figure when you're a seven-ton, forty-foot animal yous can eat whatever you desire."

Schwimmer says that too teeth, the other thing that really sets deinosuchus apart are these things called osteoderms, or scutes – bony plates that covered the creature's back. On deinosuchus, they were unusually large and lumpy. Schwimmer says they looked like behemothic, one-half-baked oatmeal cookies.

"Information technology'south a bone in the skin. It would've been biscuit shaped. Kind of oval shaped. And this is what kind of helps give it some sort of structural integrity," Schwimmer says.

He says, "They're loftier and lumpy and irregular. The purpose of the osteoderms – according to one theory, and i think it's a good one – is to help the animal walk, of all things."

Back at the deinosuchus exhibit, in that location's a painting of the hulking behemothic. It'due south stretching out of the water, squaring off against a tyrannosaur. The larger-than-life scene, the open up space -- they're all kind of the reason why Floridian Misty Brenham fabricated the trek to Large Curve in the first place. She says she merely wanted to "...make myself and my journey, brand it seem bigger past making myself and my issues in my life smaller if that makes any sense, like calculation contrast."

And there's no better way to feel small, than continuing next to deinosuchus riograndensis, one of the giants that roamed the land before Texas.

Kittens In A Cavern: How Saber-Tooths Lived In The Ice Age

Past Shelly Brisbin

When yous think nigh prehistoric animals, the images that come to mind are probably large, reptile-like creatures – dinosaurs. Just before the land nosotros know as Texas was Texas, the few remaining Water ice Historic period dinosaurs shared the Hill Country with some critters that have a lot in mutual with modern mammals. Well, except for their longer, sharper teeth.

I need to start with a confession. I'm a cat person. I have three.

Only I'm as well a big fan of wild felines. And I'm not alone. My 7-year-onetime niece, Katie? She'southward pretty keen on cats, too, even if the cats in question are thousands of years sometime.

We're continuing in front of an exhibit at the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin. And nosotros're looking at three cats. I tell Katie they lived during the Ice Historic period.

"Like you mean like, the old days when everything was gray?" she wants to know.

Yeah, kind of greyness. Afterward all, the cats we're looking at are fossils – two kittens and an adult who lived 10,000-20,000 years ago. And unlike the three I live with, they definitely weren't business firm cats.

Pamela Owen, associate managing director of the Texas Memorial Museum says the specimens on display are scimitar-toothed cats. Or – more scientifically, homotherium.

"And then we use the term saber-toothed cats to draw – at least hither in Texas – two species that nosotros know of that were living during the terminal Water ice Age, the Pleistocene," she says.

Owen says the cat most people telephone call a saber-toothed tiger had much longer teeth than these guys do. And they weren't really tigers. Merely telephone call them smilodon.

The statue of a saber-tooothed cat in front of Texas Memorial Museum resembles smilodon, not homotherium.

The statue of a saber-tooothed cat in front end of Texas Memorial Museum resembles smilodon, not homotherium.

"You can look at smilodon every bit kind of your beefier, jaguar-bodied, very elongated, upper-canined saber tooth – the archetype saber-toothed cat that people know and beloved. And and then homotherium serum is sort of a lion-sized saber-toothed cat, with relatively shorter elongated canines, with longer legs, maybe a amend runner."

Their teeth are serrated, like good steak knives.

The adult homotherium at the Texas Memorial Museum is special because its skeleton is fully articulated. And the kittens are besides largely intact. Having even one intact fossil gives scientists a window into what a prehistoric brute looked like, and how it lived. Just Owen says the three cats hither are all distinct.

"The two kittens are two different ages, so they indicate two unlike litters," she says.

One was probably two months one-time; the other four months.

Ernest Lundelius is a professor emeritus of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Texas.

"I recollect this may be the all-time sample of homotherium that'southward known," he says.

At historic period 90, Lundelius still maintains an office at the UT Vertebrate Paleontology Lab. It's just across from the academy'southward large drove of animal fossils. He says the cats' teeth aren't the only feature that distinguishes them from other Ice Historic period felines.

"If yous look very advisedly, you'll discover that the claws on this animal were actually quite modest," he says. "They're actually not annihilation like the slap-up big hooks that y'all would get on a cat of that size today, like a king of beasts or a tiger. They're much more like the claws y'all'd notice on a cheetah, except for the one on the thumb, which is a bully large claw."

And similar the cheetah, he believes homotherium was built for speed.

"This is a relatively long-legged cat, Lundelius says. "If you look and compare the lengths of the major limb basic to say a standard cat, especially the other saber-toothed cat that we had around – smilodon – these are quite long-legged animals."
The homotherium at the Texas Memorial Museum aren't but special because they are so fully intact. They're too special considering of where they were found.

