Dinosaur Valley & Wild Glen Rose

Glen Rose sits in a valley the Paluxy River has been carving for ages, and that river did something here it did almost nowhere else: it peeled back the limestone to reveal the tracks of dinosaurs that walked this ground when it was the muddy edge of an ancient sea. Locals knew about the strange three-toed prints for years before scientists arrived in the 1930s and made Glen Rose world-famous as the dinosaur-track capital of Texas. This driving loop pairs that deep prehistory with the frontier and the present-day wild country around town. You'll start at a Civil-War-era frontier fight site, stand over the celebrated tracks downtown, then drive out to Dinosaur Valley State Park to see the trackways in the riverbed and end among the rhinos, giraffes, and zebras roaming the hills of Fossil Rim. It's a day that runs from raiders to reptiles to the open range.