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 Three. Dinosaurs and the Humans Who Are Still Looking for Them

On June 1, the participants in the Road Trip hopped (or, rather, packed themselves) into the van and I drove them down into the heart of Texas, to the town of Glen Rose, just southwest of Ft. Worth. We arrived at the Creation Evidences Museum in time for the monthly sermon of an infamous creationist named Carl Baugh. Baugh is a smooth talker, and cultivates a friendly, calm, and reasonable image. The image of humility may conceal great pride, however: he seems very proud that lots of scholars, including many young-earth creationists, know him and reject his beliefs. Every month you can expect to hear something different and astonishing from Baugh that you will hear nowhere else, even from the Institute for Creation Research or Ken Ham. Every month the world of Baugh and his followers retreats a little further from reality. I could hardly wait to see what this month had in store. The other time I visited, Baugh said that there had been no lava flows on the moon until after the Flood, and that pre-Flood moonlight promoted longevity before the Flood (see here). What would he say this time? (Photo courtesy of Mary K. Johnston.)

The museum included a replica of what Baugh thought Noah’s Ark might look like, and many other displays, including a model of an Acrocanthosaurus head. Acrocanthosaurs seem to chase Mary K. Johnston around; but relax, Mary, can’t you see that this acrocanthosaur eats plants? You can see them hanging from its mouth. That’s what the razor-sharp teeth are for!

Most of Baugh's sermon was devoted to defending the idea that humans and dinosaurs lived together about 4,000 years ago. This idea is no different than what you will find in Ken Ham’s creationist museum in Kentucky. And Baugh defended at length the idea that human footprints and dinosaur footprints occur in the same layer of Cretaceous rock exposed in the bed of the nearby Paluxy River. Again, this is what he has been saying for years. And he admitted that this belief has undergone some challenges. For example, what he had long considered to be a trackway of human footprints turned out to be dinosaur footprints. He admitted that Glen Kuban, who has studied the Paluxy River dinosaur tracks for decades, was right about that. Even John Morris, who leads the Institute for Creation Research in the footprints, as it were, of his father Henry, has withdrawn his support from this assertion. So is this the end for Carl Baugh?

Not on your life. Baugh insisted that giant humans had hopped along and put their footprints in the middle of pre-existing dinosaur footprints, so of course they looked like dinosaur footprints. These were of course giant humans, with strides as great as those of large dinosaurs. They grew big because the intense atmospheric pressure of the pre-Flood Earth buoyed them up. Of course, he could not prove this, and hesitated to say that he could.

In the end, Baugh’s entire belief system rested primarily on just one piece of data: a supposed human footprint overlapping a dinosaur footprint. The slab of rock with these structures can be seen right in his museum. Some of our group took a look at the “human footprint” after the sermon. The dinosaur print was real; there are still hundreds of them in the bed of the Paluxy River. And there are compression lines below them, showing that the dinosaur footprints have not been carved. But the human print looks both too good to be real and artificially cartoonish. Judge for yourself.

I was still waiting for the surprise. Toward the end of the sermon, I got it—something I had not heard Baugh say before. (Not that I am a regular visitor to his sermons.) Baugh said that dinosaurs were still alive. No, you cladists, he didn’t mean birds. He meant the big ones. The likes of Paluxysaurus and Acrocanthosaurus. Where? In some African jungle, I think; he wasn’t clear about this. I’ll have to look it up in the Edgar Rice Burroughs book. Maybe in a parallel time dimension at the other end of a cosmic wormhole. They are waiting to emerge when the Millennium starts. His evidence? He said that the book of Job, written after the Flood, refers to dinosaurs (leviathans and behemoths) in the present tense. After all, medieval European and Chinese tales told of dragons. Are you calling St. George a liar? That settles it.

In a later discussion, our group considered the cult characteristics of Baugh’s followers. He seemed to have a mental list of things to do to make himself credible. He knows most of the audience members by name, therefore Baugh has formed a community of believers. He has also told them that they are a little embattled enclave surrounded by unbelievers, some of them even fellow creationists. While Baugh said that people could disagree with him and still be good people, some audience members muttered that anyone who disagreed with Baugh could not be a good person. And they seemed to be mesmerized by him. I did not notice this at the time, but when I reviewed the brief video I took of Baugh’s sermon (which is out of focus, sorry), Baugh said something like, “Have you ever seen a human footprint stepped on by a dinosaur…” A big scary man in the front row nodded in the affirmative. Wow. I would not want to encounter that big scary man who thought I was a bad person and who was convinced that he had seen dinosaurs. This is the same guy who said that disagreeing with Baugh was like Pharaoh spurning Moses even after the Ten Plagues. It’s not quite as cultlike as Jonestown, but it has all the defining characters of a cult.

