[0:00] It’s November 1938. Roland Thaxter 
Bird is standing in front of the  
[0:04] display window of an Indian Trading 
Post in the town of Gallup, New Mexico.
[0:08] Roland works for the Department of Vertebrate 
Paleontology for the American Museum of  
[0:12] Natural History in New York City, but such a 
prestigious role belies the man’s true character.
[0:19] Just a few years earlier, Roland was 
a drifter, wandering the American west  
[0:22] living out of a compact trailer hitched 
to the side of his rusty Harley. 
[0:26] Despite a sharp mind, childhood illness 
forced him to dropout of high school. Life  
[0:31] had delivered Roland few prospects until 
in 1932 he stumbled upon a fossilised jaw  
[0:36] that would land him in the office of the most 
famous fossil hunter of all time, Barnum Brown.
[0:41] Now in his 60s, Barnum was, in a way, 
a dinosaur himself. Barnum is better  
[0:46] understood not as a paleontologist as we 
now know the word, but as a transitional  
[0:51] fossil between Victorian-era treasure hunters 
and dedicated academics. While Barnum took  
[0:57] care to document a lot of his work, he was 
still really close friends with dynamite.
[1:03] He had spent decades wandering America trading 
for fossils. He spent years just floating down  
[1:08] Alberta’s Red Deer River, stopping to 
dig anywhere that looked promising.
[1:12] And as paleontology matured, the image 
of Barnum out in the field wearing a  
[1:16] massive fur coat just felt, even by 1930, 
anachronistic. The Department of Vertebrate  
[1:22] Paleontology was no longer staffed by fossil 
hunters, but rather with career academics.
[1:29] Barnum looked at Roland, and saw a fossil 
hunter. Someone who could read a map,  
[1:33] identify safe drinking water. Someone that Barnum 
could send out west and expect to come back alive.  
[1:40] Barnum offered Roland a job on the spot, and 
spent the following years mentoring Roland.  
[1:44] As Roland described it, Barnum Brown’s tutorage 
was worth more than a millionaire could afford.
[1:50] So after several years of shadowing Barnum, 
this 1938 season was Roland’s first solo  
[1:55] mission. Barnum had given him a stack of loose 
leads and a few odd jobs and let him loose on  
[2:01] virgin territory, trading out Roland’s motorcycle 
for a beat up 1929 Buick belonging to the museum.
[2:08] Roland was desperate to make this chance count. 
He craved the opportunity to bring back something,  
[2:14] anything, that he could drop on 
a desk and prove himself to his  
[2:17] idol. And after several months out in 
the field it had amounted to… nothing.
[2:23] He now found himself in Gallup, New Mexico, 
picking up a fossilised plant that had been  
[2:27] donated to the Museum. One last odd job 
to make the most of his time out west.
[2:32] While making conversation, a local resident told 
Roland to swing by Jack Hill’s trading post.
[2:37] [RESIDENT] “Got some o’ the damnedest tracks in  
[2:39] stone ever I seen. Look like they was 
made by a man maybe twelve feet high.”
[2:44] Out here, Roland was always hearing 
stories of wonders elsewhere,  
[2:48] locals all had some spectacular story they 
picked up from some fella. But this was a  
[2:53] first. The footprints of the twelve foot man 
were just a short walk from Roland’s hotel.
[2:58] The weather that night had taken a 
turn, and it was now snowing. Roland  
[3:02] was looking through the showcase 
window at two large rock slabs.
[3:05] What he hoped to be looking at was an ancient 
footprint of a prehistoric bear. But obscured  
[3:10] by snow, Roland couldn’t make anything 
of the footprints. He avoided lingering  
[3:14] by the window for too long, for fear of 
arousing the store clerk. After moving  
[3:19] on and making a second “casual” pass, 
Roland found the courage to step inside.
[3:24] As he approached the slabs, Roland was 
disappointed. By excavating these footprints  
[3:29] onto separate slabs, it was now impossible to 
measure the stride of the prints. That would  
[3:33] make Roland’s job harder, and ultimately 
destroy a lot of the scientific value.
[3:38] However any anxiety about scientific 
value was quickly dispelled.
[3:43] [STORE CLERK]
“Do you know of anything,  
[3:44] have you ever seen anything 
that looked like that before?”
[3:49] [ROLAND BIRD]
“I’m afraid your  
[3:50] Jack Hill has found himself 
a pair of fake footprints.”
[3:54] Instead of bear prints, or fossils of any kind,  
[3:57] someone had taken these rocks and chiseled 
a caricature of a human footprint into them.
[4:02] Why? Who cares? For the fun of it perhaps. To scam  
[4:05] a gullible traveller maybe. It didn’t much 
matter. This was of no value to Roland.
[4:11] [ROLAND BIRD]
“Who’s been carving  
[4:11] these things out of stone to fool people?”
[4:14] [STORE CLERK]
“I don’t know much  
[4:14] about ‘em. All I know: they come from Glen Rose,  
[4:17] Texas. Mr. Hill brought them west a couple 
weeks ago, with some dinosaur footprints.”
[4:22] Dinosaur footprints… Now that’s interesting. 
Could those be fakes as well? Roland had never  
[4:27] encountered fake dinosaur footprints 
before. In hindsight, it seems like an  
[4:32] obvious grift. But regardless, if the prints 
were genuine, Roland might have his trophy  
[4:37] after all. And if they’re also carvings, 
well, at least it would be interesting.
[4:42] The dinosaur prints were at Jack 
Hill’s second store in Lupton,  
[4:46] what is now a 20 minute drive away.
[4:48] Roland drove out into the snowy night to 
see these dinosaur prints. And when he  
[4:53] arrived at the store, he found 
that the prints were pristine.
[4:57] Don’t misunderstand, they were also obvious 
carvings. But the size and proportions were  
[5:03] absolutely perfect. The human footprints 
were cartoonish, resembling the artist’s  
[5:08] guess at what a human footprint would look 
like. These dinosaur tracks were a different  
[5:13] story. They were so good that the creator 
must have been working from a reference.
[5:19] That morning, Roland consulted his 
maps. The museum had never been to  
[5:23] Glen Rose. The geologic map suggested a 
strong possibility of dinosaur tracks.  
[5:28] And no one was waiting for him back in New York. 
[5:31] Screw it.
[5:33] Roland hit the road
[5:35] [FOLK MUSIC] Oh river Paluxy, revealer of history. 
No longer a mystery, those footprints in stone!  
[5:48] Both man and dinosaur roamed on your ancient 
shore. River Paluxy, revealers of history.
[6:03] During the Lower Cretaceous, 
this was part of a massive,  
[6:06] shallow continental shelf that 
spanned from South Florida to Mexico.
[6:11] We know this in part because 
of the limestone I’m standing  
[6:15] on. Calcium carbonate, or just lime, is secreted 
from the skeletal remains of marine organisms,  
[6:16] like coral, shrimp and so on which 
breaks down into a firm lime mud.
[6:24] So while this area was often under water, it 
was shallow enough for dinosaurs to cross,  
[6:30] and the lime mud was an ideal surface 
for dinosaurs to leave impressions.
[6:34] But what’s unique about this formation is 
that freshwater streams would also deliver  
[6:39] other forms of sediments, coating 
the lime mud in silt and clay,  
[6:43] that would fill in these footprints, 
preserving those impressions in the lime.
[6:48] So as time went on and the sediment was 
compacted the lime mud developed into  
[6:53] limestone while the silt developed into clay marl.
[6:57] Millions of years later, what we’re left with is 
this: The Glen Rose Formation, an expanse of rock  
[7:03] 20-feet deep, with alternating layers of 
solid limestone, and softer, friable clay.
[7:09] And this river, the Paluxy, has 
spent hundreds of years cutting  
[7:12] through the rock - exposing some of the most 
spectacular dinosaur footprints in the world.
[7:20] Upon arriving in Glen Rose,  
[7:21] lacking a plan, Roland Bird heads to the 
center of town - the local courthouse.
[7:25] As he approaches it, he catches a familiar 
shape out of the corner of his eye.
[7:28] He spots that.
[7:32] [ROLAND BIRD]
“It was a beauty,  
[7:33] and there was no doubt that it was genuine. It 
was all twenty inches of footprint perfection.,  
[7:38] made by a three-toed carnivore in mud which had 
faithfully preserved every minute detail … A  
[7:43] slab of such prints alone would be a 
fine addition to any museum collection.”
[7:48] A fine addition to any museum 
collection. And here it was,  
[7:51] being used as masonry. Because as it 
turns out, the locals didn’t really  
[7:54] think that much of it. Apparently there were 
loads of similar prints down by the river.
[7:59] After asking around, Bird was given 
the name James Ryals. The poor bastard  
[8:03] was known to chisel these footprints 
out of the riverbed and try to sell  
[8:06] them to anyone who’d pay. If anyone 
could show Roland around, it was him.
[8:11] RYALS
“I’ve had a heap o’ fun at it.  
[8:13] Don’t put much food on the table, but then… what 
does? Hereabouts, ‘bout the only money-makin’ jobs  
[8:20] is cuttin’ cedar posts, bootlegging’ and quarryin’ 
dinosaur footprints. And the other two is hard,  
[8:26] hard work. Cuttin’ out dino tracks is 
hard enough, but it’s a heap cooler.”
[8:32] The two met and Ryals agreed to show 
him around. Because it was November,  
[8:35] months removed from the dry season, most of the 
footprints were underwater and filled with silt,  
[8:40] but James still managed to show Roland some of 
the best quality footprints he had ever seen.
[8:45] Then, in conversation, Roland alluded 
to the strange footprints he had seen  
[8:49] in Jack Hill’s store. Ryals immediately perked up.
[8:54] RYALS
“Oh, you mean the man tracks?”
[8:58] Let’s talk about footprints for a bit
[9:00] Looking again at those carved 
footprints from Gallup,  
[9:03] they resemble a human foot 
- but not a human footprint.
[9:07] On hard surfaces, your footprint won’t be a 
perfect representation of your foot, but rather  
[9:12] a reflection of what parts of your foot were 
contacting the ground and bearing the most weight.
[9:18] So your big toe, which you rely on 
to push-off the ground, presses down  
[9:22] and has a visible connection to the ball 
of your foot. Whereas your little toes,  
[9:26] who are freeloaders, curl up and only 
leave an impression of their pads.