In the summers of 1949 and 1951, UT paleontologists located the three homotherium, along with a large number of other Pleistocene fossils, in a cave just n of San Antonio, on property owned by the Friesenhahn family.

"And and so that Friesenhahn Cavern site is something that nosotros would call a den site for homotherium," Owen says. "The females that were raising their kittens were using that cave during the terminal Water ice Age as a site to raise those kittens until they had erupted some solid teeth and could go and hunt with her."

Owen says the museum also has other fossils from Friesenhahn.

"We have a long-nosed peccary. We actually have a little black bear, and a funny piddling skeleton of a cotton-tail rabbit, which is oftentimes some of the visitors' favorite skeletons," she says.

Some of the teeth and bone fragments in Friesenhahn Cave have a story to tell about homotherium.

"These scimitar-toothed cats were found in a cavern that contained the remains of over 100 juvenile mammoths – so baby mammoths," Owen says. "And some of the bones had tooth marks, and bear witness of an a carcass being dismembered."

Now, even during the Ice Age, mammoths, or prehistoric elephants, weren't cave dwellers. So they probably didn't go in in that location voluntarily. In other words, they were cat food.

"We tin confidently say that homotherium serum did prefer these larger-bodied mammals similar mammoths," Owen says.

Paleontologists tin can be confident almost what saber-toothed cats ate considering Friesenhahn Cave has been and then well-protected from the outside world, for thousands of years.

Laurence Meissner was a long-fourth dimension professor of biology at Concordia University in Austin. He had a lot to do with making certain Friesenhahn Cave remains available for hereafter exploration.

"Yeah, it'southward a sink hole," he says. "Information technology's most perhaps 25 or 30-by-60. It has about an 8-foot ceiling...and information technology is accessed by a vertical shaft."

Concordia acquired the cave xx years ago.

"The gentleman who owned it was getting ready to sell the state, and I mentioned to him, I said 'Wow, if this gets in the easily of developers, you'll never know what's going to happen.' So he donated to Concordia," Meissner says.

Since acquiring the cavern, Concordia has removed excess dirt and debris, and reinforced the roof, to forbid damage. Meissner says Concordia is working with UT and others to create a direction quango to plan for futurity exploration of the cavern, and to ensure information technology continues to be protected.

During our museum trip, I told my niece Katie about the nearby cave where the cats – and other animals on brandish – lived. She had a theory about why a female parent cat might raise her family unit in a cavern, and how the sharp-toothed kittens might help keep watch.

"Their mom wanted, probably wanted to protect the fiddling ones," she says. So when anyone approached their habitation, the baby…the baby cats would tackle them."

It might not take worked exactly like that back in the Ice Age, but Friesenhahn Cave did keep the homotherium family protected long plenty to show paleontologists, and all of usa, a thing or two about how they lived.

In Texas, You Never Know Where A Fossil Might Plow Up

By Kevin Wheeler

Dinosaurs sometimes seem similar creatures that just exist in movies. But long before we walked this state nosotros phone call Texas, dinosaurs did information technology start. And at ane point, virtually 260 1000000 years ago, Texas was almost completely covered past water teeming with sharks and other ocean life. The remaining bear witness of these creatures – dinos, sharks, and other creatures – are what we call fossils. And you lot don't have to be a paleontologist to find 1. Only a little marvel and a willingness to become a fiddling dirty will exercise.

If you want to learn virtually fossils, yous might caput to a bastion of old bones on the University of Texas at Austin campus – Texas Memorial Museum. Among the displays of animals who once trod or even swam over Texas eons ago, you lot can notice Pamela Owen. She'south the acquaintance managing director of the museum. As a vertebrate paleontologist, she knows a lot near fossils – and badgers.

"My dream finds are the ancestors of badgers," Owen says. "I've spent many years studying badgers and I'm actually interested in what has happened in their history that led up to them condign these fabulous digging machines."

Fossils can answer these questions. As it turns out, a fossil isn't merely something that'south old. Information technology doesn't even have to be a bone. According to Owen, a fossil can be any evidence of past life, like a office of the body (a os, tooth, or a beat, etc.), or some evidence of an organism'south beliefs, like a footprint.

Owen uses a mammoth'due south human foot os to help teach museum visitors nearly fossils and the fossilization process. The bone is brownish and surprisingly lightweight. You wouldn't think twice if Owen told you it came from a 20th century elephant. That'south because this mammoth bone hasn't become completely petrified. But a bone doesn't need to be to become a fossil. Basically, it just needs time.

"We're typically talking thousands of years to millions of years ago, not a 50-year-one-time moo-cow bone," Owen says.

Owen says a bone needs to exist at least x,000 years old to exist truly considered a fossil. That'southward around the time of the final Water ice Age. This fact always leads to a little bit of thwarting on Fossil Identification Day. It's the museum's almanac event where amateur paleontologists and enthusiasts bring what they've establish, to be evaluated. Many sleuths are told they're only bearers of old bones or teeth.