Because it is a little cult, I doubt that their attempts at world outreach will amount to much, especially when the 76-year-old Baugh, whose charisma holds the group together, “graduates” to Heaven someday. Of course, if he gets inside the hyperbaric chamber (their next project, though they cannot legally do human experimentation) he might outlive Methuselah. (The hyperbaric chamber is meant to mimic the high air pressure believed to have existed before The Flood.)

Baugh might have thought that everyone who came to hear him, including trip participant Mary K. Johnston, was there to admire him. We did not tell him any differently. (Photo courtesy of Mary K. Johnston.)

We met outside the museum to see Marlyn Clark’s Flood Tank. About 1980, an engineering professor, M. E. Clark, at the University of Illinois, constructed a tank that could pitch and yaw around. If you put water, gravel, sand, and silt into it, they sort into different layers. Clark considered this to be experimental confirmation that The Flood could produce all the fossil layers. I do not know if he threw the family cat into the tank to see if it would fossilize. I don’t think Thelma and Becky would have let him. You see, I knew him and his family a little bit, mostly because he was one of the people at our church who tried to silence me from teaching a class about evolution, which I taught at the request of the church leadership. He was pretty grim but had a good side. He invented some component that is now used in artificial hearts. As he neared the end of his life, he donated his tank to Baugh’s museum. It sits out on the grass, unlabeled; very few people know what it is. We took a group picture in front of it.

Front, left to right: Carl Rutledge; Cora James; Mary K. Johnston; Lindsay Fluker; Sharon Young. Back, left to right: Jim Huff; Wilfred Berlin; Drew Marteny; Fran Stallings; Gordon Stallings; Gordon Eggleton.

I will skip ahead to a final observation. Before we left the Paluxy vicinity and headed into Glen Rose for some barbecue, we stopped at a little rock house where the proprietor sold fossils: ammonite casts, which were probably genuine; trilobites, which looked too good to be real; fragments of crinoid stalks from Morocco, which is famous for fake fossils (as described by Gould in “The Lying Stones of Marrakech”); coprolites, one of which I bought and do not care if it is real; and other things. This was the very rock house in which George Adams had carved fake human footprints in slabs with dinosaur prints in the 1930s. While we were there, who should pop in but Baugh’s understudy Aaron Judkins, whom Baugh had introduced before his sermon. The proprietor gave Aaron a very nicely made clay pitcher. Let me predict what might happen. Judkins might imbed the pitcher in limestone matrix and put it in Baugh’s museum, claiming that it was used by one of the pre-Flood humans. I may be wrong, but I put the world on notice: in the future, if and when I visit this museum, I am going to watch for that pitcher. I asked Judkins if the pitcher was “from around here.” He said it was from pre-Columbian Mexico. For the record, that pitcher is not pre-Flood; it was obtained from the rock shop, free of any matrix, on June 1, 2013.

After we entered Dinosaur Valley State Park and ate our lunches and discussed what we had seen, we went looking for dinosaur tracks (next entry).

Yesterday’s blog entry got a comment, from Prom Limo Service saying what an informative blog it was. It appears that parasites live in the blogosphere just as in the biosphere.

Evolution in Oklahoma, a Road Trip: An Encounter with Creationism

Time is running out to sign up for the Oklahoma Evolution Road Trip May 30-June 2. Information and links are available immediately below (previous blog entries). More information, and online registration, is available here.

We will also visit a couple of creationist museums on this trip. The purpose is not to create any confrontations, either between us and the creationists or within our group (since there may be some diversity of viewpoints among the attendees). What we intend to do when we visit the museums is to find out what the creationists have to say; to ask insightful questions; and then to afterwards discuss what we have seen. In particular, we will discuss some of the creationist claims that are not even clearly stated in the Bible, but appear to have been made up whole cloth by the creationists. I have met these creationists and they are not stupid; so, what IS their motivation? What makes them believe things that, to anyone outside their circles (even to most conservative Christians) seem ridiculous? Let’s talk about it.

The museums are the Creation Evidences Museum in Bokchito, Oklahoma and Carl Baugh’s dinosaur-and-human-footprint museum down in Texas (which I described in blog entries from March 2011). The Baugh museum is not worth a six hour round trip by itself but it is right next to Dinosaur Valley State Park. We will see many dinosaur footprints there, if the water is low. When I visited in Fall 2011 (see blog entries) the water was very low. We probably will not have such prime conditions on this visit, but we can see at least some dinosaur footprints and discuss what you can learn from them.

