Move Over Tamil Nadu. Texas has an OFFICIAL STATE SAUROPOD.
Socialism!!!! Ok, not really.
What’s great about this Star-Telegram piece is that, in addition to being about Sauropods, it has like 12 ledes:
The official state dinosaur would look big even inside Cowboys Stadium.
The creature stood 15 feet tall at the shoulders.
Sixty feet long, head to tail, it weighed 20 tons or more.
Sadly, despite being native to Texas, the species lived and died without ever tasting brisket.
“It was a herbivore,” paleontologist Dale Winkler said.
The quadrupedal sauropod — sort of a giant prehistoric giraffe — was the state’s first vegetarian.
Here’s the video of Texan scientists on a fresh Sauropod tip. The glorious dino, Paluxysaurus Jonesi, did move in herds. And HOW did it become the State Dinosaur of Texas?
In 1997, the Texas Legislature named Pleurocoelus as the official state dinosaur.
Later, an SMU graduate student disputed the belief that the fossilized bones of several dinosaurs found in the Glen Rose area were the same as the Pleurocoelus bones first found in Maryland and Virginia.
Peter Rose determined that the fossils came from a previously unknown — and uniquely Texas — species he named Paluxysaurus jonesi after the Paluxy River and W.W. Jones, owner of a ranch in Hood County where the fossils were discovered.
Note to Pleurocoelus: DO NOT MESS WITH TEXAS. Also humorous, this nubbin:
SMU geological sciences professor Louis Jacobs has described Texas as a “free trade zone for the age of reptiles.” Dinosaurs from three geological time periods have been found in three areas of the state.
Texas’s role in the Mesozoic was thus strikingly similar to its role in NAFTA.
