Dinosaur Trackways on the Blank Slate of the Mind

The last couple of days, I have had the privilege of working, again, with Glen Kuban down in the bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas (Dinosaur Valley State Park). Usually we work alone, or with a couple of other people, but this time there was a little crowd. A BBC film crew brought their cameras and even a photographic drone to get video footage of the dinosaur trackways, which I have written about numerous times previously in this blog, for example here). They also came to interview Glen, who has worked on these tracks (and knows each footprint by name) for 37 years, and he will not get some worldwide recognition for the work he has done. Congratulations, Glen! You deserve it.

Watch for the BBC video when it comes out. It will be called Rediscovering T Rex. The trackways in the park are not T. rex, but there are very few verified footprints of T. rex. But in the Paluxy river bed you can see long trackways of Acrocanthosaurus, which was similar to T. rex in many ways. The BBC does not yet have an American distributor for this video, so far only Canada and France, but I’ll bet that within a year or so you can find the video on Amazon or your local library.

I have posted a YouTube video of Glen and the film crew, if you want to experience what it was like to be there.

We were at the trackway site that was made infamous in the 1970s-era creationist movie Footprints in Stone, where creationists claimed that human footprints overlapped dinosaur footprints, thus proving, they claimed, that the entire evolutionary timetable of Earth history was wrong. The evidence of human footprints in 110-million-year-old mud (now limestone) was skimpy and some of it faked. Most creationists, even those who have not publicly disavowed the “manprints of the Paluxy,” pretty much ignore them. The son of the producer of the creationist movie, when he discovered that his father had misled his viewers about these footprints, destroyed all remaining copies of the movie. There was no discussion of this uniquely American controversy with the BBC crew, even though they knew about it, because it is such a dead issue even among creationists; certainly European viewers would wonder why anyone took so much as two breaths to talk about the supposed man-prints.

But there are still passionate creationists, mostly in the Glen Rose vicinity, who believe that the supposed man-tracks are real and that they prove that not only are all evolutionary scientists wrong, but even most creationists. They are a crazy little cult. They still have a museum right near the state park, although it appears to be on the skids and is now only open two days a week. I have posted essays in this blog about the Mantrack cult in the past (for example here). The state park personnel who were with Glen, me, and the BBC crew told me that this little cult has so effectively spread the hoax that lots of visitors still ask them how to find the man-tracks. It gets pretty intense sometimes, and rather than to create a confrontation, the park personnel sometimes have to simply walk away or busy themselves with some other park visitor.

We sort of expected that some members of this cult would come and try to disrupt the BBC filming. This did not happen, however, perhaps because there were a half dozen park employees on the scene. This track site is hard to find but the cult members, some of whom own adjacent land, can get there. They act as if they also own the river bed, and have in the past tried to keep Glen from studying the tracks. Actually, the river bed belongs to the state of Texas.

But one of the cult members came by, claiming that he was taking photographs for the City of Glen Rose. I very much doubt that the city government actually sent him, however. They might have posted some of his photos in the past, but he was acting in no official capacity. Of course, this man, whose name I forgot, and just as well, started going through his little speech about how belief in the man-tracks took less faith than belief in what he called “strict evolution.” Glen had told me beforehand almost verbatim what this little speech would be. It is as if the cult members are programmed to give their little speeches, and they will not respond to anything you say. They act as if they are brainwashed.

But that was not actually the precipitating event. The man started by saying that a cold front was coming through this weekend, and that it would only be about 92 degrees instead of the normal 97 degrees. This, he claimed, disproved the entire science of global warming. As I am one of the climate scientists that Donald Trump hates and Emmanuel Macron loves, I had to point out that this was an invalid conclusion. Global warming does not mean that temperatures never decrease; it means that they increase more, and more often, than they decrease. Well, this was all the cue he needed to self-identify as a right-wing extremist (or words to that effect; I did not yet so label him) and launch into his speech.

This man went on to comment on the fact that paleontologists have stopped using the genus name Paluxysaurus and started using Sauroposeidon instead. This shows, said the man, that scientists are wrong about this and, why not, everything else also. But changing names of organisms reflects the ongoing process of coming to better understand the evolutionary history of the organisms. And, of course, science advances because scientists make mistakes and then learn from them, something that religious cults almost by definition cannot do. Cults believe themselves to be directly inspired by God, and to admit one mistake totally undermines their reason for being.