We hope to have all registrations by May 3, so we can make a decision about whether the trip will have enough people. We need 9 and we have 6.

Above all, it should be a great group of people for discussion, the kind of people you will enjoy spending a weekend with.

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 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 Five. Mysteries of the Cretaceous World at the Baugh Museum

Before I begin this essay, I want to let you know that the National Center for Science Education has posted its Upchucky Award winners for 2011! And now, on with the essay.

I visited Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum on March 5. After Baugh had finished his presentation (see two previous entries), I looked at the displays I had driven down to Glen Rose, Texas, to see. The bed of the nearby Paluxy River is famous for the trackways of footprints that dinosaurs left in the mud 110 million years ago (according to scientists). But Baugh claims that it was only about 4000 years ago, and that humans had left their footprints in the mud also. In his museum you can see excavated pieces of Paluxy River limestone that have what are supposed to be human footprints in them. One of the stones has what is supposed to be a human footprint overlapping the print of a three-toed predatory dinosaur (see photos). Think about what it would mean if these displays are genuine. It would mean that the entire timeline of evolution, in which dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago but the human genus did not evolve until about two million years ago, is wrong. If you glance quickly at these displays, as most people visiting the museum were doing, it seems to be pretty clear that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time on a young Earth. But if you look closely at the stones, as I did, you begin to notice a few things.

During the Depression, when the dinosaur footprints of the Paluxy River were already famous, some enterprising individuals carved human footprints in the stone and sold them. One might naturally assume that the footprints in Baugh’s museum were also carved. Baugh claims that, while some Paluxy human footprints were fakes, the ones in his museum are genuine. Unfortunately, the only way you can evaluate this claim is by looking at the footprints, as I did. They did not look like fakes to me, at first glance. But, I am not even a geologist, much less an ichnologist (expert in fossil burrows and tracks). How would I know? I was, however, suspicious. The footprints looked good—a little too good, as a matter of fact. Every toe was perfect. I could see no chisel marks, but I concluded that the human prints are fakes, even if Baugh did not carve them himself. For a summary of the human footprint story, click here. In other displays, you can see putative human sandal prints which are supposedly the same age as the dinosaur prints. And even what Baugh claims is a child’s handprint.

One of the footprints is quite large. Baugh has an explanation for this. The footprints were produced by a species of giant humans, which Baugh, no stranger to ego, decided to name after himself (Homo bauanthropus).

There are other items on display at the museum that, according to Baugh, prove that not just humans but technologically advanced humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs. One is the Cretaceous hammer (see photo). It is an iron hammer with a wooden handle that was found, according to the display, embedded in Cretaceous rock further south in Texas. How could a hammer get into a Cretaceous rock? There is actually an easy answer to this question. Somebody in the nineteenth century dropped a hammer into a crack in the Cretaceous deposits, and then erosion filled in the gaps. You can see eroded limestone filling cracks in today, down at the river.

The museum is designed for a quick glance at the displays, rather than careful thought. If you think carefully, however, you quickly realize that the creationist explanation makes no sense. Cretaceous deposits, in Texas and all over the world, are above the Paleozoic, Triassic, and Jurassic deposits, all of them full of fossils. And, in many parts of the world, there are Cenozoic deposits on top of the Cretaceous layers, and they, too, have fossils. That is, if all of the fossil-containing layers were formed during Noah’s Flood, then these Cretaceous layers had to be deposited in the middle of the Flood. Here’s what had to happen. The Flood had been going on long enough to deposit thick layers of sediments full of plants, animals, and technologically advanced people. Then the waters receded, and dinosaurs and humans who had been hiding somewhere came out and walked (not ran) over hundreds of feet of mud without sinking into it. One of the humans lost a hammer. Another lost a finger (see below). Then the Flood came back and buried all of them.

By the way, you don’t want to miss the Cretaceous finger. It looks like a finger from a statue, since there is no evidence of any internal structure such as bone. But Baugh claims it is a real finger, which apparently broke off of a giant who was fleeing the Flood.

The visit to the displays, just like the experience of Baugh’s lecture, creates an alternate psychological reality. Quickly glancing at the displays gives you the impression that humans and dinosaurs lived together on a young Earth. But one of the displays, as I describe in the next entry, proclaims that evolution is the major source of evil in the world in the past and today.

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