Jim McMahon/Mapman ®

Normally, droughts are bad news. But for fossil hunters at Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas, two years of drought conditions led to an incredible find:  113 million-year-old dinosaur tracks! Between 70 and 80 tracks were spotted in parts of the dried-up Paluxy River, which runs through the park.

Two species of dinosaur made the tracks: the carnivorous Acrocanthosaurus and the plant-munching Sauroposeidon. Volunteers named the location where the footprints were found the Ballroom because of the number of prints going in every direction. Last summer, they worked to make casts of the footprints so they could study the fossils before the river covered them once again. “The drought is a really scary thing, but there are silver linings,” says park superintendent Jeff Davis. “It gives us the opportunity to spot tracks that have never been exposed before.”