Some of the strangest cryptids reports there are congregate around sightings of what appear to be some sort of living dinosaurs stalking through the wild places of our world. There are certainly places where one could sort of imagine this happening, such as the deepest, darkest unexplored jungles of Africa or South America, and certainly these places have their reports of living dinosaurs. Yet, these strange creatures seem to make appearances in other areas that would not traditionally be at the top of most people’s lists for places to find actual surviving dinosaurs, and one of these is in the desert badlands of the U.S. state of Texas. Here in Texas there have long been reports of something that seems very much like a T-Rex or other similar bipedal dinosaur, and the reports are just as bizarre as they are surprising.

A very strange string of what seem to be some sort of living theropod dinosaurs in Texas comes to us from the author and paranormal blogger Lon Strickler of Phantoms and Monsters. In October of 2013 he published a report with the heading “Dinosaurs Run Amuck In South Texas Town?” and gave the truly outlandish account of a witness identifying himself as simply “MR,” of Hebbronville, Texas. MR says that this had happened during the summer months of that year, when temperatures were sweltering and when it seems dinosaurs were on the prowl. The witness says it started when a friend of his claimed to have spotted what looked like a bipedal theropod dinosaur very much like a small T-Rex scramble across the street right through the swath of the headlights of her car at approximately 8:45 PM. He says that when he heard of this sighting it brought back memories of his own weird experience just a few months before, and put it all into much clearer focus. He says of his own bizarre encounter:

Just a couple months before I had actually heard a creature I could only describe as a dinosaur. I had been asleep, it was night, maybe around 1 or 2 am. I had awoken and just at that moment I heard an unfamiliar screech of something running by my window. We have an AC unit in the window so the window is basically open. I heard its footsteps as it ran by and it was heavy whatever it was. I could hear it clearly on the ground. As it ran further away I could hear it screech again! It was like nothing I’ve ever heard in my life! It was loud too and I wonder if anyone else heard it or saw it. I live in an apartment complex. I just laid there in bed completely bewildered by what I had just heard. I questioned my sanity and if I had heard what I thought I heard. So when my friend saw the “dinosaur” she was excited and wanted to tell me because of what I heard. Im only sad I didn’t get to see it too. We both questioned our sanity.

At around the same time, Strickler posted another eyewitness report, this time from a man in Falfurrias, TX which is about 18 miles east of Hebbronville. The witness, calling himself “LM,” claimed that the region was actually undergoing quite a spate of such bizarre sightings, and becoming ground zero for all manner of dinosaur encounters. LM tells Strickler:

I live near Falfurrias, TX which is about 18 miles east of Hebbronville. I and others have seen those creatures. My neighbor and I saw a pair in December 2012 on the roadway behind our houses. We were scared to report our sighting. I know other people in this area have seen the same creatures. A family member from Sabinas Hidalgo in Mexico told me that he saw a ‘big lizard’ the last time he visited us. He saw it while he was driving near McAllen, TX. He described the same thing we have seen. It was 2-3 ft. tall with a large head and long tail. It ran on 2 legs and was very dark in color. The two creatures we saw were dark brown and walking quickly on 2 legs also. It was about 4:30 pm and we watched them for about 20 seconds as they moved towards the dead end of the road. We got a very good look. For a few nights after that, we heard short shrills coming from the brush at the end of the road. A couple of weeks later, my son told me that he and his friends found many quail feathers and deer bones scattered by a tree in the same brush. I did contact a wildlife authority about the remains but didn’t mention what we had seen. He said that it was probably coyotes, though I have not heard or seen coyotes for long time. Another neighbor lost a dog about the same time. Again coyotes were said to be the predator. No remains were ever found. My husband was alarmed and had a high heavy duty steel link fence built around the yard so that our grand children and pets are safe.

The witness also claims that her guard dogs have been acting skittish and afraid, and even speculates on what it all could mean, suggesting that it is the legendary “Chupacabras” blood sucking goat killer. Yet another report from the area of Hebronville was apparently made all the way back in 2011, by a witness called “MG.” She says that at the time she had been walking along a dusty lonely road on his way home from work at around 5:45 PM when he noticed something odd, in the form of plumes of dust wafting up into the air from a nearby field as if something were running along there. This would perhaps not be so strange in and of itself under normal conditions, but it would soon prove to be something very bizarre indeed, and the witness says:

On the side of the road where I was walking, I saw dust being kicked up into the air and moving along the field. Then the trail of dust was heading toward the road in front of me. I stopped walking not knowing what may be exiting at the road. About 40 ft. in front of me was what I can only describe as a little T-Rex dinosaur, about 2-2 1/2 ft in height. It didn’t stop running as it dashed across the road into a smaller field. It was light reddish brown, stood on two legs and had a long tail that was straight out as it ran. There is no way that this was a lizard known to live here. It looked very much like the photo of the toy I found online. No one wanted to believe me. My friends and family think I mistook it for another lizard, but I know what I saw. I do believe there are very strange creatures around here. My ex-husband used to talk about huge birds and walking shadows that he and others would see on a ranch south of Hebbronville. At one point several cattle would go missing without a trace. He would never stay there at night.

