A Visit to the PAST

WELCOME TO TEXAS’ BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK

- Nick D'Alto

Imagine if you could travel millions of years back in time. Back to a world of towering mountains, lush forests, and incredible dinosaurs. Well, in a way, it’s possible to make this journey. At Big Bend National Park, in Texas, visitors can come face to face with the Cretaceous world.

Don’t expect simple exhibits displayed in museum halls (as wonderful as that can be). Because Big Bend is a place where you can see the skeletons of giant dinosaurs, unearthed from this very land. Where you can stand beneath the enormous, outstretched wing bones of the largest flying creature that ever lived. And then look up into the same skies where such beasts once soared. It’s as close to meeting dinosaurs as we humans will ever come.

Shifting Earth

Today the park is a parched, rocky landscape. What would this place have looked like, back in dinosaur days? “Well, at the beginning of the Cretaceous Period, about 130 million years ago, we would have been underwater!” chuckles park geologist Don Corrick. “In those days, a shallow ocean we call the Western Interior Seaway cut across North America. So sharks and sea turtles would be swimming around here.” They might have swum alongside early marine reptiles called mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. How do we know all this? “We find these marine species in the limestone that formed as mud and silt hardened,” Corrick explains. “We can find seashells and fish fossils on what is dry land today, because this entire region was once the undersea floor.”