I wish to make two points from this. First, the religious fundamentalists are now attacking all of science and education on two fronts. Formerly, they focused all their attention on evolution. Now, they also consider climate scientists to be servants of Satan. This is why scientific and educational organizations, all the way from national and international organizations such as the AAAS and NCSE to local ones such as the Oklahoma Academy ofScience and Oklahomans for Excellencein Science Education, of both of which organizations I am a past president, disseminate as much information about climate science as about evolutionary science.

The second point explains the title of this essay. The lumpy limestone of Dinosaur Valley State Park has proven to be one of the most creative blank slates upon which a religious cult can write its own version of the history of the universe. The dinosaur footprints are real enough. The supposed man-tracks are incomplete dinosaur footprints. On some of these prints, the dinosaur toes have eroded away. On others, the creationists have deliberately ignored the dinosaur toe prints. Early creationists film footage and notes show clearly that they knew the dinosaur toe marks were present. In a few infamous instances, creationists have even carved human toes on the dinosaur prints, or carved entire fake human footprints in the limestone. Rather than getting insights from the evidence in the limestone, they have used the limestone as a blank notebook on which to write their own version of reality, a version not even shared by most creationists.

It is unclear whether these cult members are dangerous. Of the hundreds of videos I have posted on my Darwin Youtube channel, the only ones on which rabidly angry comments have been posted were those in which I showed Glen Kuban at work in the Paluxy riverbed. A couple of times I have wondered whether to report these creationists to the FBI, but their comments were just short of personal threat. Of course, there were atheist comments also, which insulted the creationists. The creationist comments did not threaten the atheist commentators, Glen, or myself with any violence; they merely hoped that God would rain down fire and brimstone from the sky to destroy us and our children, that’s all. The blank pages of limestone on which this cult writes its version of reality includes at least the hope that everyone who disagrees with them will be destroyed.

Second Oklahoma Evolution Road Trip, part three

On the Thursday of the Second Oklahoma Evolution Road Trip (see previous entries), we went down into the mystical, mythical, misty land of Texas, through fog that shrouded the Red River. We kept driving down to Dinosaur Valley State Park. After a picnic lunch, we looked for dinosaur footprints. This location is described more fully in earlier blog entries (here, and follow the links). We could only see a couple of prints, because the river was up, filling the footprints with sand and gravel. We did find one—one of the best—that was above water level and with which the students had their photos taken.

I did not need to tell the students very much; this brilliant group pretty much figured out all the things you could learn about dinosaurs by studying not just their footprints but their trackways. We wished that we could have been there when the water was low and Glen Kuban was with us. As a consolation prize, the next day I showed them some videos from my YouTube channel in which Glen explains the trackways (for example here and here).

Technical note: since the earlier entries, the Paluxysaurus dinosaur has been assigned to the genus Sauroposeidon.

I also told the students about the “man-track” controversy, in which a relatively small number of creationists claim that there are human footprints alongside and even overlapping the dinosaur footprints. This would show that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time and that, ergo, all of evolutionary science was wrong. Of course, the creationists cannot explain how, in the middle of Noah’s Flood, dinosaurs came out of their hidey holes and left footprints in sediments that had just been deposited by that flood. But we will let that pass. If, in fact, there are verifiable human prints overlapping with dinosaur prints, then evolution has a problem.

So we all went (and paid our admission fees) to Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum, which I have described in earlier blog entries (for example here). The first thing that I noticed was that the displays (with fake slave shackles) that claimed that evolution led to slavery had been removed. But several of the students went straight to the display that claimed to show a human footprint overlapping an Acrocanthosaurus print. They all noticed that the so-called “man-print” looked fake. All the toes were perfect, and there did not appear to be an arch. One particularly observant student pointed out to me that the silica grains inside the man-print reflected light, while the silica grains outside the print did not, which is exactly what you would expect if the print was carved into the rock. Gotcha! Another alleged man-print did not appear to have any relief, but looked like a layer of paint. Finally, one of the students noticed that the alleged man-print and the (undoubtedly real) dinosaur print had the same amount of relief. But this should not have been possible; the dinosaur would have compressed the mud, and the human footprint on top of it would have been shallower. I’m not absolutely sure about this, but it does look a little suspicious, doesn’t it?