[9:31] In mud, your foot will sink further into the 
ground, giving a more complete look - but it  
[9:38] will retain those anatomical details. And the 
depth of the print will do a lot to communicate  
[9:43] the shape of the foot. For instance, your 
little toes will still curl, but the rest  
[9:47] of the toe will dig into the mud, creating 
a clear elevation between the pad and ball.
[9:53] Even if we ignore their obviously giant size,  
[9:56] the slabs from Gallup have numerous 
errors that you can recognise intuitively.
[10:01] The toes are far too long. The big 
toe is too narrow and its depression  
[10:06] is far too deep. The ball of the foot 
is too wide, while the heel of the foot  
[10:10] is too narrow. These errors compound 
to give the print a harsh triangular  
[10:14] shape. The arch is disproportionate and 
the ball is misshapen. We could go on.
[10:19] It’s just, it’s plainly awful. As Laurie 
Godfrey, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology,  
[10:24] put it: the creator was clearly using the top of 
his foot as the reference, rather than the bottom.
[10:30] The sculptor made the print extremely detailed 
because they wanted it to be “high quality”,  
[10:36] but in that detail gives us the 
tools to prove it’s inauthentic
[10:41] James Ryals’ invocation of “man tracks” was 
too inviting of a phrase not to pursue. 
[10:46] Ryals led Roland on a brief walk,  
[10:48] stopping to show him the pits where he had 
quarried footprints from the river bed.
[10:52] Stopping at a shallow hole 
by the edge of the river,  
[10:54] Ryals sloshed his shovel back and forth to stir 
the silt, and let the current wash it clean.
[11:00] The water revealed an ill-defined, oblong print, 
15 inches long, having clearly been made in soft  
[11:06] mud that had collapsed before it was preserved. 
It was too vague to take any information from.
[11:12] This got Ryals talking about all the 
tracks that had been lost to erosion,  
[11:16] all the tracks that had been 
destroyed in floods over the years.
[11:19] RYALS
“Too bad,  
[11:21] there used to be some fine things under [those 
stones]. I wish you could have seen them.”
[11:25] ROLAND
“What did the tracks look like?”
[11:27] RYALS
“Some  
[11:28] was rounded-like. Others was bigger and longer.”
[11:32] RYALS spreads his arms to 
indicate an enormous print.
[11:33] ROLAND
“Any claws? Did they show any signs of claws?”
[11:35] RYALS
“The big ones did. The littler, rounded ones, no.”
[11:39] James Ryals is describing sauropod footprints.
[11:43] Roland fought to keep himself calm. These 
tridactyl theropod prints were one thing,  
[11:48] a valuable find but common as far as fossilized 
dinosaur prints go. Sauropod prints, however,  
[11:54] were a whole different ball game. The 
only sauropod prints discovered up to now  
[11:59] were vague and undefined. If Roland could 
find a sauropod print in this limestone…
[12:05] That was the fantasy, but the realistic 
path forward was to uncover and document  
[12:09] a high quality run of three-toed dinosaur 
prints. While that might not make history,  
[12:14] it would be a valuable addition 
to the museum’s collection.
[12:17] Over the next few days, Roland 
got to work with a pick,  
[12:20] shovel and broom. He found a run with 
a footprint so pristine that it had  
[12:24] preserved the curl in the dinosaur’s claw. 
It’s hard to imagine doing better than that.
[12:29] Roland cleaned the prints,  
[12:30] got his photos and did his documentation. 
After a quick sandwich, it was time to go.
[12:35] But Barnum had a rule: Always dig three 
feet beyond - you might just get lucky.
[12:41] So Roland wandered along the river, digging 
his three-feet in spirit if not in action.
[12:45] He soon found himself standing 
in front of a sizable pothole up  
[12:48] on the ledge running above the river. It 
looked like a simple cavity in the rock,  
[12:53] but there was something odd 
about it. Roland started digging,  
[12:56] shoveling dirt into the stream, until his plate 
rang sharply against a margin in the depression.
[13:01] Clearing the dirt Roland was 
standing in a three-foot long  
[13:05] sauropod footprint. The right hind foot.
[13:08] But as we already know, a footprint is one thing 
- a series of tracks is another thing entirely.
[13:14] As it turns out, Bird didn’t find 
one print - he found three. Each  
[13:18] demonstrating the necessary four toes, each 
reinforcing the authenticity of the others.
[13:24] These sauropod tracks were 
the best ever documented,  
[13:27] but they were already exposed and 
weather worn. As valuable as they  
[13:31] may be, their true value was as evidence of 
further tracks that remain under the rock.
[13:36] So Roland took a cast of the right hind foot,  
[13:39] and returned to New York, trophy 
in hand. Eager to lead a excavation  
[13:44] to quarry a trail of sauropod tracks for display 
in the American Museum of Natural History.
[13:49] Roland would get the opportunity 
to write about this whole episode,  
[13:51] from the carvings in Gallup to the 
“man like tracks” shown to him by  
[13:55] Ryals to his sauropod discovery, in an 
article for Natural History in 1939.
[14:01] It was from this area right behind 
me that Roland Bird excavated over  
[14:06] a hundred feet of trackway in 
1941, a trackway that is still  
[14:10] on display to this day in the Museum of 
Natural History in New York, New York.
[14:20] James Ryals did not have an easy life. A father 
to eight children, anyone would struggle to put  
[14:25] enough food on the table. But James was a farmer 
in Glen Rose, Texas - a uniquely harsh situation.
[14:31] Agriculture was historically the 
dominant industry in Glen Rose. But  
[14:35] the region wasn’t great for agriculture. A 
reliance on cotton, poor farming techniques,  
[14:40] and completely unorganised flood 
control measures all depleted the soil,  
[14:44] sending the county’s agriculture into 
steep decline by the first World War.
[14:48] By the Great Depression, it wasn’t enough 
for James simply to own a farm. He needed  
[14:52] to earn more money, and he opted 
to chisel dinosaur tracks out of  
[14:56] the Paluxy River bed to sell to whoever would pay.
[15:00] So, after the chores were finished 
on the farm, James and his wife,  
[15:03] Cecil would head down to the river. Wielding a 
long chisel made from the axle of an old Model T,  
[15:08] and an 8 pound sledge hammer, the two would 
get to work. He would hold the chisel,  
[15:13] she would swing the hammer. 
Depending on the conditions,  
[15:15] the trace fossil could take between a few hours 
and a week to extract from the surrounding rock.
[15:21] A dinosaur footprint could 
sell anywhere from $25 to $50.
[15:25] Dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy River were 
first documented in early 1909, when a 9  
[15:30] year-old boy named George Adams discovered 
an oddly shaped depression in the river bed. 
[15:35] And he had skipped school that day 
and there’d been a flood in the area,  
[15:38] and he decided to go exploring in 
the local creek here. And he found a,  
[15:44] at the time he didn’t know it, a 
dinosaur track.

I’m Dennis Moore,  
[15:47] I’m the curator of the Somervale county 
historical society museum here in Glen Rose.
[15:52] And so I guess he had to go back the next 
day, say I skipped school, and Mr. MacDonald,  
[15:56] the teacher, went out either that day or 
the next day and said “this is a dinosaur  
[16:00] track”. So we give George Adams the credit for 
first getting the dinosaur tracks identified.
[16:05] He drew the shape on the school blackboard, and 
his teacher recognised it as a dinosaur footprint.
[16:06] This story made the local papers, and drew in a 
few interested folk from neighbouring villages.
[16:11] That same year, George’s brother, 
the 22 year-old Ernest Adams,  
[16:14] was walking the river with a 15 year-old named 
Charlie Moss, when Ernest Adams discovered a  
[16:19] series of elongated tracks in the river bed, 
unlike the three-toed prints his brother saw.
[16:24] Ernest declares them to be “giant man tracks”,  
[16:27] and goes so far as to name his new species 
“Texanus Gargantuas”, a prehistoric giant human.
[16:34] With the benefit of a century of hindsight,  
[16:36] it’s hard to ignore the circumstances 
around this supposed discovery.
[16:40] Ernest is a man of local legend. To 
quote the cover copy of his biography:
[16:46] “Ernest T. "Bull" Adams was the first-ever 
Rhodes Scholar from Baylor University,  
[16:51] but he spent most of his adult years on 
his knees sifting through the dirt as  
[16:55] he unearthed clues about the earliest 
humans. He was a formidably brilliant  
[16:59] lawyer and apt public official, yet 
he tenderheartedly devoted much of  
[17:02] his professional career to representing the 
down-and-out. Blessed with Herculean physical  
[17:07] prowess that earned him his nickname, this 
gentle giant was most at home while he entranced  
[17:12] youngsters from his hometown in Glen Rose, TX, 
with yarns about his rugged, enigmatic life.”
[17:19] This paints the picture of a man dedicated 
to being the smartest guy in the town,  
[17:23] if not the entire state of Texas. 
[17:26] To be blunt, it’s really easy to imagine 
Ernest’s ego being threatened by his  
[17:29] 9 year old brother’s discovery, and 
immediately setting out to one up him.
[17:34] Regardless of Ernest’s motivations, this 
story, and the “giant man tracks” became  
[17:38] something of a local myth: Yes sir, our 
Ernest is one of the smartest men in Texas,  
[17:43] did you know he discovered giant human 
footprints down in the river bed?
[17:47] Tall tales like this were a dime a dozen out West. 
Small towns had social hierarchies, complex family  
[17:53] dynamics and a lot of boredom. So when something 
interesting happened, it was really interesting.  
[17:59] Human footprints in the river bed didn’t just 
make Ernest unique, it made Glen Rose unique.
[18:05] The myth was aided by the fact that these 
tracks, once exposed, became very fragile.  
[18:10] Neither of these trails were ever documented, and 
they were lost to the Paluxy's infamous flooding.
[18:16] Prior to the 1940s, Texas had no unified plan for 
water management. Farmers instituted flood control  
[18:23] measures as they saw fit, and the unorganised 
mess caused floods to wreak havoc in the region.
[18:28] Flooding on the Paluxy River was severe 
enough to tear up the limestone layers of  
[18:32] the river bed, destroying any tracks 
and carrying the debris downstream,  
[18:36] dumping it into massive piles of stone slabs.
[18:39] At some point in the 1930s, 
deep in the Great Depression,  
[18:42] a now adult George Adams looked upon one 
of these piles of stone, and had an idea.
[18:48] While James Ryals toiled under the hot 
sun chiselling and torquing limestone  
[18:52] out of a riverbed, George blazed his own trail.