But this isn't to say you couldn't stumble upon something huge or important. In fact, one of the largest fossils at the Texas Memorial Museum was establish by an Austin dentist in 1991. Information technology'due south the Shoal Creek Plesiosaur, and it lies in land on the bottom flooring of the museum. It has big flippers and looks kind of similar a dolphin crossed with an alligator.

Finds like the Shoal Creek Plesiosaur reflect how neat Texas can be for fossil hunting. They're everywhere, and anyone can find one if they look hard enough in the right places.

That notion is mayhap best exemplified by Wes Kirpach. He teaches biology at West Plano high schoolhouse, and for the by fourteen years, he's taken hundreds of students out fossil hunting at a nearby creek.

"I idea maybe the students might be able to find 1 or two piffling pieces of fossils out there and that would still be function of the fossil tape that they could talk most, you know," Kirpach says. "Information technology just then happened that there was a lot more than that out at that place."

It's an area rich in fish bones, seashells, and shark's teeth. But on top of that, Kirpach's students have made their share of big finds too. They've unearthed a mosasaur that'southward currently existence studied at Southern Methodist University. And they very well may have discovered a new species of ammonite. While not everything in the creek is worthy of its ain scientific paper, Kirpach says every student he's taken to the creek has come out with a fossil.

"All the way down through even Austin, you know that most of Texas has some type of fossil formation just underneath your feet, underneath the soil," Kirpach says. "So when you see that exposed stone it'southward a good thought to kind of become up to it, and have a wait and see if nosotros can find something interesting, because it doesn't actually require paleontologists or a lot of experience come beyond something really fascinating. "

Kirpach says his students enjoy fossil hunting in the campus creek. But maybe not all of them as much equally Jordan Lee. He graduated from West Plano this year. He'll be going on to UT'south pre-med program, but he plans to continue fossil hunting in his spare time.

Lee's passion for fossils started around age five, when his father gave him a iv-and-a half inch megalodon tooth. He was more often than not just a fossil collector – until he met Mr. Kirpach.

"What blew my heed was when I started hunting on my own, y'all know, I was finding similar stuff that paleontologists find themselves," Lee says. "And notwithstanding here I was just a kid. All my free fourth dimension hunting in a little dry riverbed and I could all the same do the exact aforementioned thing that professionals do."

And so can you. If you've been bitten by the fossil bug, you could end upwardly like Lee did, filling a third of your family's three-car garage with some of your larger finds.

To get started, look for one of the many paleontological societies in Texas. Most of them take Facebook pages.

Sharks In Ancient Texas: Know Them By Their Teeth

By Kevin Wheeler

In one case upon a time, about 260 meg years ago, the land before Texas was non really state at all. In fact, Texas was completely covered past ocean.
Roger Ferris, author of "The Collectors Guide to Sharks and Rays from the Cretaceous of Texas," says that's why information technology's so common to find shark teeth and other remnants of ancient aquatic life in our often hot, dry state.

"Information technology was a very interesting fourth dimension back many millions of years agone," Ferris says. "Information technology was a much warmer time, like twenty to 30 degrees warmer, [and] naturally the ice caps melted."

Ferris says that while dinosaurs were stomping around the land, marine life including sharks swam over the Lone Star Land.

"We establish...many thousands of [fossilized shark teeth]," Ferris says. "Non only in the DFW area, [merely] all the way down through Austin articulate down to Big Bend. And then teeth are the most common vertebrate fossils out there."

Ferris says that nosotros can glean some data about these ancient creatures past looking at their fossilized teeth. The clear similarities between ancient teeth and mod shark teeth suggests an obvious evolutionary bond."

"Sharks are and then adapted," Ferris says. "[Information technology's] good news that we tin can study today'due south sharks and so match them to what nosotros had back in the Cretaceous time."

Written by Josue Moreno.

When A Dinosaur Isn't A Dinosaur

By Laura Rice

For the last several weeks, we've been featuring stories for our series "The Land Before Texas: When Dinos Roamed the Lone Star State." But the truth is, that title is a little misleading. Because non all of our stories near prehistoric Texas accept featured dinosaurs. At that place were the ancestors of sharks when Texas was covered by sea, and so the big-toothed cats.

But what'south in a proper name anyway?

Dinosaur!

There may just be something about the word itself that makes u.s. want to use it – a lot.

Pamela Owen is the associate managing director of Texas Memorial Museum.
"'Crusade information technology'due south a fabulous word. Dinosaur," she says.

Owen knows a lot near dinosaurs – and what people call up of them.

"You know it'due south this terrible lizard, terrible reptile. You know, information technology'southward got forcefulness merely at the same fourth dimension it sounds ancient," she says.

Where she works, there'southward one specific creature that oftentimes gets called dinosaur.