Some of the alleged man-prints were very large and supposedly produced by giants (Homo bauanthropus, which Baugh named after himself). The students also saw the hammer supposedly deposited in Cretaceous limestone. (It might have slipped in a limestone crack maybe a few decades ago and was then cemented by dissolved calcite.) Some of the students were quite skeptical that giants would use such a small hammer. Maybe it was for dental work, one of them said. These students noticed things that, in my previous visits, I had not. I remain grateful for their insights.

We watched (some of us more, some less) a video of Carl Baugh explaining the history of the planet to us. It is an astonishingly different version than what scientists accept, and even most creationists. He explained the red shift of the galaxies, which makes some of them appear to be 13 billion light years away, by saying that God stretched out the heavens really really really fast on one of the days of Creation. Consider that 13 times 365 is 4,745. God would have stretched out the heavens at 4.7 trillion times the speed of light to do this. He would have had to suspend the physical laws of the whole universe to do this, except on Earth, which was unruffled by all this cosmic excitement. A miracle? I suppose the creationists can make up as many miracles as they like. He said the vapor canopy created a pink light. He also said, I think, that ultraviolet light, cycling through the vapor canopy, created the magnetic field. He also said that God increased the diameter of the Earth after the Flood. He also said that Psalm 18 describes a great noise that shot out into the heavens, “which we assume was microwaves.” A biblical literalist claiming that noise is microwaves? Our heads were spinning with the things Baugh just made up. Perhaps the most amazing was his claim that everything in the fossil record is larger than their modern (post-Flood) counterparts. There are numerous counter-examples (one thinks of horses, for example), but, I suppose, Baugh could explain these away by saying that the organisms that are larger today are not, in fact, counterparts of the smaller organisms in the fossil record.

Outside the museum there is what looks like a petrified log, but one which petrified quickly in a mineral hot spring.

The very existence of petrified wood seems to indicate an old Earth; but can petrified wood actually be young? Look at the photo and you will see that it is mineralized, not petrified; the wood is still there, forming easily visible fibers. Real petrified wood (such as this piece from outside of the Goddard Youth Camp museum) is not like this.

The hyperbaric chamber, which I saw on earlier visits, and which looks like a TV set submarine, is still sitting idle. I asked about this. The receptionist said that all they needed was $250,000 more dollars and they could get it up and running. To prove what? They want to prove that the high air pressure that a vapor canopy would have caused makes organisms grow bigger and healthier. They cannot get permission to experiment on humans or animals, so they presumably still plan (as I was told in 2013) to use plants. But couldn’t they build a smaller chamber for plants, one that would not require so much money? The same observant student who had noticed the silica grains also saw what looked like a small pressure chamber back in a corner. One of the members of our group speculated that the hyperbaric chamber was just a ploy to keep raising money.

Afterward, we went back to the picnic area to discuss what we had seen. We tried to figure out the genetics of Noah and his family. How could five people (Noah, Mrs. Noah, and the wives of the three sons; the sons would have had only the alleles from their parents) have contained all of human genetic diversity? Well, maybe they could have, if they were black. Studies consistently show that almost all human genetic diversity is contained within Africa, with other races having subsets of that diversity. One problem is that, if all humans are descended from Noah’s family, shouldn’t human DNA show a distribution pattern centered around Mt. Ararat, which is in modern Turkey, where the Ark supposedly landed? That is, instead of an afrocentric distribution, shouldn’t there be (I am the first person to use these terms, and I claim priority) an araratocentric or turkocentric distribution of human genetic diversity? The Adam and Eve in the Baugh museum mural were pure white. We also discussed whether the Flood water would have been fresh or salt water or maybe brackish. Whatever the case may be, many species of fishes would not have survived, and the Bible makes no mention of fishes aboard the Ark. Finally, the students noted that it was strange that footprints of a race of giants would be found in Baugh’s museum, but no other evidence for these giants is found anywhere else in the world: in particular, no giant human bones.

However interesting dinosaurs are, humans with their ability to invent stories are much more interesting. Having reached this conclusion, we relocated to a famous barbecue restaurant in Glen Rose.

