Paluxy River Footprints

For a while now I have been a fan of Monstertalk. I am grateful that many of their episodes have transcripts and are now searchable. I grew up hearing annually about the Paluxy River footprints being concrete proof of human-dinosaur coexistence. Unfortunately I was in college before I gave this one up. Anyways this episode of Monstertalk stood out to me.

Glen: Yeah, in the case of things like alleged plesiosaur carcasses, they would argue that 1) it might somehow disrupt the conventional geologic time-table. They seem to think that if scientists conclude that plesiosaurs went extinct with the dinosaurs, for example, then that is somehow some critical tenet of evolution, when really it is not. Now the Paluxy tracks which we can get into are a more interesting case. That would be much better support for their position if there actually were human tracks alongside dinosaur tracks because the general pattern of the fossil record does indicate that large modern mammals, and especially humans, did not appear until long after the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct. So the finding of human tracks back in the Cretaceous rocks with dinosaurs would, in fact, be a major problem for conventional geology, much more of a problem than say finding a modern plesiosaur, which all that would mean is that some group of reptiles survived longer than we thought.

Blake: In the case of Creationists who have used plesiosaurs or other brachiosaurs or a similar animal in Africa—that seems to be a popular one as well, and of course there’s the pterodactyls…

Glen: Right, right. In all those cases, like I say, they really—many Creationists imply they would be huge problems for conventional geologists to explain, but really not. In fact, just like with the discovery of the coelacanth, the gingko, conventional scientists would celebrate those finds. They would say, “Oh great. Some creature we thought was extinct is still alive.” You know, they would not be a problem for them whatsoever. On the other hand, again, finding human tracks in Mesozoic rock, that would be a different story. That would be a big problem.

Blake: How have the Creationists been using it in their literature and in their program? It seems like you presented a few cases where they had.

Glen: Yeah, well to be completely honest, they—the Creationists and cryptozoologists, for that matter—have really not used either of these cases in recent years very strongly. Most cryptozoologists have backed off from the Japanese plesiosaur and have acknowledged that itís most likely a basking shark. And in the case of the Paluxy tracks almost all the major Creationists leaders and groups have admitted that they were wrong or likely wrong in a lot of their initial identifications and that there is no compelling evidence of human tracks in the Paluxy or in the ancient rocks, as far as that goes. There are only a few individuals still promoting the Paluxy man-tracks, as they call them, but they’re considered disreputable or unreliable even by most Creationists, so really that controversy has faded, most of them have back-pedaled from their older claims.

Karen: Have there been any major scientists or spokespeople who’ve rescinded their endorsement of this creature as being as a plesiosaur? Any one in particular?

Glen: Well it was primarily a few cryptozoologists and several Creationists who promoted the plesiosaur interpretation initially. I don’t think any of them were actually experts in the field of marine science or paleontology or anything like that. So, I don’t think it was ever the case where conventional scientists were embarrassed by misidentification. They—especially the American scientists—seemed to be pretty cautious initially and they speculated, you know, it could be a shark or perhaps a whale or a large turtle with the shell missing, something like that, but they waited for the tissue analysis before drawing any firm conclusions, which was good, you know. Unfortunately the initial sensational reports seemed to get a lot more attention than, you know, the scientific reports of the tissue analysis which pretty much…

Ben: Well, that’s always what happens, you know. The original claim is just this big headline-grabbing, you know, “Mermaid Found!” Oh wait, hold on, never mind. I was going ask, can you…

Glen: Well, that’s why basically I wanted to do the article, to kind of compile the history of the case, and explain all the lines of evidence which pointed to the fact that it was almost certainly a basking shark. To try to just set the record straight, that sort of thing. And occasionally you’ll still see an article here or there which is not familiar with the whole case and suggest that it could still be a plesiosaur, but those are few and far between. It seems like almost all Creationists, cryptozoologists and mainstream scientists have come to agree that it’s almost certainly a basking shark.

Ben: A lot of our listeners may not be familiar with the Paluxy case. Can you sort of give us a little thumbnail sketch of the whole incident and basically what your thoughts are on it?

Glen: Yeah, that’s something that’s largely consumed my spare time for about thirty years. I began investigating the tracks right after college in 1980, and would fly down to Texas and work in the riverbed for a week or two or three almost every year since then, and I was just there a few weeks ago in fact to try to finish up some mapping in the State Park where a lot of the tracks are exposed. It’s hard to summarize the case in just a minute or two. You can reference my website where I have many articles explaining the whole controversy.

Ben: What website is that, Glen?