[18:55] He picked a good slab out of a pile, preferably 
one that already had a nice depression in it,  
[19:00] took it to a shady tree, and sat beneath 
it finely chiselling a footprint into the  
[19:04] slab. It was easier work for a higher quality 
product, all on a schedule convenient to him.
[19:10] Upon completing the carving, he would 
treat the print with hydrochloric acid  
[19:13] to dull the chisel marks, before covering the slab  
[19:15] in manure for several days to give the 
track the appearance of a uniform age.
[19:20] These dinosaur tracks sold on loose slabs were 
something of a cottage industry in Glen Rose,  
[19:25] and it’s impossible to know precisely how 
many were genuine versus carvings. These  
[19:30] weren’t great acts of deception, the slabs 
were sold to tourists or local residents,  
[19:35] typically ending up as garden ornaments.
[19:37] And look, this was Glen Rose in the Great 
Depression. If some passerby on their way  
[19:42] to California could afford to part ways with 
25 whole dollars for a novelty stone slab,  
[19:48] that money was better off 
with George Adams anyway.
[19:51] Many residents may have 
gotten a piece of this pie,  
[19:54] but what made George noteworthy wasn’t 
that he carved, it was what he carved.
[19:59] You had the classic tridactyl prints 
that he discovered as a child. But  
[20:03] he also carved tracks of the saber 
toothed tiger, and most critically,  
[20:06] a giant human footprint matching the 
dimensions of Ernest’s Texanus Gargantus.
[20:11] But the giant man tracks weren’t 
as popular as the dinosaur tracks,  
[20:15] typically going for around half the price. 
Whether this is because giant humans were  
[20:19] less interesting than dinosaurs, or because 
they were more obviously fake - who knows?
[20:24] But it was one of these sets of man tracks that 
found its way to Jack Hill’s store in Gallup,  
[20:28] New Mexico, where they were presented as 
genuine. It was there that, by sheer coincidence,  
[20:33] they would be encountered by an assistant 
to history’s most famous fossil hunter.
[20:38] If it weren’t for that encounter and Roland 
Bird’s dramatic account of them in his  
[20:41] Natural History article, these slabs would 
be entirely forgotten outside of Glen Rose.
[20:47] But within Glen Rose, the story is remembered. 
George Adams was the local mailman,  
[20:52] who sold a few carved footprints 
to survive the Great Depression.  
[20:56] We only know of him because his family and 
community worked to preserve his memory.
[21:01] And sometimes, those stories get a little 
distorted, they add a little narrative flare;  
[21:05] they become exaggerated in the 
way that all stories do. Sometimes  
[21:09] facts alone can’t convey how much 
a person meant to their community.
[21:14] So while Ernest Adams certainly did not discover 
giant human footprints in the Paluxy Riverbed,  
[21:19] the story offers countless insights into 
the lives and history of this village. A  
[21:24] history that is both unimportant and invaluable.
[21:28] So let’s just take a second to appreciate 
all this, and just listen to Mary Adams,  
[21:32] Ernest’s daughter, recount her father’s life. 
[21:35] "His most outstanding contribution, however, was 
his finding of footprints of man and dinosaur  
[21:40] tracks in the same geologic strata in the 
Paluxy River. This confirms the biblical  
[21:46] account of creation as stated in Genesis… This 
finding also disproves the theory of evolution,  
[21:52] which claims that the dinosaur was extinct for 
55 million years before man quote “evolved”.”
[21:59] Sorry, what was that about Genesis?
[22:06] Have you ever noticed how creationists 
seem to love dinosaurs? You’d think  
[22:10] that the discovery of dinosaurs would 
wreak havoc on Christianity, striking  
[22:14] out huge portions of the Bible and sending 
churches all across the nation into chaos.
[22:20] But as it turns out, when dinosaurs 
first started being discovered many  
[22:24] denominations were extremely cool with them.
[22:27] As early as 1902, the Seventh-Day Adventist 
newspaper Signs of the Times was publishing  
[22:33] articles and essays on the subject 
of dinosaurs. Both discussing their  
[22:37] theological implications but also 
just… geeking out about dinosaurs.
[22:42] This niche was spearheaded by a 
man named George McCready Price,  
[22:46] a devoted Adventist who loved himself 
a dinosaur. Price’s faith wasn’t just  
[22:51] unthreatened by dinosaurs - he argued that 
they were proof of Biblical authority. 
[22:57] We’re finding the buried remains of 
all these creatures that no longer  
[23:00] inhabit the world. What could have caused it? 
[23:03] Well, it’s obvious - The Genesis 
flood, the one with Noah and the Ark.
[23:08] Price would develop this thought, resulting 
in the theory of “flood geology” - claiming  
[23:13] the geology of the Earth as it exists 
today, the continents, mountain ranges,  
[23:18] canyons, soil composition, the whole 
lot, all result from Noah’s flood,  
[23:24] a paradigm where geology has two 
points in history, pre and post flood.
[23:30] It follows that all fossilised organisms 
that are uncovered were victims of the  
[23:34] flood. This theory necessitates that all 
fossilised creatures were wiped out in  
[23:39] the same extinction event, and they 
must have existed contemporaneously  
[23:43] pre-flood. That means that dinosaurs must 
have existed pre-flood alongside humanity.
[23:51] The point of this theory is to provide support 
to a literal interpretation of the Bible. So  
[23:56] while it’s not a necessary component of 
flood geology, one of the theory’s core  
[24:00] tenets is that the Earth is only about six to ten 
thousand years old, reflecting Biblical history.
[24:07] And as of 1940, all of this 
was… not popular. Even within  
[24:12] evangelical circles of the early 20th 
century, this was perceived as crank.
[24:18] But one of the few people who did believe in 
flood geology, was a man named Clifford Burdick.
[24:25] A geologist from Tuscon, Arizona, at first 
glance, Burdick looks and behaves like your  
[24:30] standard crank or quack from this era. He 
spent his life lying about his education,  
[24:35] he was most comfortable applying his 
science out West, far from peer-review,  
[24:39] and like a quack doctor, you trusted 
his diagnosis at your own peril.
[24:44] But despite seeming like a perfect fit 
for your John R Brinkley archetype,  
[24:48] he differs in one essential aspect: Clifford 
Burdick never met a theory he couldn’t believe.
[24:56] [LEONARD NEMOY] Dr. Clifford Burdick 
has been to Mount Ararat four times.  
[25:00] He failed to locate Noah’s Ark, but his 
scientific mind recognized other clues.
[25:06] Burdick was an advocate of flood geology, yet he 
would go on to become flood geology’s greatest  
[25:12] enemy by the sheer force of his passionate 
incompetence, a man so easily misled and so  
[25:19] convinced in his erroneous beliefs, that even 
his staunchest allies would come to fear him. 
[25:26] Trusting Burdick on anything 
was to risk utter humiliation.
[25:31] Okay, so, for our purposes Burdick comes onto 
the scene in the forties but to illustrate just  
[25:36] what kind of guy he was, just the way in which 
the man was a prototype Fox Mulder who just…  
[25:44] wanted to believe, let’s skip ahead for a minute 
to the seventies and talk about the Moab Skeleton.
[25:51] In 1971, a man named Lin Ottinger 
discovered major portions of two human  
[25:56] skeletons in the Keystone Azurite 
Mine in Moab, Utah. Within days,  
[26:01] archaeologist John Marwitt was brought 
in to document and investigate the find.
[26:06] The remains were found in loose blowsand, 
which was near, but entirely distinct from,  
[26:10] the hard sandstone around 
the remains. For Marwitt,  
[26:14] this was unquestionably a Native American 
burial, only a few hundred years old.  
[26:20] But Marwitt was accompanied by a freelance 
writer Fran Barnes, who reported on the  
[26:24] discovery in the local newspaper, putting a 
very familiar spin on this whole situation.
[26:30] You know how this goes: because the bones 
were found near 100 million year old rock,  
[26:35] the bones were 100 million years 
old. Check-mate evolutionists.
[26:39] Clifford Burdick read this news report and 
published his own article in 1973 based solely  
[26:46] on the claims of Barnes and Ottinger, distorting 
the data to really drive the idea that these  
[26:51] were fossilised human remains found within 
Cretaceous rock just like a dinosaur fossil.
[26:58] Burdick pushed this claim for over a decade,  
[27:01] making the Moab Skeleton a very big deal to 
an incredibly small group of Creationists.
[27:07] Ottinger began showcasing the bones 
at numerous creationist events, and  
[27:11] it was the star attraction of the Bible-Science 
Association meeting held in Glen Rose in 1983.
[27:18] Despite Marwitt’s dating of the skeleton 
being quite well known, an attendee was  
[27:23] willing to pay ten-thousand 
dollars for the Moab Skeleton.
[27:27] It probably lost some value after 
1989, when UCLA carried out carbon  
[27:32] dating on a sample and confirmed that the 
remains were only about 200 years old. 
[27:39] You could say he got… boned by 
that one! [Laugh until cough]
[27:45] But before all that, in 1943, Burdick was a member  
[27:49] of the Deluge Geology Society in Los 
Angeles, one of the many attempts at  
[27:54] establishing an organisation that 
would take flood geology seriously.  
[27:58] Burdick is assigned to a team focused on finding 
evidence of human coexistence with dinosaurs.
[28:04] Flood geology has countless bugbears, but its two 
foundational concerns are the age of the Earth,  
[28:10] and the concept of evolution. If humans could 
be shown to have coexisted with dinosaurs,  
[28:16] then evolution as we know it is cooked, and it 
would raise doubts about the geological timeline.
[28:21] Clifford and his friends took an interest 
in Bird’s Natural History article. They  
[28:25] wanted to see Ryals’ “man track” from 
the river bed with their own eyes,  
[28:29] and conduct a legitimate excavation of the 
river to see if the tracks were genuine.
[28:33] After years of failing to raise funds, the project 
was quietly forgotten. But Clifford Burdick didn’t  
[28:39] forget. He ventured out solo to conduct his own 
investigation, and was immediately side-tracked.
[28:45] Burdick was seemingly able to trace the carved 
man tracks Bird saw in Gallup to their new owner,  
[28:50] the operator of a roadside museum in 
Arizona named Allen Berry. Upon inspection,  
[28:55] Burdick became convinced that the 
prints were genuine, and thus these  
[28:59] tracks were the same “man-like 
track” Bird saw in the river bed.
[29:04] This would cause Burdick to fixate on Man Tracks,  
[29:07] making numerous sporadic trips to 
Glen Rose over the next forty years.
