Several massive, three-toed footprints etched in limestone were discovered near Big Sandy Creek during cleanup after the July 5 flood. Some of the dinosaur tracks were hidden by brush; others had been covered in sediment that was scoured away by floodwaters.

"It's one of those sort of bittersweet things about our job, is that it's the cataclysmic events that often preserve fossils in the first place and then also are exposing them," Matthew Brown, a paleontologist at UT Austin, said.

The footprints were created some 115 million years ago, Brown said, when what is now a neighborhood in Northwest Travis County was a beach on the Western Interior Seaway.

/The tracks were likely made by an Acrocanthosaurus, the largest carnivore in North America during the Early Cretaceous period. They ha

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