Jurassic Park on Shoal Creek

 It was January 1990 an amateur paleontologist and his five year old son discovered an estimated 90 million year old plesiosaur skeleton in Shoal Creek near Northwest Park. At the time my family was living nearby and I can remember paleontology crews camped out for quite some time in a backyard bordering Shoal Creek with someone on site 24/7 in part to protect the site and also to complete digging before any major rains that would cause Shoal Creek to flood.

“We’ve had bits and pieces [of plesiosaurs] found before, but we don’t know of any skeleton like the one here,” said John Buckley, instructor of paleontology at Austin Community College and a member of the Texas Memorial Museum’s Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory at the University of Texas. “We still don’t know how much we have. We don’t know how far under the (creek) bank it goes.” (Austin American-Statesman, 22 Mar 1990, p.17)

Plesiosaurs aren’t dinosaurs proper, rather giant swimming reptiles that frequented the warm, shallow sea that once covered Central Texas; they were among the largest predators in the Mesozoic era oceans (Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods). Carnivorous, they fed primarily on fish. The Shoal Creek plesiosaur would have weighed about a ton and was from 14 to 18 feet long. Plesiosaurs had a small head, long and slender neck, broad flat body, short tail, and two pairs of large, elongated paddles. Think Loch Ness monster!

The Shoal Creek plesiosaur is on display at UT’s Texas Memorial Museum, part of the Hall of Geology and Paleontology on the first floor. As a museum podcast says “The fossil remains are exhibited in the position in which they were found and excavated. The skull was not attached to the skeleton, but discovered next to it. Unfortunately, it was very poorly preserved and broken into many pieces – too fragile to be put on exhibit. Despite the condition of its skull, this plesiosaur is still an important and fascinating part of Austin’s ancient history.”

If all this gives you pause about wading in Shoal Creek on your next trip to Northwest Park, relax. Plesiosaurs went extinct along with about 75% of all animal species on earth – including dinosaurs -- around 66 million years ago when a large asteroid 6+ miles wide struck the earth off the northern tip of the Yucatán peninsula creating what is today known as the 110 mile wide Chicxulub impact crater.