[29:11] In 1950, Burdick would publish an 
article in Signs of the Times where  
[29:15] he made his ultimate argument: humans did 
not evolve, in fact, we have degenerated.
[29:22] “Not only has man decreased in stature”

Wait,  
[29:25] what does Burdick sound like?

[BURDICK] 
We did find many evidences, we were  
[29:29] kinda surprised about what we did find that 
supported the theory that there was an ark.
[29:36] Okay then.
[29:36] [BURDICK]
“Not only has man decreased in stature 
from a magnificent specimen ten or twelve feet  
[29:41] tall, to an average today of less than six feet, 
but his average life has shortened from many  
[29:47] centuries to little more than half a century. 
Where do we find any human evolution here?”
[29:54] Burdick claims that Roland saw so many human 
tracks that it was “impossible to deny their  
[29:59] existence.” But, wouldn’t you know it, the 
tracks have all been quarried and sold off.
[30:04] He took this rhetoric further in 1955 
with a second article. Burdick bends and  
[30:09] distorts Roland’s account to an extent 
that even the sloppiest hack journalist  
[30:13] wouldn’t dare to try today. Burdick combines, 
rearranges and outright rewrites different  
[30:18] portions of the Natural History article 
to completely reframe Bird’s motivations.
[30:23] Motion graphic highlighting the 
way Burdick cut up Bird’s article
[30:23] [“ROLAND T BIRD”]
"This put things in  
[30:24] an entirely new light, even the possibility of 
such an association [dinosaur and human ] seemed  
[30:30] incredible.. . . The surroundings were lower 
Cretaceous in age, rock exposures roughly  
[30:34] 120,000,000 years old—very definitely the age 
of reptiles. . . . Could I have been mistaken  
[30:40] in my first conclusions? I am afraid Mr. Hill 
has found himself a pair of fake footprints."
[30:46] As Burdick tells it, Roland saw the man 
tracks in Gallup and was so blown away,  
[30:50] so terrified by the significance of 
this discovery and its consequences  
[30:54] for Darwinian evolution, that he raced to 
Glen Rose to confirm their authenticity.
[31:00] Then, Ryals’ mystery footprint was so perfect 
that it caused Roland to have an existential  
[31:05] crisis. His ‘dogmatic’ belief in evolution 
was being shattered by the Paluxy River and  
[31:11] it was easier to deny, deny, deny than 
accept the reality of Biblical creation.
[31:17] Bird would be made aware of these articles, and 
while he was outraged at being so misrepresented,  
[31:22] he ultimately viewed it as harmless. Signs of the  
[31:25] Times was a niche Adventist newspaper 
and he had better things to be doing.
[31:29] But Clifford Budick had just 
opened the Genesis Floodgates…
[31:33] [BURDICK] We did find many evidences, we were 
kinda surprised about what we did find that  
[31:38] supported the theory that there was an ark. And 
because that the mountain was covered with water  
[31:43] at one time. And this is one of the evidences. 
We found great bodies of salt above six thousand  
[31:48] feet, which indicate that the water was much 
higher than six thousand feet at one time.
[31:53] In 1961, seminarian John C. Whitcomb 
Jr. and hydraulic engineer Henry  
[31:58] M. Morris released their landmark 
creationist book, The Genesis Flood.
[32:03] In the book, Whitcomb and Morris 
make their scientific argument  
[32:06] for flood geology and young-earth creationism.
[32:09] By this point in the 1960s, there 
had been a two decade movement of  
[32:13] evangelical scientists trying to reconcile 
modern science with Biblical authority,  
[32:18] which was itself built on hundreds of years 
of apologetics, but a schism was forming. 
[32:24] In the mainstream this manifested in a 
growing support for liberal theology,  
[32:29] a school of thought which allowed 
for the Bible to be interpreted as a  
[32:33] complicated and nuanced collection of ancient 
literature with its own historical contexts.
[32:39] A great example is Day-Age Theory,  
[32:42] which argued that the days in Genesis were 
metaphoric, each day referring to millions  
[32:47] or even billions of years. This allowed for 
the existence of “old-earth creationists”,  
[32:53] evangelicals who could accept the true age of 
the Earth, without it threatening their beliefs.
[32:58] But flood geology is a product of a Christian 
fundamentalism. The doctrine of Biblical inerrancy  
[33:05] does not permit something like Day-Age Theory. 
The Bible says creation took six days, so the  
[33:10] earth was created in six literal 24-hour days. And 
the earth itself is around six-thousand years old.
[33:18] Young-earth creationists had, by 1960, 
spent 20 years trying and failing to  
[33:23] make a convincing scientific argument 
to their evangelical peers. It’s not  
[33:27] really an exaggeration to say they 
had been bullied out of the room.
[33:31] The thing is that this entire subject 
had already had its day in court:  
[33:36] god-fearing natural philosophers and 
later geologists took the theory very  
[33:41] seriously in the 17 and 1800s. The idea 
that fossils and geologic layers were  
[33:47] artefacts left behind by Noah’s flood 
was one of the first theories proposed. 
[33:52] The Biblical account of creation was by 
and large the default supposition that  
[33:57] other theories were competing against, and it 
was systematically discarded over the course of  
[34:04] two hundred years as the evidence across dozens of 
scientific disciplines simply didn’t support it.
[34:11] Saying that George McCready Price developed 
the concept of flood geology that Witcomb  
[34:16] and Morris then ran with is not strictly 
inaccurate, but the more nuanced version  
[34:22] would be to say that by being a combination 
of ignorant and dismissive of the work that  
[34:27] had already been done by his own predecessors, 
Price re-invented an already debunked theory.
[34:35] And The Genesis Flood is no different. It is 
pure pseudoscience constructed entirely of  
[34:41] motivated reasoning. Neither Morris nor 
Whitcomb have a background in geology,  
[34:45] which causes some problems in their 
scientific argument for flood geology.
[34:50] The resulting work was so poor, so misleading,  
[34:53] that it prompted an 11,000 word response 
from an Adventist geology professor. 
[35:00] “It is almost incredible that such 
an effort, which must have cost an  
[35:03] enormous amount of work and money, has been 
made for such a bad procedure as this.”
[35:07] But despite his scathing 
critique of their science,  
[35:10] his foundational critique 
remained spiritual in nature.
[35:14] “The most tragic aspect of the 
fundamentalist conception seems  
[35:18] to me that his standpoint 
requires scientific proof,  
[35:20] so that he must somehow live in fear of 
the results of developing scientific work,  
[35:25] because indeed this development could then also 
disprove the reliability of the Holy Scriptures.”
[35:30] This alludes to a cognitive dissonance within 
many evangelicals, who were growing increasingly  
[35:35] anxious in the technological and social turmoil 
of the 20th century. The church was losing its  
[35:41] unofficial but otherwise functional position 
of supreme authority, and political policies  
[35:46] like Jim Crow, tenuously justified by appeals to 
scripture, were in the process of being torn down.
[35:53] These groups clung to Biblical literalism 
because if you cede that some parts are  
[35:59] abstract or poetic or only relevant within a 
historical context then the entire Bible is open  
[36:06] to such challenges. And if you use the Bible 
as the justification for monstrous policies,  
[36:11] obviously those policies are going 
to be the first to be challenged.
[36:16] That audience, evangelical laymen, were the 
real target audience of The Genesis Flood.  
[36:22] The purpose of the book was not to win over 
stuffy Adventist academics or Presbyterian  
[36:27] journalists, but provide a comforting 
narrative to everyday church-goers.
[36:32] No metaphorical interpretation, no 
backsliding or unanswered questions.
[36:37] It is in this environment that the protestant 
belief that scripture should be accessible to  
[36:42] the laity metastasizes into 
full anti-intellectualism:  
[36:46] the belief that the shallowest, least-informed 
reading is not merely worth discussion but  
[36:52] is in fact more legitimate. This is where 
we get the theology of Kent Hovind, where  
[36:57] primacy is given to a childish and strictly 
literal interpretation that presents the  
[37:02] Bible as a single unified text authored by God 
from end to end in its current form for the  
[37:09] enlightenment of English-speaking modern white 
evangelical protestants in the American south.
[37:14] [KENT HOVIND] If what you’re proposing 
is true, then there’s no possible way the  
[37:19] average person in the world can read 
this book and understand it. The God  
[37:24] that I worship wrote a book that anybody can 
read and understand the vast majority of it,  
[37:28] and this book clearly says God made everything in 
six days, they were days just like we have today,  
[37:33] I think the Big Bang theory is one of the 
most ridiculous ideas I’ve ever heard of  
[37:36] in the world, and I think we’ll have an 
interesting discussion on that tonight.
[37:39] I think if you gave this book to five thousand 
people and said ‘read this, tell me what it  
[37:44] says.’ All five thousand would come back and 
say ‘this is saying he made it in six days’
[37:50] This simplistic theology creates an equally 
simplistic geology: things are what they  
[37:56] look like to a child. If a child would conclude 
that the Grand Canyon was carved by the receding  
[38:02] waters of the flood then any argument 
otherwise was just muddying the waters.
[38:08] The Genesis Flood sets out to 
correct the growing dissonance  
[38:11] between science and the Bible by 
arguing that science was, in fact,  
[38:16] correct and useful and was responsible for 
the myriad technological innovations of the  
[38:20] modern age, it was scientists and their 
interpretations who couldn’t be trusted.
[38:26] The shift is the argument that the science 
actually proves the Bible and has all along,  
[38:32] but scientists, either blinded by their 
secularism or perhaps willfully corrupt,  
[38:37] were obfuscating that; the 
faithful had the real science.
[38:43] The Genesis Flood suggests that there is 
no conflict between science and the Bible,  
[38:47] because they are the same, and thus the litmus 
test for any conclusion is agreement with the  
[38:53] scripture. In a single stroke it is 
thus able to depoliticize religion,  
[38:58] imbuing it with the perceived objectivity of 
science, and from that inheriting its authority.
[39:05] Science in this context is not a system of 
iterative theories and tests and investigations,  
[39:11] but a mythology, a twin sibling of religion,  
[39:14] with an authority that can simply be 
claimed by performing its rites and rituals.
[39:19] The book is the passion play 
performance of the idea of science,  
[39:24] the vocabulary and aesthetics, flattened into 
a simple, unambiguous fable.

What’s more,  
[39:30] that performance is easy: it’s 
so simple a child could do it.