Glen: Well, my homepage is paleo.cc and from that there are links to my Paluxy articles as well as my plesiosaur/shark article that will give listeners a chance to look into it in more detail, but I can try to summarize quickly. Around the turn of the century, in 1908, there was a large flood in the Paluxy, which is a riverbed about sixty miles south of Fort Worth, near the town of Glen Rose, Texas, and the flood ripped up some limestone layers revealing many dinosaur tracks, which the locals initially mistook for ancient elephant tracks. Some of the elongated forms, they thought were giant human tracks, or as they called them, moccasin prints, giant moccasin prints. And in the 1970s and ‘80s many strict Creationist groups seized on these tracks, they did a film there, took a lot of photographs, and didn’t do a lot of rigorous work but wrote a lot of articles, and again the film that promoted these elongated footprints as giant human tracks alongside dinosaur tracks and claimed that that proved that evolution could not be true and the conventional geologic time table had to be wrong and the Earth was only several thousand years old, which was kind of their argument, and this was one of their best tangible lines of evidence they claimed.

Before this, during my studies in college I began reading Creationist literature and ran across these claims about human tracks alongside dinosaur tracks, and I didn’t know what to make of them, and I wasn’t satisfied really with the level of documentation either in the Creationist literature or the mainstream responses. A lot of conventional scientists had dismissed the claims as just all carvings or all middle-toe impressions of dinosaurs or as one thing or another without apparently a lot of careful research to determine what exactly they were. So I decided right after college to fly down there and try to investigate and figure out what they were, and it turned out to be a perfect time. The riverbed was dried up and all the sites could be accessed and I was able to, with a friend of mine, clean off and photograph and study a lot of the impressions which were claimed to be human tracks. And it wasn’t before long we had concluded that some of them were just erosional features, natural irregularities, or erosional marks that had been selectively highlighted to look kind of human. And there were some cases of what appeared to be carved prints—most of the carvings were on loose blocks of rock. But there were some, definitely some striding trails of elongated prints which did not look like typical dinosaur footprints. Bipedal dinosaurs typically make footprints with three large toes, almost like large bird tracks, and these are much longer, and the toes are not very distinct on many of them, they did look somewhat like moccasin prints in some cases. But when we cleaned the surface very well we could see on almost all of them indications of a three-toed—a long three-toed pattern in the front. So it was becoming clear to us even before the end of our first trip that they must be some type of reptilian or unusual dinosaur prints, but we really didn’t understand what was causing them to be that elongated and take on that roughly human-like shape.

To make a long story short, in the subsequent trips there and further studies at other sites I found more and more examples of these elongated footprints and better and better indications of a three-toed pattern at the front. And it appeared to me that—at first I thought maybe there was a dinosaur with an unusually long foot making these impressions. And then it suddenly dawned on me, it wasn’t a dinosaur with an unusual foot; it was a dinosaur walking in an unusual fashion. It was putting weight on its soles and heels in what they call a plantigrade type way of walking. I call these metatarsal tracks because they’re impressing their metatarsals, their soles and heels rather than just being up on their toes like most dinosaurs. Well, when I showed this evidence to some paleontologists, initially they kind of downplayed it and said that dinosaurs, as far as we know, they don’t walk that way, so you must be mistaken, but I gathered more and more evidence and some very clear examples of these metatarsal tracks. And then in 1986 I gave a couple of papers at the First International Convention on Dinosaur Tracks and they all then agreed that these were in fact metatarsal dinosaur tracks and they did appear to explain most of the alleged human tracks in the Paluxy. And during all this I was also writing letters to many of the Creationists who made the claims urging them to come down to the Paluxy and look at the evidence that I was uncovering and reexamined, some of the tracks and trails that they said were human, because in almost every case you could see some pretty strong evidence of these dinosaurian toes at the front of their human tracks. I wasn’t sure if they had not cleaned the tracks well enough or that they just were selective in what tracks and which trails they had shown.

But in 1985, the evidence was becoming even plainer that many of these were dinosaur tracks because we noticed that, on their most famous sites, the digit impressions of the dinosaur’s tracks were infilled with a secondary sediment, and the infilling was rusting as we had cleaned and exposed them repeatedly. The iron in the infilling material was actually oxidizing and becoming a dark rusty brown color and was contrasting with the limestone and increasing the contrast. In other words, they were becoming more and more obviously dinosaurian. And finally after they saw enough of our pictures and diagrams and so forth, a representative from the largest Creationist group in California, ICR, the Institute for Creation Research, and representatives from the company that did the film, Footprints in Stone, they came down and were quite shaken when we showed them all the evidence, and they admitted that they apparently had made a mistake. And soon afterwards, they withdrew the film from circulation, and ICR stopped selling their book, although…

Ben: That’s—I don’t mean to interrupt—that right there is pretty remarkable. I’ve rarely heard Creationists admit they made a mistake.

Glen: Yeah, well, they weren’t too eager to do it.