"You'll come up the stairs and above your head is this quetzalcoatlus," Owen says.

Nosotros'll get into exactly what that is in merely a sec – but kickoff, know that it's a pterosaur. See, it has that "saur" part, and they lived at the aforementioned fourth dimension equally dinosaurs – merely aren't dinosaurs. This may pb you to ask the same question I did:

"Why?"

Thankfully, Owen has been asked this before. And she has an reply even a non-paleontologist can understand.

"Then 1 thing that dinosaurs do that these other reptiles [don't] do is they hold their legs underneath their body," Owen says. "So they have this upright stance so it'south not this sprawling stance like I'thousand going to practise a pushup stance that you would see in a lizard. Dinosaurs also have a very interesting style of moving their hind feet. They have a straight hinge for an ankle. And that is an adaptation for improve running."

There's more than – but that'due south the simple reply. Now, let'south get back to that quetzalcoatlus – a pterosaur – actually the biggest pterosaur ever institute – and found right hither in Texas.

Nowadays, Doug Lawson is a research scientist for Southwest Airlines. Just back in 1971, he was merely a student in the right identify at the right time.

"When I was a graduate student at University of Texas at Austin I was working on my chief's degree and that's when I discovered the largest flying creature when I was working in the Cretaceous sedimentary rocks in the Big Bend surface area of Texas," Lawson says.

"Yeah yous have a brusk opportunity to find something that's come to the surface. And, if you're lucky, the rest of the skeleton is nevertheless at that place."

In Lawson's case, the bone he constitute exposed was role of the upper arm of the pterosaur. More of the wing was below the surface – just much of information technology had plainly eroded – and the remainder of the creature was nowhere to be found. But what he found was enough.

"The wrist of pterosaurs is pretty unique – and then one time I realized what that was I knew we had a huge flying fauna because, yous know, this is practically the size of a soccer ball and it'southward its wrist!" he says.

The size came as a chip of a daze to scientists. Most already-discovered pterosaurs were more similar the size of a mod bat. And scientists besides knew of ane with a 15-foot wingspan – much bigger than any flying animal today. quetzalcoatlus had a 40-human foot wingspan.

"So this was quite a spring from 15 feet to about twoscore feet – so uh, more than doubling the wingspan of anything that had ever flown," Lawson says.

Again… 40-feet… that'due south about as long equally phone poll. Can y'all imagine what that'd wait like on takeoff? Lawson thinks quetzalcoatlus wouldn't have taken a running star – but more likely would accept started from a high place.

"Because all they have to do is get loftier enough to bring that wing down one time, correct? To become that lift," he says.

But Lawson says one time airborne… it doesn't seem quetzalcoatlus would soar over not bad distances. No fossils accept been found over marine sediment – simply on what was land. And barren or semi-barren land at that – like Big Bend.

"So we have to attempt to figure out what was such an animal doing in a semi-barren, mountainous valley that didn't soar and glide around a whole lot and was basically toothless based on the skull of the littler specimens," Lawson says.

The answer is non all that clear. Merely Lawson has an thought. And since he'southward quetzalcoatlus's founder – his estimation is worth something.

"Me, I like the thought that it'southward a scavenger," he says. "That it just picked up the easy meat, correct? It could be dead meat, it could exist defenseless meat. Petty dinosaurs. And land, gobble up what it could, and took off, and then land later at another opportunity and swallow that."

Sort of like an aboriginal vulture. So perchance yous tin think of quetzalcoatlus next time you see 1.

And it's true that birds today are actually the closest living relatives we accept to dinosaurs. That's a lesson Pamela Owen frequently teaches curious kids at the Texas Memorial Museum. She keeps a mounted skeleton of one modern bird in the museum's paleo lab.

"They see information technology's something that's got the big three tows with claws, it's got an s-shaped neck, it's, you know, on its hind legs which are relatively long so information technology looks like something that could actually move out," she says. "And so they tin can see that, you know, essence of like, 'that's a dinosaur.' So when I say, 'hey, practice you lot know what it's called?' And they're similar, 'no, what is it?' And I was like, 'well, information technology's chicken!'"

Merely – though birds are descendants of dinosaurs – they aren't exactly on the same branch of the family tree.

"You know crocodiles, and dinosaurs, and of course birds these days, and pterosaurs are all related to one some other," Lawson says. "Because they all came out of this group called archosaurs – ruling reptiles."

But of course they're not all the same thing. And if yous'll remember – that's how this whole story began.

"Yous know the downside of calling things say a flying dinosaur or a pond dinosaur or this is a dinosaur fish annihilation like that is that y'all kind of take away, you know, the magic of the diversity of life," Owen says.

So yes… it's very fun to say…

Dinosaur!

But not everything that'southward quondam is a dinosaur. Information technology may be something else that's very absurd in its own way.