[39:35] Within the context of evangelicalism, The Genesis 
Flood was tectonic. It transformed young-earth  
[39:41] creationism from an obscure long-debunked doctrine 
into something with broad appeal. Readers didn’t  
[39:48] need to understand it - they didn’t even need 
to read it. They just needed to accept it.
[39:54] The Genesis Flood was quoted 
in church, creationist  
[39:57] organisations would be built around the book,  
[40:00] and it has been a staple of the evangelical 
homeschooling curriculum for going on 60 years.
[40:07] It energized an entire movement of 
fundamentalists to put on lab coats  
[40:11] or whip together a volunteer field excavation 
and perform some science to affirm the Bible.
[40:17] And one of the book's most spectacular 
revelations was the coexistence of man  
[40:21] and dinosaur, and their evidence for this… 
was the Gallup Slabs. Authenticated by none  
[40:27] other than paleontologist Roland T 
Bird… according to Clifford Burdick.
[40:33] [STAN TAYLOR] Basically there are two major views:  
[40:36] one origin by evolution, two 
origin by special creation.
[40:41] In 1968, Reverend Stanley Taylor 
travelled to Glen Rose, Texas. 
[40:46] Taylor ran a small evangelical film production 
house, he’d read The Genesis Flood, and wanted  
[40:51] to see these tracks for himself. He invited 
Clifford Burdick to meet him in Glen Rose  
[40:56] to show him the tracks and document the 
footprints as part of a proposed film.
[41:01] For Burdick, this was a question of 
restoring credibility. Burdick was  
[41:05] adept at tracking down Man Tracks on 
loose slabs, and had started his own  
[41:09] collection of the specimens that he 
claimed to be genuine trace fossils.
[41:14] This included a pair of human feet that 
have come to be known as the Burdick Slabs,  
[41:18] which he claims to have bought from a 
Reverend in Arizona, as well as some  
[41:22] dinosaur prints and giant cat footprints - all 
quite obviously originating from George Adams. 
[41:28] Burdick even traced the slabs back 
to a knick-knack shop in Glen Rose  
[41:32] that was known to flip George’s carvings.
[41:34] So Taylor meets Burdick, sees these slabs,  
[41:37] asks around, and puts it all together 
- they’re carvings. But he’s open to  
[41:42] the possibility that the Man Tracks are 
replicas of genuine prints from the past.
[41:48] So Taylor focuses on the river, and conducts 
his own original excavation. Taylor was a  
[41:53] Reverend and filmmaker, so he wasn’t at 
all trained or qualified to be doing this,  
[41:57] but with the support of the old timers like 
Charlie Moss and James Ryals, Taylor and his  
[42:02] volunteer crew from the Lubbock Texas Bible 
Church, were able to make a genuine discovery.
[42:08] The Taylor Trail is relevant enough 
to be listed on Google Maps. What  
[42:12] drew Taylor to this run of prints is 
that it heavily featured the poor,  
[42:15] elongated tracks that paleontologists 
would typically write off.
[42:19] When you look at the trackway as a whole, 
it’s obvious that a dinosaur left the prints.  
[42:24] But a few individual prints bear enough of a 
resemblance to a human print to satisfy Taylor.
[42:31] The excavation was captured on 16mm 
film, and combined with interviews  
[42:35] and a few random set pieces to create 
the documentary Footprints in Stone. 
[42:44] [FOLK MUSIC] Oh river Paluxy, revealers of 
history, oh what is this mystery of footprints in  
[42:50] stone? Did man and dinosaur roam on your ancient 
shore? Oh river Paluxy, revealer of history.
[43:06] Released in January 1973, this film 
had essentially become lost media  
[43:11] until a quite damaged and extremely 
faded copy surfaced online in 2023.
[43:16] The documentary is amateurish, bumbling, 
comically inept, and, well,  bad. Contemporary  
[43:22] reviews of the film painted it as incompetent 
even for a low budget doc from that era.
[43:28] The camera gets as close to the titular 
footprints in stone as it can, but Stan  
[43:32] and his son Paul, working the camera, 
are severely limited by their equipment,  
[43:37] mostly showing blobby tracks  in wide 
shots, rendered further illegible to  
[43:42] contemporary viewers through the 
poor quality of most projections.
[43:46] Due to those limitations, and the general 
challenge of photographing the bright limestone  
[43:50] along the Paluxy, the crew make heavy use of 
movie magic  - using water and oil to essentially  
[43:57] paint the feet into the depressions 
to better sell them to the camera.
[44:01] To put on my filmmaker hat for a moment here, 
the resolution that they’re working with in terms  
[44:06] of dynamic range and detail means that this 
wetting overwhelms all other considerations.  
[44:12] The surface of the rock is so flattened by 
the photography that whatever Stan chooses  
[44:18] to paint onto the rock becomes the only thing 
that you can make out, it’s quite manipulative.
[44:25] But despite that, Taylor was clearly 
making an effort at doing legitimate  
[44:29] work here and makes the savvy decision 
to omit the carved footprints entirely.. 
[44:34] Instead, Taylor leans into the 
testimonies of the old timers.  
[44:39] The problem is that many of the key 
players were either incredibly old or  
[44:43] incredibly dead. So Taylor’s interviews 
with them feature very dubious claims.
[44:48] [RESIDENT] Now I do know that quite a few people 
I think that are real reliable people that said  
[44:53] when they were younger, forty and fifty and 
sixty years ago, that there were tracks here in  
[44:57] the river and they saw ‘em and they certainly, if 
they weren’t human tracks they couldn’t tell it.
[45:02] [JAMES RYALS] If they wasn’t a human print I’ve 
never been able to figure out what they were.
[45:09] [STAN TAYLOR] You saw them right along with 
dinosaur footprints?

[JAMES RYALS] I’ve  
[45:12] seen them all together and right 
along down and I at that time I’ve  
[45:19] seen ‘em where the man would step 
in a dinosaur’s print after he’d  
[45:27] passed over. Some of them had wore sandals or 
some kind of moccasins in the track they made!  
[45:35] Some of them had to be barefooted because 
the mud had come up between their toes!
[45:39] [STAN TAYLOR] Now did you count five toes?
[45:40] [JAMES RYALS] Sure, just naturally as my own foot.
[45:43] [STAN TAYLOR] Was there an arch in the foot?
[45:44] [JAMES RYALS] Just a very slightly arch.
[45:46] So there you go, evolution debunked.
[45:49] The film also features interviews with various 
creationists, including Clifford Burdick and  
[45:54] Genesis Flood author Henry Morris. But notably 
there was not a single secular voice in the  
[46:00] film. The only skeptics included were old-earth 
creationists. So even the dissent was toothless.
[46:07] Footprints in Stone became a core text for 
creationist organisations. The film was screened  
[46:12] at churches all across the United States. It 
could be rented through mail order for $30,  
[46:16] but if you were playing the film for a secular 
public school, they’d loan it to you for free.
[46:21] Given that this was a 16mm 
film distributed by mail order,  
[46:25] the roll out of Footprints in Stone was 
slow - but its influence is undeniable.
[46:32] [FOLK MUSIC] Both skeptic and believer have come 
from far and wide to peer into your waters and  
[46:42] stand in odd surprise! Could man have lived 
at that time when dinosaurs walked here? Then  
[46:52] geologic tables are incorrect I fear. 
11 Return to Glen Rose 
[46:58] Throughout all of this, from 
the cities to the eighties,  
[47:02] Glen Rose had become an obscure tourist 
destination for fundamentalist pilgrims.
[47:06] Back in the 40s Emmett McFall bought land on 
the Paluxy River and erected a sign offering  
[47:11] the curious a tour of the dinosaur and 
“giant men tracks” on his property.
[47:16] Prior to his death in 1959, George Adams would 
still carve the odd footprint. This slab,  
[47:22] produced sometime in the early 50s, 
is probably his best work. It has some  
[47:27] problems, but it’s a night and day 
improvement on his work 25 years prior.
[47:31] At some point, the influx of Man Track 
pilgrims became too much for Ernest Adams.  
[47:35] The story goes that Ernest “ordered” the 
local merchants to spread the word that all  
[47:39] human tracks were fake. This isn’t framed 
as a confession or anything of that sort,  
[47:44] but instead as him protecting his 
small town from the world’s attention.
[47:49] That didn’t do much to dispel rumours, 
and only muddied matters further.
[47:52] Despite decades of excavations producing no 
documentation of man tracks as well-defined  
[47:58] as the carvings, the oblong tracks 
being uncovered were convincing enough  
[48:02] for tourists to accept the testimonies of 
old timers and send them home satisfied.
[48:08] If they could find this in an afternoon, perfect 
human prints are certainly under there somewhere.
[48:16] By 1980, the buzz around these footprints 
in the Paluxy River bed was beginning to  
[48:20] bleed out of evangelical circles and 
catch the attention of secularists,  
[48:24] or at least people not already immersed in 
the niche politics of young earth creationism.
[48:29] One such individual was Glen Kuban, a 
then-recent biology graduate who in his own  
[48:34] words was “leaning towards strict creationism” 
and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
[48:40] Quick sidebar here, but while Glen’s entrance into 
the story is seemingly unremarkable, he sticks  
[48:46] around and does just an absolutely tremendous 
amount of work, both primary research and  
[48:56] just collating and documenting what everybody 
else was up to, for going on forty years now.  
[49:05] Indeed this whole story would be very difficult 
to tell if not for the foundation laid by Glen.
[49:12] To Glen the claim of fossilized human footprints 
would be huge, if true, but on arrival it clearly  
[49:18] wasn’t. As Glen saw it this whole thing 
was seemingly just a big misunderstanding. 
[49:23] These lay people had a clear 
interest in the footprints, like him,  
[49:26] but had absolutely no familiarity with the 
subject. Tourists were turning up at the  
[49:31] river and just kinda wandering, maybe 
getting a local to show them around.
[49:36] So maybe if Glen helped get accessible 
explanations on topics like erosion  
[49:40] and dinosaur footprints out into the world 
that could help clear this whole thing up.
[49:45] But then Carl Baugh arrived in Glen Rose.
[49:49] Baugh is your classic charlatan. We know very 
little about his life prior to arriving in Glen  
[49:55] Rose, and what we do know is contradictory and 
full of holes. Back in 1996 Kaylois Henry did  
[50:01] a profile of Baugh for the Dallas Observer, 
and despite the article’s clear deference  
[50:05] to the Creationist argument, she can’t pin much 
down about Baugh before he arrives in Glen Rose
[50:12] “Only one thing about Baugh's academic history 
can be established with any certainty: In 1959,  
[50:18] he earned a three-year "graduate of theology"  
[50:21] degree from then-unaccredited Baptist 
Bible College in Springfield, Missouri.  