Blake: That’s exactly… [Laughter]

Glen: There’s a little bit more to the story. John Morris, who’s now the Director of ICR—he was at that time the son of Henry Morris who was the Director—he wrote the longest Creationist treatment on the subject with the book called Tracking Those Incredible Dinosaurs, and when I showed him all this evidence, he looked quite upset and said, “I don’t know what we’re going to do, we just printed thousands more copies of this book.” And I said, “Well, John, you’re going to have to tell people the truth,” and he says, “Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do, I don’t know what we’re going to do, I have a lot of pressure from the group,” and he was saying things like this, and then he said, “Well how do I know that some of these features weren’t painted on the tracks?” And I said, “John, you can see that, you know, there’s not just the color contrast, but there’s indentations or cracks or other indications of these three-toed dinosaur patterns on the tracks, you know.” And he said, “Yeah, I can see that.” So he admitted on site, in other words, that these were actually dinosaur tracks, that the coloration features were part of the infilling phenomenon, they weren’t—it wasn’t painted on. And he also acknowledged that there were cases of carving in—highlighted erosion marks and so forth. But he says, “I don’t know if I can just come out and say all this.” He kept looking for ways to kind of backpedal without admitting fully that they had misidentified these things.

Blake: Did they consider putting a sticker on their book?

Glen: Well, yeah, he actually did keep selling the book for a while, and in most cases did not have disclaimers in it. Eventually he stopped selling it. But what really disturbed me is that he—when he did finally write a statement about the tracks he said—he admitted that they had made some possible mistakes, but that it is possible that some of these features may have been artificially applied with paint or acid or something like that. And in the context of talking about my research he kind of insinuated that I or my colleagues might have doctored the tracks to make them look more dinosaur-like when he admitted on site that that was not the case, so that disturbed me, that he could not just come clean and say he was wrong. In any case, most groups, they praised him for admitting the possible mistake, and ICR and other groups no longer promote the tracks. There are only a few individuals that still do so and again, they’re not considered reliable even among Creationists, so the controversy has died somewhat.

Blake: Well, I knew that John Green, Bigfoot journalist, had written about these tracks and wanted to know why no specialists in fossil footprints had investigated them, but he wrote that a few years before your investigation.

Glen: Yeah, I was—I didn’t claim to be a fossil footprint expert when I began studying the Paluxy tracks, but I’ve learned an awful lot in the course of my research and I have often worked with professional paleontologists in the Paluxy, and in fact just a few weeks ago again I was doing more work with some paleontologists, Jim Farlow from Indiana Purdue University, and representatives from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and so forth, so I’ve not done all this by myself, but I did kind of spearhead the resolution of the controversy, maybe because no one else was really doing it. For some reason, especially when I first started working, footprints in general, fossil footprints were not—didn’t seem to be too interesting to many paleontologists, and I think some of them might have been staying away from the Paluxy tracks just because of all the Creationists involved, made them more reluctant to get embroiled in the whole controversy, which I think was a mistake because we learned an awful lot about dinosaur behavior, locomotion, posture and so forth just from studying the dinosaur tracks, even aside from the human footprint controversy.

Blake: How big are these tracks, you said giant human footprints?

Glen: Well, they’re not all that huge. A typical metatarsal dinosaur track is about two feet long, sometimes shorter, but the portion of it which appears human-like is the metatarsal section at the back. These tracks appear roughly or superficially human when the digits are subdued by either erosion or infilling or mud collapse or some combination of those factors, and it’s that back part, the metatarsal segment, which roughly resembles a human foot. And in many cases it’s somewhat larger than a normal human foot; it might be, you know, fourteen, fifteen, you know sixteen inches long or longer, and that’s why when some of the locals during the Great Depression carved some giant human tracks in loose blocks, I think they were just trying to make better examples of what they assumed were human prints or human moccasin prints, and in the Paluxy, I don’t even know that they had any anti-evolutionary motivation. I think they were just trying to make a little extra money. They probably didn’t even understand that human tracks weren’t supposed to be with the dinosaur tracks geologically. And I’m not even one hundred percent sure that they sold the tracks as real tracks; they might have even admitted they were carvings, for all I know.

I recently, during my last trip, met the grandson of the man who apparently carved most of the loose slabs, and they recently found another one in the cellar, and the family acknowledges that this man did carve the tracks, his name is George Adams. They all have—the ones on loose blocks—anatomical problems, usually the toes are too long, the ball is misplaced, and so forth, and several have been cross-sectioned and sub-surface features abruptly truncate [garbled] depressions and that shows pretty clearly they were carved. But again, I think he was trying to make better examples of what he assumed were human tracks in the Paluxy riverbed, which again I think began when locals misidentified these metatarsal dinosaur tracks as human tracks, and when they’re not well cleaned they do look roughly like large human tracks. They do have that general shape. So it was an understandable misidentification for the locals. Now the Creationists, most of them I think were sincere but they could have done a lot better research, they just don’t seem to have—not cleaned and studied the tracks carefully and kind of jumped to the conclusion that they were human tracks, which was what they wanted to conclude they were. But again, most have backed off, backpedaled in recent years and very few promote them anymore.