A Visit to the “Man-Tracks”

On August 13 I drove down to Glen Rose, Texas, to meet again with Glen Kuban, the expert on the Paluxy River dinosaur trackways. The river level is again very low, revealing 110 million year old dinosaur tracks, and Glen was hard at work on them.

Glen took me to the most famous of the trackway sites, off in a corner of Dinosaur Valley State Park that is seldom visited by tourists: the trackways that creationists have long claimed had human and dinosaur footprints right beside one another. Glen showed me the actual tracks that appear in creationist books and movies. When you get up close and look at them, you can see that they are all dinosaur prints: you can see the three big claws, and the hallux pointed inward. Here is a photo of the dinosaur track with a supposedly human print right beside it, a creationist icon. But you can see the claw marks on the supposedly human print. In the photo, you see the dinosaur track on the bottom, the “man-print” which is actually a dinosaur print (note the three claws) above it, and Glen’s foot for scale (which shows that these “man-prints” were supposedly made by giants).

I learned something very interesting about fossilized tracks that I had never realized. Sometimes mineral water fills the limestone track impressions. Over millions of years, the mineralized infilling (which is harder than the limestone) erodes less than the limestone, leaving a raised footprint, sort of a negative footprint.

I also learned that three tracks can be more than three times as valuable as one track. The reason is that a single track can be distorted; for example, a toe may appear short because it was pressed incompletely into the mud. But if the feature appears over and over in a trackway, you can trust the feature to be reliable, not just an accident of track formation and preservation. This photo shows the famous Taylor trackway, which Footprints in Stone producer Stan Taylor considered to be of humans and dinosaurs walking together.

Creationists have sometimes made desperate claims in an attempt to discredit the dinosaur origin of the “man-tracks.” They have even implied that the dinosaur marks were introduced artificially by evil evolutionists. But when you look at the tracks, as in this photo, you can see that, even when the track is flat (that is, neither impressed nor raised), there is a texture difference between the mineral infilling of the track (which is smooth) and the rough limestone around it.

Glen pointed out something very interesting. These dinosaur tracks—indeed, the very ones we were looking at that very moment—are supposed to be important enough creationist evidence that, by themselves, they could invalidate the entire time frame upon which evolutionary science is based. I recall that J.B.S. Haldane, the famous British evolutionary scientists of the early twentieth century, was asked what would convince him that evolution was wrong. He speculated that a Precambrian rabbit would do the trick. Well, right here in the bed of the Paluxy River is the near equivalent of a Precambrian rabbit: a Cretaceous human, if it can be proven. Why aren’t the creationists devoting their effort to studying these tracks? They hardly ever even visit them. We could not shake the impression that the “man-tracks” are more of a creationist stunt than a scientific creationist challenge to evolution. The “man-tracks” are something to use for publicity, not to do research on.

I always learn interesting things from Glen, and when I do, I will pass them on to you.

I have just posted a video of Glen Kuban explaining the "man-tracks," on my Darwin YouTube channel.

Oklahoma-Texas Evolution Road Trip, Part Four. Dinosaur Tracks

Dinosaur Valley State Park appears to be mainly a place for kids to go swimming in safe shallow water. There are no longer any dinosaurs there, I think even Carl Baugh would admit. The water was at a normal level, not flood stage, but we could find only a few Acrocanthosaurus prints. They were, however, quite striking.

When I visited this riverbed in September 2011 with Glen Kuban (see entries on this blog for October 7, 14, 21, and 29 of 2011), there was hardly any water in the river. God had not yet answered Governor Perry’s call to prayer for rain. At that time, we could see entire trackways of dinosaur prints.