[50:27] The rest of his purported academic credentials 
appear to be flimsy correspondence-course degrees,  
[50:33] and even these have changed between 
books and articles written by Baugh.”
[50:38] Baugh was lured to Glen Rose by The Genesis Flood  
[50:40] and Footprints in Stone. And 
he immediately got digging. 
[50:45] He first made his presence known on June 16 
1982, when he invited reporters from Fort  
[50:50] Worth and Dallas to witness the discovery of “24 
Tyrannosaurus prints” and various new Man Tracks.
[50:57] A lot of this history was 
preserved by Ronnie Hastings,  
[51:00] Texan high school physics teacher 
who lived close to Glen Rose.
[51:04] He caught wind of Baugh’s announcement and 
attended the excavation alongside the media.  
[51:09] This began what would be an almost 3 year long 
documentation of Baugh’s activities in Glen Rose.
[51:14] Hastings noted that the Baugh’s crew, like 
Taylor’s, were volunteers from local church  
[51:19] groups. But he noted that these volunteers took 
far more care in their work than Baugh himself.
[51:25] Carl Baugh was quick to draw conclusions and quick 
to pivot. He had no issue contradicting himself,  
[51:30] and had no issue playing games with 
skeptics. He could see toe marks on  
[51:33] the tracks, if you can’t see 
them, that’s a skill issue. 
[51:36] [CARL BAUGH] within the side of the 
dinosaur track. Actually the human  
[51:40] footprint comes over to right here. Now I’m 
going to wet my foot and step down in that,  
[51:48] and I think it should even be plainer then. 
[51:58] Okay so, we need to stop for a second and really 
point out how absurd this whole thing has been.
[52:03] Paleontology, or in this case Paleoichnology;  
[52:06] the study of trace fossils, is 
an exceptionally complex field,  
[52:10] combining the already complicated topics of 
geology, biology and, in our case, anatomy.
[52:16] But throughout this entire saga, the 
Mantrack phenomenon has been driven by  
[52:20] individuals with absolutely no experience 
in this field. It’s been local farmers,  
[52:26] filmmakers, and tourists, all making shockingly 
confident identifications of trace fossils.
[52:32] And some of the claims they 
wrote are just nonsense.
[52:35] In this Moral Majority Report article from 1985,  
[52:38] the author claims that the footprints are 
so well preserved because they were buried  
[52:42] rapidly by Noah’s flood. We’ve already 
covered that violent floods can literally  
[52:46] rip apart a stone river bed. The original mud 
prints had to be buried gently to avoid being  
[52:53] washed away. The quality of the prints opposes 
the flood narrative, it does not support it.
[53:00] But don’t think that it was just 
creationists running their mouth  
[53:03] about this. The most absurd claim we 
found came from an atheist skeptic.
[53:07] “It seems obvious that pranksters intent on 
faking the evidence hitched up their pants  
[53:12] legs and had a good time paddling around in 
bare feet in the soft limestone in order to  
[53:16] make it appear that both humans and dinosaurs 
walked the Earth at the same ancient time.”
[53:21] The soft… limestone. This is just 
rowdy teenagers stomping around,  
[53:28] punching 4 inch deep holes in the rock.
[53:32] This incompetence can also be seen in the work 
of Taylor and Baugh’s respective digs. Neither  
[53:37] excavation cleaned up after themselves, 
leaving the site littered with trash.
[53:41] Stanley Taylor attempted to 
do a legitimate excavation;  
[53:44] including the full field documentation that 
had been universally absent since Bird left.  
[53:49] But Taylor had no idea what he was doing. So 
even the most basic exercises stumped him.
[53:55] Taylor’s measurements were wildly inaccurate, 
which he seemed to be aware of. Even individual  
[54:01] footprints were getting approximate measurements, 
because he lacked the confidence to make a  
[54:06] decisive measurement. Observational errors of a 
similar magnitude were found throughout his work.  
[54:11] Needless to say, these errors taint Taylor’s 
analysis and render his conclusions worthless.
[54:17] So if Stanley Taylor’s excavation of a 
genuine trackway was such a debacle in  
[54:22] spite of his best efforts, what hope do you 
and I have just vibe checking the river bed?
[54:29] Limestone is notoriously deceptive when it 
comes to trackways. River erosion produces  
[54:34] intricate surfaces with numerous depressions. 
One major example is Karren weathering,  
[54:39] a chemical reaction that produces cavities 
that can be misinterpreted as toe marks.
[54:45] In terms of erosion of the dinosaur prints 
themselves, there are too many factors to  
[54:49] even name. You have the erosion that 
occurs when the lime mud is fresh,  
[54:53] where the mud will collapse in 
on itself or the print will just  
[54:56] begin to fall apart as the tide comes 
in. And that erosion is entirely separate  
[55:02] from the erosion that occurs once the track is 
unearthed as limestone 100 million years later.
[55:08] Then there’s the weird curve balls. The 
trackmaker could have slipped in the mud.  
[55:11] You might be dealing with an undertrack, where the 
lime mud was already buried under clay or algae,  
[55:17] giving you a softer, shallower print. 
Or maybe you’re looking at the burrow  
[55:21] of an ancient shrimp - that one 
has tricked Baugh a few times.
[55:25] So the paleontologist has all of these factors to 
consider, while typically lacking the most crucial  
[55:31] detail - what made the track? It’s rare to know 
what species or even genus you’re dealing with.
[55:37] So yeah, when Roland Bird was shown a 
vague footprint that lacked all definition,  
[55:43] as a scientist he did just have to 
shrug and move on to the next track.
[55:48] Individual tracks, especially poor tracks, 
aren’t good for much. But when you have a  
[55:53] series of them, the paleontologist 
can start to piece it all together.
[55:57] We’ve already done this. The Taylor Trail featured  
[56:00] elongated tracks that were very appealing 
to our human pattern recognising brains,  
[56:05] but in the context of the whole 
trail, those are just one weird print.
[56:10] So it should be clear by now why 
statements like this hurt so badly.
[56:16] “The tracks were clear. I remember how 
the skin between the little toe and  
[56:21] the one next to it had grown 
together on the right foot.”
[56:24] There are more layers to this than the Glen Rose 
formation itself. Charlie Moss was a bootlegger  
[56:29] and pecan farmer, who is quoted here making a 
perfect ID on a human footprint he saw over half  
[56:36] a century prior, where he has presumed a deformity 
in the trackmaker’s anatomy to explain a defect.
[56:42] The same behaviour can be seen from Jim Hall 
when he attended Carl Baugh’s expedition in  
[56:47] 1985. Hall spoke about finding ‘skid marks’ 
where a person had almost slipped in the mud.
[56:54] Carl Baugh has continued to carry out 
annual expeditions to the Paluxy River  
[56:58] bed even through to today. For the 
low price of $15 per person per day,  
[57:03] you too can help Carl Baugh unlock the secrets 
of the ancient world. You will need to bring  
[57:08] your own equipment. Carl recommends several 
tools, but creative substitution is encouraged.
[57:13] Guests are invited to bring their 
imaginations with them to the river,  
[57:17] and find a story in the rock.
[57:19] [CARL BAUGH] Kay, the outside of the track 
is here, the digit goes around like that,  
[57:24] but it’s still infilled, the central 
digit goes like that but it’s infilled,  
[57:28] the near digit goes that far but it’s 
infilled, we swing around and this is  
[57:33] the hallux back of the foot. So here’s the 
outline of this little juvenile track. But it  
[57:41] still needs to weather. It’s a beautiful little 
thing, and it’s a continuation of that trail.
[57:50] Is that an accurate identification 
of an acrocanthosaurus track? How  
[57:55] should I know? Do you have any 
idea how difficult all this is?
[58:00] When Carl Baugh arrived in Glen 
Rose, he represented a seismic  
[58:04] shift in this whole thing. Where Taylor 
and Burdick sought actual respectability,  
[58:09] Carl immediately began pumping out 
a constant stream of disinformation.
[58:14] When he began his excavations in Glen Rose,  
[58:16] he was seemingly completely 
clueless when it came to dinosaurs. 
[58:19] His early footprints were erroneously credited 
to “Tyrannosaurus” and “Brontosaurus” seemingly  
[58:24] because of the Sinclair fibre glass 
models beside the parking lot.
[58:28] Baugh’s 1982 excavation was a barrage 
of claims fired at Ronnie Hastings, but  
[58:33] one in particular foreshadowed what was to come. 
[58:36] On October 20, 1982, Baugh brought out a cigar box  
[58:39] and showed Hastings his best evidence 
of a young-earth: The London Hammer.
[58:44] This would be the first of a vast collection of 
“out-of-place artifacts”. As the name implies,  
[58:49] these are artifacts that are made 
noteworthy specifically because of  
[58:53] the context in which they are 
found, appearing out of place.
[58:57] The London Hammer is a great example of 
how these supposed artifacts are used. The  
[59:01] hammer was supposedly found “completely 
encased” in Cretaceous rock. Therefore,  
[59:06] the hammer is as old as the dinosaur 
tracks, therefore, humans and dinosaurs.
[59:11] However, there is no documentation of where 
the hammer was found, and the story of its  
[59:16] discovery keeps changing. Baugh today says it 
was unearthed “completely encased”, but other  
[59:22] accounts had the handle either sticking out from a 
rock nodule, or even just found loose by a creek.
[59:28] If that were the case, the hammer being embedded 
in a limey matrix like this isn’t shocking.
[59:34] But the magic of out-of-place artifacts is that 
the critical context can always be withheld or  
[59:40] distorted. Every one of Baugh’s artifacts 
or fossils comes into his possession years,  
[59:44] and often decades, after their discovery. In many 
cases, there will be numerous tests that could be  
[59:50] carried out to verify the authenticity of his 
artifacts, but Baugh refuses to have them done.
[59:55] Rather than bring in qualified third-parties 
to carry out mainstream analysis of the hammer,  
[60:00] Baugh instead carries out his own crank 
experiments with spiral CT scans being  
[60:04] a particular favourite. Typically 
these CT scans are carried out by  
[60:08] medical technicians who seemingly 
have no idea what they’re doing.
[60:12] Our favourite example of this is 
Baugh’s “fossilised human finger”. 
