Big Bend National Park to showcase dinosaurs

Exhibit highlights creatures that once lived in West Texas.

They come to hike among spindly ocotillo, brush shoulders with a javelina or pitch a tent alongside the Rio Grande.

But most visitors to Big Bend National Park leave without realizing that dinosaurs once trundled through ancient marshlands here and a reptile the size of a small airplane flapped across that big, blue West Texas sky. That’s about to change. This fall, park officials will break ground on a paleontology exhibit that will explain what park geologist Don Corrick calls one of the great untold stories of Big Bend — its dinosaurs.

“The scientific significance of our fossils is big, and this is a chance to get kids interested,” Corrick says.

Big Bend is a diverse place, with more bird, bat and cactus species than any other national park. That diversity extends to the creatures that lived here eons ago. More than 1,200 kinds of fossils have been uncovered at Big Bend National Park — more than any other U.S. national park.

“It’s a tremendously thick and complete record,” Corrick says.

Two 25-foot by 35-foot shelters will be built behind a ridge just off the main park road between Persimmon Gap and Panther Junction to house the new exhibit. Lifesize touchable bronze skulls — one a cast of a 7-foot set of jaws from a crocodile-like dinosaur found in the park’s hills, the other a tyrannosaur — will be displayed on an outdoor patio. A small parking lot, picnic shelter and restrooms already exist at the site.

The project will cost an estimated $350,000 to $400,000. The Friends of Big Bend National Park, a nonprofit group that raises money to maintain and improve the park, has already raised $220,000. The National Park Foundation will pitch in an additional $100,000 in matching grants if the Friends group reaches $275,000 in donations.

“Some of the most important finds in America are right here in Big Bend,” said Courtney Lyons-Garcia, executive director of the Friends of Big Bend National Park. “To properly interpret this fantastic resource, we need to create a new exhibit. This is an opportunity to bring the prehistoric world alive for visitors, particularly children, who venture out to the park.”

The exhibit will be divided into four parts, each covering a different time period. Because the park doesn’t have a museum’s ability to preserve and protect real bones, only replicas will be displayed. It also will include photos showing imprints of dinosaur skin and egg shells.

Paleontologists have discovered bones all over Big Bend and are still searching for more. Barnum Brown and R.T. Bird, rock stars in the paleontology world, explored the park in 1940, digging up the long-neck plant eater known as Alamosaurus. The paleontologists’ campsite has since been excavated, and artifacts from it saved. Those, too, will be shared with the public.

Exhibit organizers hope the display will help visitors understand what this corner of Texas was like long before humans appeared.

“Fossils are cool and 6foot thigh bones are cool, but what’s important is what they’re telling us,” Corrick says, pointing to a dry, rocky ridge visible from the exhibit site. “That limestone was full of oyster reefs. It was full of life.”