Volunteers helping to clean up damage from the recent floods in Texas found dinosaur footprints dating back to 110-115 million years ago, during the Earth’s Cretaceous period.

The discovery was made on private property in Travis County, Texas, the county’s executive, Travis County Judge Andy Brown, told ABC News. 

University of Texas at Austin paleontologist Matthew Brown told Axios that the volunteers found at least 15 individual footprints measuring about 18 to 20 inches long etched into a limestone formation known for preserving dinosaur activity.

Some of the footprints belonged to the roughly 35-foot-long, carnivorous bipedal Acrocanthosaurus or a similar dinosaur, and additional footprints might have belonged to the herbivorous and long-necked Paluxysaurus, the official dinosaur of Texas, Mr. Brown told ABC News.

Acrocanthosaurus was similar to the more well-known Tyrannosaurus rex. 

“If they were chasing any one of us you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,” Mr. Brown told KUT-FM, the official radio station of the University of Texas at Austin.

The floods helped clear away sediment that had hidden some of the footprints, while brush obscured some of the others.

“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,” Mr. Brown told KUT-FM.

• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.