[60:16] [CARL BAUGH] One of the more intriguing 
and gratifying of these original artifacts  
[60:20] owned by the Creation Evidence 
Museum is a little finger. 
[60:26] In that Moral Majority story with Jim Hall, Hall 
says that we’ve got enough human footprints.  
[60:31] We’re good for footprints. The next step is to 
find fossilised human remains in this strata.
[60:37] And almost immediately, Baugh comes across  
[60:40] this “fossilised human finger” that 
was discovered. What a coincidence.
[60:46] It’s just an interestingly shaped rock,  
[60:49] but that hasn’t stopped Baugh from making 
all sorts of insane claims about it.
[60:54] [CARL BAUGH] This particular finger had been 
analyzed first of all by spiral CAT scan. It’s  
[60:59] been demonstrated to be genuine. That is we 
have the distal, the medial, and the proximal  
[61:06] joints showing with spiral CAT scan. We have the 
actual bone being read by spiral CAT scan. We  
[61:14] have the actual cartilaginous ligaments being 
read by spiral CAT scan. But that isn’t all:  
[61:20] we have the fingernail and the cuticle, 
and the taper read by spiral CAT scan.
[61:25] The scan has a darker area toward the 
center because that’s the point with  
[61:29] the greatest amount of rock for the radiation 
to pass through. But it… kinda vaguely looks  
[61:35] like what you imagine your bone would 
look like, so that’s Baugh’s angle.
[61:39] Incidentally, Glen Kuban received an email from 
a woman in 2012, claiming that she was the one  
[61:45] to discover the stone. She told Glen that she 
leant it to Carl to be returned soon after,  
[61:50] but Carl just stole it, refusing to give it 
back to her for almost 30 years at that point.
[61:55] Carl Baugh assembled a collection of 
these artifacts so rapidly that he  
[61:59] found himself wanting for somewhere to put it all.
[62:03] But perhaps equally fascinating is the 
roadside attraction to be found on the  
[62:07] parcel of land at the very mouth, the very 
gate to the state park itself.

Occupied by  
[62:13] a fundamentalist Christian creationist, 
the Creationist Evidences Museum is a  
[62:19] tiny complex of trailer houses and other 
debris that act like a tourist trap magnet  
[62:26] on many unsuspecting park visitors. For 
a few dollars a loner or a whole family  
[62:32] can enjoy the hilarious misinformation 
and fiction on exhibit in the museum.
[62:37] Originally a double wide trailer it has since 
been expanded into a larger permanent structure.
[62:42] We have, of course, the aforementioned 
London Hammer and fossilised finger.
[62:46] The Moab Skeleton that Burdick pushed for over 
a decade? Baugh was the guy who bought it in  
[62:51] 1983, reportedly for $10,000, and he displayed 
it in the museum at least until the early 90s.
[62:56] On my trip to Glen Rose I was unable 
to locate the artefact in the museum,  
[63:00] but I was able to have a brief interaction with 
Baugh as he was on his way out for lunch. I asked  
[63:06] him if I had just missed it somewhere 
in the chaos or if it was in storage. 
[63:11] He told me in a very cagey tone 
that there is some evidence that  
[63:15] the artefact might be intrusive and in 
the interest of “the truth” they had  
[63:21] decided to remove it from display. He 
also insisted repeatedly that it’s not  
[63:26] “in storage” but “in security” though admittedly 
the difference between those is lost on me.
[63:33] On a tour of the newest addition to the museum, a 
Potempkin laboratory where two volunteers cosplay  
[63:38] as scientists, we were shown two pieces 
of coprolite, aka fossilized excrement,  
[63:43] and told that one was two snakes fighting, 
and the other was a baby dinosaur who had  
[63:47] just hatched and was, quote, “cowering 
in fear because it saw the flood coming.”
[63:52] And how could I forget Carl’s Hyperbaric Chamber. 
[63:55] This piece of cutting-edge technology 
began construction in the early 1990s.  
[64:00] It’s a structure so important to Baugh that 
this entire building was erected around it.  
[64:05] The chamber recreates the atmospheric 
and electromagnetic conditions of the  
[64:10] pre-flood Earth. This will cause any organisms 
placed in the chamber to rapidly return to  
[64:15] their pre-flood forms - Lizards will become 
Edenic dinosaurs in just a few generations.
[64:23] Oaky, so, Carl has, like, three hyperbaric 
chambers, two small ones and a huge one.  
[64:29] Back in the 90s he put a copperhead snake 
in one of the small ones for three weeks,  
[64:34] and milked it for venom both before and 
after. Carl’s claim is that they sent  
[64:40] the venom to a secular scientist who said 
that the venom had transformed into serum.
[64:47] Now, that claim is just kind of nonsense built 
on the fact that “serum” and “venom” sound alike,  
[64:52] and thus the listener might infer 
for themselves that “serum” is the  
[64:56] opposite of “venom,” but setting 
that aside this is, at least,  
[65:01] an actual experiment. This is the hard science 
that has eluded creationism for so long. 
[65:07] The main problem is that that 
earlier chamber was too small,  
[65:11] you can’t run an experiment with live animals 
for longer than a few days for mammals,  
[65:15] maybe a few weeks for reptiles. Hence 
Carl’s massive chamber that is intended  
[65:21] to contain a fully self-sustaining 
ecosystem simulating pre-flood earth.
[65:26] It will provide irrefutable proof 
against Darwinian evolution and  
[65:30] the geologic timeline. And Carl 
Baugh will be recognised for the  
[65:34] 30-plus years of work it took 
to bring this all to fruition.
[65:40] It’s empty.
[65:42] Assuming this theory to be accurate, it 
is furthermore the producer’s assumption  
[65:46] that this hyperbaric biosphere has been left 
intact only because it would be prohibitively  
[65:52] expensive to have it hauled away, and too 
difficult to dispose of by one’s self.
[65:58] But in the early days when the 
Museum was still just a trailer,  
[66:01] Carl’s marquee attraction was Clifford 
Burdick’s footprint. An elderly Burdick  
[66:06] had returned to Glen Rose in 1983, and 
Baugh had convinced Clifford to sell him  
[66:11] one of his slabs, the so-named Burdick 
Right, now conspicuously split in two.
[66:16] Though make a mental note of 
the fact that all my footage  
[66:18] of the print is split into even more pieces.
[66:22] Why was it split in two? Because 
over a decade earlier, in the 70s,  
[66:27] a team of scientists from Columbia 
Union College and Loma Linda University  
[66:31] conducted an investigation into the 
loose slabs carved by George Adams. 
[66:36] They’d collected as many slabs as they could get 
their hand on and sectioned them to determine if  
[66:40] they were natural depressions. They concluded 
that Burdick’s prints were likely carved.
[66:46] It would be hard for Baugh not to know of 
this study, they weren’t subtle in their work.
[66:51] But over the decades, Baugh has assembled 
a truly absurd number of these things.
[66:55] None are more meaningful than any other, 
and they all share the same key traits.
[67:00] First of all, they all crop up out of nowhere, 
with a wafting story about being found years  
[67:06] if not decades earlier by a friend of a 
friend of a friend. This makes tracing the  
[67:11] prints basically impossible. It also helps 
justify the complete lack of documentation.
[67:16] Second, very few photos of these 
prints are in wide circulation,  
[67:20] with the most prominent being 
constrained to only the best angles.
[67:25] Now, from a good angle these 
tracks look more compelling,  
[67:29] but it’s still possible to debunk them.
[67:31] The A.M Coffee Print is a perfectly flat 
depression with an overly straight instep.  
[67:36] The Willet Print has monstrous toes that 
imply that the person’s strongest toe was this  
[67:41] middle one. And the Zapata Print has freakish 
proportions on the ball and through the arch.
[67:46] But it really needs to be stressed how 
unconvincing these prints are in person. When  
[67:52] you see these in person, from the bad angles, the 
idea that these are trace fossils is just comical.
[67:59] Like, seriously, you can see the 
tool marks. George did what he could,  
[68:04] but you can see the tool 
marks. What are we doing here?
[68:08] But the true masterpiece in Baugh’s 
collection is this: The Delk Print.
[68:14] Originally discovered in July of 2000, this 
piece of paleontologic perfection was found on  
[68:19] the Paluxy River by amateur archaeologist Alvis 
Delk. The slab was supposedly found loose in a  
[68:25] pile of rocks along a creek that flows 
into the river. Delk took the slab home,  
[68:30] thinking that it only contained the tridactyl 
dinosaur print. It wasn’t until May of 2008,  
[68:35] when Delk suffered a bad fall from a 
ladder and needed money for medical bills,  
[68:39] that he brushed up the specimen 
and noticed the human print.
[68:43] As an archeologist, recognising that 
this represented comically definitive  
[68:47] evidence of the coexistence of man and dinosaur,  
[68:50] explicitly “disproving Darwinian evolution” and 
‘changing world history’, Delk did the obvious  
[68:56] thing… and sold the specimen to the crank 
who runs a roadside attraction outside town.
[69:02] Never mind the fact that Delk’s 
archeological experience came  
[69:06] from attending Baugh’s annual digs!
[69:08] But who cares? Let’s just marvel 
at this thing. It’s so good.
[69:12] Carl Baugh has called the human 
print an “ideal specimen”,  
[69:16] ignoring the obvious anthropomorphic 
flaws. The big toe is two miles deep,  
[69:20] the two middle toes are far too long and splayed 
out like god only knows what, and we have a razor  
[69:26] sharp instep. Viewed from a more acute angle the 
footprint turns into clearly impossible nonsense.
[69:33] But we have a whole second print to analyse,  
[69:35] and this “juvenile Acrocanthosaurus” 
print has its own problems. 
[69:40] When you contrast it with a genuine juvy 
Acro track, the difference becomes fairly  
[69:44] obvious. The digits are too short, The 
depression on the whole is too flat,  
[69:48] lacking any indication of claw marks 
that often appear so pronounced.
[69:52] What it better resembles 
is, of course, a carving. 
[69:56] You can just see the layers that 
Delk carved through. With your eyes.
[70:02] But what makes the Delk Print so magical is 
just how brazen it is. A “perfect” Acro track  
[70:08] over the top of an “ideal” human track 
on a Cretaceous limestone slab found on  
[70:13] the Paluxy River and layered specifically 
so that the human track would have had to  
[70:19] pre-date the dinosaur track. It’s hard to 
dream of a more spectacular specimen. It’s  
[70:25] like forging your report card and giving 
yourself all A-double-plusses with a bonus  
[70:31] note that you are indeed very handsome 
and a generous lover. I love it so much.