The Road Trip participants met outside the gift shop, by the dinosaur statues (apparently left over from a movie set). I found that everyone had a pretty good idea what you could tell from dinosaur trackways as opposed to individual footprints. That is, what does an ichnologist study? If you know the size and stride, you can calculate how fast the creature was running. Some trackways were made by dinosaurs running about 30 miles per hour. But it took awhile for the participants to figure out what was most glaringly wrong about the statues. It was this: both the big herbivorous dinosaur and the smaller carnivore were dragging their tails. In the trackways of the riverbed, there are extremely few tail traces. A Paluxysaurus tail could weigh a ton, but the animal held it up above the ground, perhaps for balance, or perhaps to whip it around to knock the living daylights out of one of those humans who was chasing it, in the middle of The Flood no less, with a hammer, which the human dropped into the mud and it eventually ended up in Carl Baugh’s museum. (BTW, how did fresh and salt water stay separate during The Flood? For answers, see my 1988 and 1989 articles in Creation/Evolution, published at the time by the National Center for Science Education. These articles appear to not be on the NCSE website anymore.)

We enjoyed some Texas barbecue in Glen Rose. Someone on NPR said that you can throw a rock anywhere in Texas and hit a barbecue place that is better than anyplace else in the world. That is only a slight exaggeration. But were we just having fun? No. Even this was class time. I told people about Harvard professor Wranglin’ Rich Wrangham’s barbecue theory of human evolution. The ability to cook food, whether of plant or animal origin, allowed humans to ingest more calories; this was essential for brain enlargement.

We drove safely back to the OU Biological Station, arriving after sunset and quickly retiring to our rooms.

Dinosaur Adventure, part 5. A Race against Time.

Mike O’Brien is a man driven to accomplish as much as possible as well as possible as quickly as possible. For good reason: As I explained previously, the fossil footprints are eroding away. And not just gradually; when the river floods, whole chunks of limestone are broken up into little chunks. There is a drought going on in Texas. The Paluxy River has pools of water but no flowing water. Right now is the time when most of the dinosaur trackways are exposed. Right now is the time to make casts, photograph, and map the footprints. The water has not been this low since 1988. Glen Kuban and I also wanted to accomplish as much as possible, but we cannot resist dropping our work (literally, in Glen’s case; the broom thunks to the ground as he begins talking) to explain the trackways to tourists who walk along the trails or in the riverbed.

But first it was necessary to remove the sediments that had accumulated over the tracks. On the east side of Dinosaur Valley State Park, where Denio Creek enters the Paluxy River, there is a site that needed to be cleaned off before casts, photos, and maps can be made. Mike borrowed a water pump from the park staff, with which he sucked water from a pool into a hose with a nozzle. He used the powerful jet from the nozzle to scour away sediments (see photo). Glen and I pushed brooms around to scoot the water and any remaining rocks and sediments back into the pool. We worked for about two hours, at the end of which time the dinosaur footprints began to just look like holes in rocks. How quickly fascination can turn to fatigue. But Glen and I stopped occasionally to marvel at some of the hundreds of footprints that had been hidden for years. Glen remembered them from 1988, when they were last exposed.

But Mike just kept spraying. He looked like a World War Two hero in a trance with a machine gun. He reminded me of Audie Murphy in the 1955 movie To Hell and Back. He also reminded me of a Gila monster, which is a poisonous lizard that, once he bites (according to legend) he doesn’t let go until sundown. (I mean this in a nice way.) The sun was getting low in the sky.

Unfortunately, I had to leave, but the next morning, Mike and Glen would be back in the riverbed photographing and making casts of the tracks. Their work, for which they are not being paid, is essential: they are preserving a record of some of the most important dinosaur tracks in the world.

Don't miss the YouTube videos of the Paluxy River site!

Also, tonight (October 29) is when Jupiter is in opposition to the Earth, which means it is as close as it will be this year; if you have a telescope, go take a look at it, and see the moons, which are in very different positions every night. This is what Galileo saw that made him question the world-view that almost everyone else had at that time!

Dinosaur Adventure part 4. A Creationist Misadventure

I usually post once a week but I want to fit five "dinosaur adventures" into October.

While Glen Kuban, Mike O’Brien, Brian Miles, and I worked on the dinosaur footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River on September 24, we answered many questions from park visitors about the footrpints. Nearly everyone had come with an attitude of fascination about the footprints and a desire to learn about them.

Then along came a creationist couple, apparent followers of Carl Baugh, the weird preacher about whom I wrote previously. They started talking to Glen, since it was clear from the work that he was doing that he was no mere tourist. (What follows is based upon a few observations I made; I was helping Mike most of the time.) This couple made a series of strange statements (even by creationist standards). Glen, who has been clocked at three hundred words per minute, was flooding them with information to demonstrate why they were wrong, both scientifically and theologically. I wanted to tell Glen that no amount of information would change their minds, and he might as well come back and continue working with us. But Glen’s circuit had been closed.