This could possibly all tie into other sightings of dinosaur-like creatures spotted in different areas of rural Texas, such as a report called in to an episode of Coast to Coast AM in October of 2014. The witness, calling himself “Dan,” told of an experience he had had as a teenager in the area of Midland, Texas, where he would often go out dirt biking with his buddies in the rugged desert scrubland stretching out all around them. On one such excursion he claims that they spotted what he calls a “mini T-Rex,” of which he says in a transcription of the call by Jamie Brian:

I remember seeing this thing and it was probably about two feet high. It stood up on its back legs. It didn’t have, like, fingers or like you’d normally see a T-Rex in the movies with three or four fingers. It only had one claw. And now I remember, we were running our motorcycles around and scared it off, I guess. It was greenish-yellow, I think, in color and never really thought about it. I just assumed it was some weird, you know, lizard but I remember… It was about 2 or 2 and a half, maybe 2 or 2 and a half feet high when it stood up. When it stood up, it had this egg shaped dome… The only thing I can say is that it did look like a T-Rex. It had an egg shaped face or head. (caller talks about an old Art Bell show where a caller described an encounter with T-Rex) There was four of us. We were about 13 or 14 years old at the time. We saw, it was crawling along on all fours and as we rode up on it, it reared back and it had these little tiny arms. It looked like a little T-Rex. So I honestly thought, I missed it or it was standing or I didn’t see it right until years later when I heard that call on Art’s show. It was angry. It wasn’t happy that me and my friends were riding our dirt-bikes in that area.

From the site Frontiers of Zoology there is another report of an apparent mini T-rex, from an unidentified witness who was interviewed about it by a site contributor named Phillip O’ Donnell. The witness says he saw it in the wilds of South East Texas, and describes the creature as a “baby T-rex,” of which he says:

I saw something that really changed how I view dinosaurs. I saw a baby tyrannosaurus rex. It looked like a baby anyway. I thought maybe raptor, but no it’s head was to wide. It even looked at me before running into the woods. I even slapped myself across the face to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. It was about 6 to 7 feet tall and about the same from [tail]tip to little arms and head. It was forest green with an iridescent look much like oil. I saw it about 50 feet away as it was sunning itself in the last rays of the sun. It was sitting. It looked at me even. It was south east Texas. Silsbee to be exact. It is near the big thicket on the edge actually. I could even see the reptilian lips above the teeth.

It is interesting to note that Texas has long supposedly been the haunt of a cryptid called the Mountain Boomer, which are said to lurk mostly in the rugged mountain wilderness of the Big Bend region, near Big Bend National Park. The Mountain Boomers are said to stand between 5 to 7 feet tall and look like a miniature T. rex, with a bipedal gait, long tapered tail, powerful hind legs, and tiny fore legs tipped with sharp claws. Some reports mention large flaps of skin above and below the head, and the creature is said to sometimes emit a low, booming howl which has been described as sounding like a rumbling distant thunder. These creatures are said to be mostly shy and elusive, but one report from the early 1970s claimed that one actually ran a car off of the road. Is there any relation between the reports we have looked at here and the Mountain Boomer? What are we dealing with here?

There are quite a few ideas on what could be behind the sightings of these “mini T-Rexes” in Texas, ranging from the mundane to the fringe. One possibility is that these are misidentifications of some other wort of wildlife, although that doesn’t really seem to add up or match with what people seem to be seeing. What sort of animal lives in Texas that could possibly be mistaken for a bipedal dinosaur, other than perhaps roadrunners, which would probably be familiar to people who live there? It could also be that these represent a relic population of some sort of extinct species, maybe not a T-rex, per say, but some other small species of theropod dinosaur or even a type of ornithopod dinosaur called an iguanodon. A bit odder is the idea that people are seeing something more inter-dimensional in nature, or even seeing scenes from the distant past somehow etched upon the landscape, which play out almost like a movie reel, sort of like ghosts from the long lost past.

Of course there is much skepticism to be had with such reports as well. For one, such creatures would need massive amounts of food to sustain themselves, which in some of these desert locales would be hard to come by in sufficient amounts. Some of the wilderness of Texas where these sightings have occurred is a moonscape of bleak desert wastelands, which does not seem to be the ideal habitat for such creatures. There is also the inconvenient detail, of which I have mentioned before in other articles on “living dinosaurs,” that these creatures simply did not look like the way we imagine them to be from films such as Jurassic Park and other pop culture depictions of dinosaurs. For instance, it is now widely believed that many of these dinosaurs actually had feathers and were quite bird-like to some extent, and the fact that modern sightings such as these make no mention of that and paint them as the common public image of dinosaurs tends to certainly raise some eyebrows knowing what we know now.

One way this has been explained away is that perhaps these creatures are indicative of some sort of shapeshifting entities that can take the form of what is in our mind, but which is easier to buy, that these are shapeshifting spirits or that people are just simply making these reports up? It is all really hard to accept, that living dinosaurs could be roaming about the wilds of Texas, and yet reports like these keep coming in from time to time. Are these real dinosaurs, interdimensional phenomena, hoaxes and lies, or something else? It is hard to say, but it definitely gives one something to look out for if you are ever in Texas driving along a remote, lonely road.