The first strange statement was that the woman said one of the footprints in the riverbed had fit her foot perfectly, and that therefore it had to be a human footprint. This is Carl Baugh’s gospel: humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time and left their footprints in the mud that is now the Paluxy River bed. Glen gave her a few hundred words of rebuttal. What I would have said is, “Listen, lady, human feet come in lots of different sizes. If that footprint fit your foot exactly, then it must have been your footprint. These deposits are 110 million years old. Golly, lady, you don’t look a day over 50 million.”

Then the woman said that the dinosaurs could not have existed before the Fall of Adam, because they would have died before the Fall, and the Bible says there was no death before the Fall, and that Jesus’ sacrifice would have meant nothing at all if any of these dinosaurs had died before Adam. Glen gave her a few hundred words of rebuttal. What I would have said is, “Listen, lady, it’s news to me that Jesus came to Earth to save dinosaurs. Do they have souls? Can you find this in the Bible?”

The woman then said that Glen had been brainwashed throughout his entire life by evolution. Glen explained, in no more than three hundred words, that he used to believe the same thing she did—he had been a creationist who believed that there were human footprints mixed in with the dinosaur prints. He had changed his mind about creationism because he came here in 1980—and has been coming ever since—to actually study the footprints.

The woman then asked if Glen was a Christian. Glen said yes. The woman disagreed with him. (Why did she ask him, then?)

The woman’s husband finally felt he had to intervene. He told Glen something like this (I here take some literary license): “My wife politely explained to you that unless there are human footprints in with the dinosaur footprints in this riverbed, then the entire Bible is wrong, all of Christianity is a lie, and Jesus should never have bothered to come to Earth. My wife here politely told you that she, not you, has the prerogative of determining whether or not you believe in Jesus. My wife POLITELY told you that if you disagree with a single word that she says, that you will burn in hell forever. So why are you talking so fast, which sounds to me like you are upset?” Glen gave him a few hundred words of rebuttal. I would have said, “Well, it appears that when your wife reads the Bible, her brain is incapable of making any errors. She must be personally inerrant. Maybe we should all worship her.” (Besides, just because Glen talks fast does not mean he is upset. Oh, did I say that already?)

Second thought, maybe it’s fortunate that I was not the one talking to the woman.

As I recall, the conversation ended when Mike called Glen over to help. We had a lot of work to do and not many hours of daylight remaining, facts that Mike was continually aware of. We were already dismantling the photographic apparatus so that we could move to another site.

Actually, it turns out Glen was a little upset, not at the couple’s creationist beliefs, but at their arrogance: they assumed that they knew everything about the Bible and about science, without having seriously studied either one. Glen had asked the woman some questions about Biblical passages, which she ignored.

Interestingly, the person who should have been talking to the creationist couple was Brian. He did not go into detail, but I gather that he is a conservative Baptist. His church had hosted Carl Baugh one time, something that Brian considered a big mistake. Brian, as a petroleum geologist, knows perfectly well that the fossils have a millions-of-years evolutionary order. You can use the fossils to determine the relative ages of rock layers and this knowledge can help you find oil and gas. But the woman would probably have told him that he, also, was not a Christian.

It was time for us to go to another track site. Mike hoisted his T-pole onto his shoulder and said, “Well, I will just bear my cross,” as he walked back along the Via Dolorosa of dinosaur tracks toward his van. To be continued.

Dinosaur Adventure part 2

As described in the previous blog entry, I went to Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas, where I met with Glen Kuban, who showed me hundreds of dinosaur footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River. During the ongoing drought, the riverbed was exposed, and with it footprints left by dinosaurs 100 million years ago, when the ground on which we stood had been part of the Gulf of Mexico. In the globally warmed Cretaceous world, sea levels were higher, and reached up into what is now north Texas; also, North America was not quite in the same place that it is now.

Glen helped me make a few video clips, which I am posting, about one a week, on YouTube. In two of them, Glen shows the viewers the dinosaur footprints and explains what you can learn from them. Last week I posted a Darwin video clip; this week, an interview with Glen.

The most interesting revelations about dinosaur life come from not the individual footprints but the trackways of prints. The trackways were left by at least two species of dinosaurs. One was the large, long-necked, herbivorous dinosaur species in the genus Paluxysaurus, which was a sauropod similar to the brontosaurus. What can we learn about these dinosaurs from their trackways? First, Glen pointed out, a group of them was walking in the same direction. They apparently lived in herds rather than as loners. Second, the trackways were close together, indicating that the sauropods walked with their legs underneath them, like birds, rather than out to the side, like lizards. Third, these dinosaurs, though their tails may have weighed a ton, did not drag their tails. This sounds to me like the sauropods had a pretty healthy metabolism and lots of muscle. If they had dragged their tails, they would have left grooves in the mud. See one of the above photos of sauropod trackways. These are the same trackways that I photographed back in March, when they were underwater and visible as green smudges in the photos that I took at that time.

The other species of dinosaur whose prints are common in the Paluxy River bed was a theropod in the genus Acrocanthosaurus; it was sort of a medium-sized T. rex. These dinosaurs left three-toed footprints. The above photos include some adult footprints and a baby footprint (with my foot for scale). The theropods were walking in lots of different directions, and were probably foraging. While it is possible that they were tracking the sauropods to attack and eat them, it is also possible that they were searching for shellfish to eat in the tidal flats. By knowing the size of the dinosaur and the distance between the footprints, it is possible to calculate the speed at which they were walking. Most of them were ambling along, as you might expect if they were looking for seafood left by the receding tide, but in another location the prints were far enough apart that they must have been running at almost 30 miles per hour, which is a very rapid speed for such a large animal—and this was in mud! Imagine how they could have run on solid ground!

The footprints were made 110 million years ago, and subsequently hardened into stone, along with the sediments that had covered them. There may be hundreds of thousands of dinosaur footprints in this layer of rock in northern Texas, but almost all of it is covered with hills. Only in a few places, such as the Paluxy River bed, has this rock layer been exposed by recent erosion. You can’t even find them in the nearby Brazos River, which has apparently eroded through them. Since nobody is going to spend millions of dollars to bulldoze away the hills to expose new footprints, the Paluxy prints represent a rare trove of dinosaur footprints.

And they do not last very long once they are exposed. Large areas of the Paluxy River bed, which used to have dinosaur footprints (even as recently as the 1980s, when Glen began his work), have broken up due to erosion caused by the river. It doesn’t take very long. The river undermines the trackway layer, and then the layer (of soft limestone) cracks and crumbles. Glen and I stood on an approximately 100 square meter slab of limestone with tracks in it, while right beside it was a larger area of riverbed with broken stones which had formerly had dinosaur footprints.

So if you want to see the Paluxy footprints, you’d better go now, while the drought is going on (before God heeds the entreaties of Governor Perry) and before the footprints erode away. To be continued.

Don't forget my website and, if you are interested, my religion blog.

Don't forget my website and religion blog (if you are interested).

Dinosaur Adventure, Part 1

I had three choices of how to spend the weekend of September 23. I could have gone to the field meeting of the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences; I could have gone to the Prairie Festival at the Land Institute; or I could go look at dinosaur footprints in Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas. I chose the third option. This was the weekend when I had a chance to meet with some of the people who know more about these footprints than anyone else in the world. As an evolution educator, author, and blogger, this was an opportunity I did not want to miss.

I visited Dinosaur Valley State Park last March, as described earlier in this blog (see here and here), but on the previous visit I was by myself and the river was still flowing. Some of the photos I posted from that visit show dinosaur footprints underwater. This time, in addition to my chance to meet the experts, the river was nearly dry. Texas has had a long drought, costing the state economy over $5 billion, and to which the April 21, 2011 day of prayer proclaimed by Governor Rick Perry has not brought an end. Such a drought is a disaster in all ways except one: it exposed the bed of the Paluxy River, which has dinosaur footprints.

They say that you can throw a rock anywhere in Texas and it will hit a barbecue place that is better than anyplace else in the world. I entered a barbecue place, where a sign on the wall said, “Cowboys: No shirt, no service; Cowgirls: No shirt, free beer.” Yep, I’m in Texas all right. In reality, this place had no beer and everyone was clothed. I was with Glen Kuban, who has an expert knowledge of the Paluxy River dinosaur footprints.

As we ate our brisket, Glen told me his story. Our lives were strangely parallel: we are the same age, we graduated the same year, and we made the same migration from creationist fundamentalism to Christian theistic evolution at about the same time. We were both elected as Fellows of the American Scientific Affiliation, a Christian scientific organization, the same year. The difference is that, while my abandonment of creationism involved learning about research done by other people, Glen’s abandonment of creationism resulted directly from his research into one of creationism’s most notorious claims. Also, I am a professor, while Glen sells molds and casts of fossils and fossilized footprints, primarily to museum gift shops. Glen is sort of a latter-day Alfred Russel Wallace or Henry Walter Bates, the nineteenth-century naturalists who funded their travels and work by selling specimens they collected in the tropics. He also maintains a website with lots of Paluxy information.

Here is the notorious creationist claim. In 1982, a creationist named Carl Baugh was looking around at the fossilized dinosaur footprints in the bed of the Paluxy River. He found some impressions that, to him, looked like they might be human footprints. He also obtained some footprints that looked like very flat carved human footprints (see earlier blog entries above). Whether he carved them himself or credulously obtained them from someone else I am not prepared to say. If humans and dinosaurs left footprints in the same mud at the same time, then the entire evolutionary time scale is off. This does not necessarily prove the creationist version of Earth history; after all, why would dinosaurs and humans have been walking leisurely along in the mud in the middle of the Flood of Noah? But, thought a young Glen Kuban, the Paluxy footprints would be a really important thing to study.

So in 1980 Glen began to study the footprints. He quickly discovered that the so-called human footprints that were still in the riverbed were actually dinosaur footprints partially obscured by mud when they were originally made and afterwards. And another discovery surprised him. He found that the creationists, even those who used the “Paluxy man prints” as evidence of creationism, did not seem to be interested in studying the Paluxy prints. They seemed to be satisfied with hearsay and content to accept Baugh’s carved prints as evidence sufficient to overturn all of evolutionary science. Glen may be the only person in the world whose view of creationism was changed by actually studying the Paluxy dinosaur footprints. It appears that some prominent creationist writers and speakers continued to tout the “man-prints” even after they knew, and admitted, that the man-prints were fake. We’re not saying who the creationists are.

I looked forward to the next day, September 24, on which I would work in the dry riverbed with Glen and with another expert, Mike O’Brien. To be continued. This month's blog entries will be about the dinosaur footprints.

I have also posted a YouTube video in which Charles Darwin visits the dinosaur footprints.

I also maintain a religion blog which I have not heavily advertised because I want to keep this evolution blog and my website focused on science.

My Fun Creationist Weekend, Part Eight (final installment)

On the weekend of March 5, I visited two creationist museums (see previous seven entries). One was the museum in which Carl Baugh had displays which, he claimed, proved that humans and dinosaurs left footprints in the same layers of mud.

Before I went home, ending my fun creationist weekend, I visited Dinosaur Valley State Park to see some real dinosaur footprints, still in the river bed (see bottom photo). The water is high in spring, and only a few prints were visible: round holes that are the footprints of large herbivorous Paluxysaurus dinosaurs, and three-toed footprints of small carnivorous Acrocanthosaurus dinosaurs. Some of the prints are visible under water, especially when green algae grow inside of them (see top photo). This was the part of my Texas trip that was refreshing and realistic, and I recommend a visit to this park if you are in the area.

Before I left Glen Rose, I did one more thing that altered my mind. I stopped at a barbecue place. It is well known that you can throw a rock anywhere in Texas and it will hit a barbecue place better than almost any other in the world. I had the brisket. The waitress brought me a pile of meat. It was pretty good, but it usually takes me a week to eat this much meat. I quite literally left Glen Rose feeling like what I thought a Neanderthal would have felt like. Neanderthals, you may know, ate mostly meat, according to scientists who have studied their coprolites. But recently a scientist studied Neanderthal tooth deposits and found that they also ate grains. Well, I suppose they must have had a piece of Texas toast with their barbecue.

Don’t miss my new book, Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, just published by Prometheus Books.