[70:39] By the early 1980s, Man Track Mania had 
peaked. Stanley Taylor and Henry Morris  
[70:44] had passed their torches to their 
respective sons who continued to  
[70:47] push the Man Track claims, albeit 
with some increasing timidity.
[70:52] By late 1985, Glen Kuban and Ronnie Hastings were 
working with a small team of secular academics.  
[70:58] Glen had assembled his own massive body of work 
debunking the “man track” claims on the Taylor  
[71:03] Trail, while the rest of the team put together a 
68 page special edition of the Creation/Evolution  
[71:09] journal, focusing solely on the Paluxy River’s Man 
Tracks. It debunked misinformation surrounding the  
[71:15] anatomy, geology, and anthropology 
of Man Tracks, among other things.
[71:20] Today, the authors would just drop this 
article like a bomb. But Glen Kuban invited  
[71:24] Paul Taylor and John Morris down to the 
Paluxy River to reevaluate their claims,  
[71:29] challenge Glen, and really 
just get their story straight.
[71:32] And in a turn of events that would never, ever 
happen today - Taylor and Morris came to the river  
[71:38] in good faith. They already had concerns about the 
quality of the work that creationists had carried  
[71:43] out, they accepted the evidence against the Man 
Tracks, and took steps to fix the situation.
[71:48] John Morris ceased publication of his 1980 book 
advocating for the Paluxy mantracks and as Glen  
[71:54] Kuban understands it Paul Taylor straight up 
destroyed all copies of Footprints in Stone.
[71:59]  John Morris released a carefully worded 
statement that stopped short of a full retraction,  
[72:04] but he hits all the necessary beats to earn 
full credit. ‘All the existing tracks in  
[72:09] the river bed were made by dinosaurs, the 
old timers’ testimonies are questionable,  
[72:13] creationism can’t rely on the Paluxy 
River for evidence of a young-earth.’
[72:17] “several years ago when I spoke at ICR 
and I said “John, why did you withdraw  
[72:22] your book?” He no longer sells the book. 
He says “Brother Hovind I’ve got a whole  
[72:26] warehouse full of those books, and I’d 
love to be able to sell them. But I just  
[72:30] cannot in good conscience continue to 
support the footprint idea in Texas.
[72:35] There was a movie made called Footprints in Stone 
by, I forget which group made that movie, that  
[72:38] movie went around the circuit for a 
while showing the dinosaur and human  
[72:41] footprints together. And then they 
withdraw their movie off the market.
[72:46] You’ll get some people who’ll give you 
some flak and say “oh the creationists  
[72:49] don’t support those human 
footprint ideas anymore. “
[72:53] People like Hovind and Baugh took the wrong 
lesson from all this. Never compromise,  
[72:59] never apologize, never retract. Or 
else you’ll end up with warehouses  
[73:03] full of books you cannot in good 
conscience continue to sell.
[73:07] Carl Baugh flip flopped on 
accepting the secular evidence,  
[73:10] though ultimately rejected it, and he 
has continued to promote Man Tracks for  
[73:14] the past 40 years. Baugh was always on the 
fringes of these creationist organisations,  
[73:20] but this has made him radioactive even 
to his most extreme creationist peers.
[73:27] Dr Carl Baugh is a noted scientist 
and researcher. He joins Kenneth  
[73:31] Copeland for an extraordinary video tape 
teaching series: Evidences for Creation. 
[73:36] Creationism is a philosophy, 
but it’s also a product. While  
[73:40] sectarian infighting is older than the 
Young Earth even thinks it could be,  
[73:43] creationist infighting today is 
dominated by commercial interests.
[73:48] While Clifford Burdick spent his entire 
career tied up in young-earth creationism  
[73:52] simply for the love of the game, the modern 
creationist movement is dominated by books,  
[73:57] the lecture circuit, homeschooling resources, 
and attractions like Creation Museums.
[74:03] Answers in Genesis is a young-earth 
creationist organisation founded and  
[74:07] operated by Ken Ham. AiG is best known 
for its Creation Museum in Kentucky and  
[74:12] companion Ark Experience, the 
gold standard of their genre. 
[74:16] Creationist Museums were a response to 
creationism’s continued inability to  
[74:20] break into public schools. After decades of 
failure, these organisations decided that if  
[74:25] they can’t bring creationism to the children, the 
children should be brought to the creationism.
[74:31] This dovetails with homeschooling, the other major 
compromise that creationists had to settle for.  
[74:36] These museums may be one of the only excursions 
some home schooled fundamentalist kids ever see.
[74:43] Museums like Ken Hams’, and the ICR’s Discovery 
Center here in Dallas, are both the product of  
[74:49] decades of creationists mastering the art of 
proselytising with a secular appearance. Here,  
[74:55] they can control both sides of the message,  
[74:57] and use the language of museums to create 
propaganda with a relatively deft hand.
[75:03] The ICR Discovery Center is a slick operation, 
a large glass and stone building in Dallas that  
[75:09] plays the part of a museum well, even as 
the corner-cutting makes itself obvious.
[75:19] That’s, that’s just cardboard. 
It’s printed on cardboard.
[75:25] Oh my god.
[75:29] Oh wow.

The world’s tiniest 
stegosaurus. Tiny steggo!
[75:37] By contrast, Carl Baugh’s collection of 
random junk, including utterly unrelated  
[75:42] ephemera like a ten foot tall statue of 
former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry,  
[75:46] is so shameless and so sloppy that it 
offends people like Ken Ham on a deep level.
[75:52] Despite ostensibly being allies,  
[75:54] Ken Ham has been attacking Baugh’s claims 
and his credibility for over 20 years.
[76:00] While these groups are allies in a political 
sense, that spirit of cooperation is in tension:  
[76:06] they are courting the same increasingly insular 
audience, competing to sell them their books,  
[76:11] their lecture serieses, and tickets to their 
museums. But from the outside they appear  
[76:17] homogenous, so if Carl is an embarrassment 
who claims that velociraptors were designed  
[76:22] by god to cut grass in the garden of 
Eden then it makes everyone look bad.
[76:27] [CARL BAUGH] These are velociraptors. 
Models of velociraptors, and it’s that  
[76:32] claw that gives them the reputation of having 
sickles that would just cut your gut out.
[76:37] [JIM SCUDDER] Right, well that’s 
what we’ve seen in the movies. 
[76:40] [CARL BAUGH] Well yes, but in reality that’s 
not the case. In the fossil record we have  
[76:45] canes that grew, that today, like 
the Lycopsid clubmoss is 18 inches,  
[76:52] but in the fossil record 120 feet tall! 
To harvest those would require a sickle  
[76:59] built in. And if you didn’t harvest them, 
they’d take over the entire landscape. 
[77:05] [JIM SCUDDER] So there was a creature 
that God created that had that sickle  
[77:08] built in and that would also 
help keep the canes in check. 
[77:13] [CARL BAUGH] It’s the balance in nature.
[77:14] But at the core all of them are 
peddling variations of the same  
[77:18] bundle of misinformation, in a very literal sense.
[77:22] After publishing The Genesis Flood Henry 
Morris goes on to found the Institute for  
[77:26] Creation Research. Ken Ham, who was raised in 
the nascent creationist movement in Australia,  
[77:32] comes across a copy of the book while 
he’s in university in the 70s and it  
[77:36] fully radicalizes him. He moves to 
the US in 1987 to work for the ICR  
[77:42] before breaking away to form the organization 
that would become Answers in Genesis in 1993.
[77:48] And as we already discussed,  
[77:49] Genesis Flood is the book that convinced 
Baugh to move to Texas in the first place.
[77:54] So Ham and Morris warning people to stay away 
from Baugh’s fraudulent artefacts while sharing  
[78:00] his claim that Noah brought dinosaurs onto the 
ark is creating a difference without distinction.
[78:06] The thing Baugh understood before any 
of the rest of them is that if you deal  
[78:11] with scientists in good faith, you will be 
humiliated, you will have to make retractions,  
[78:16] you will lose. So just keep your 
head down and plow right on through.
[78:21] The Burdick track was cut in 
half by Loma Linda in the 70s,  
[78:25] a decade before Baugh bought it, and then 
somewhere along the way it was cut into  
[78:30] even more pieces for even more tests that even 
more confirmed it was even more just a carving.
[78:37] And it doesn’t matter. The thing has been a known 
carving since Burdick acquired it in the fifties,  
[78:43] and there it is, in Baugh’s museum, 
where it’s gonna sit forever.
[78:47] Baugh may be a pariah on the fringes 
of an already fringe belief, but he  
[78:51] cracked the meta in the eighties. People 
have been making fun of his unfinished  
[78:56] hyperbaric chamber being a year or two 
away from operations for as long as it  
[79:02] has existed.  He was posting through 
it before posting was even invented.
[79:07] Morris and Ham have way more in common 
with Baugh than they would like to admit.
[79:13] They conflict with him on a personal level, find 
his displays cheap and sensationalist because,  
[79:19] well, they are, but they have wholly 
adopted science as performance.
[79:25] While they do a better job with the cosplay, 
their “research institutes” are larger and  
[79:30] better equipped, and their websites do a 
lot of posturing about data and research,  
[79:35] they are ultimately playing Baugh’s game: Never 
compromise, never apologize, never retract.
[79:42] Part of that cosplay is, of course, 
the performance of being led by data,  
[79:47] but, maybe it goes without 
saying, that’s just not true.
[79:51] These organizations, performing as researchers 
and scientists, must walk a very silly wire.
[79:57] The 50th anniversary edition hasn’t been 
updated in over forty nine printings, but, like,  
[80:05] why would it be? It doesn’t matter. If you get 
a copy today the Gallup Slab material, the stuff  
[80:11] that cites Burdick citing Bird, stuff that’s been 
debunked for fifty years, sits entirely unchanged.
[80:17] The book doesn’t need revisions, it doesn’t 
need updates, it doesn’t need to change with  
[80:23] changing data. In fact to do so would be 
counter to the purpose of its existence.
[80:29] The fact that science is constantly shifting with 
new data, new findings, new insights, is the very  
[80:35] thing that the audience for The Genesis Flood 
sees as a weakness, sees as proof that science  
[80:41] is untrustworthy. So naturally a science 
textbook for anti-science must never change.
[80:59] And so we come back to Baugh, to his 
silly roadside attraction with its  
[81:04] silly pretend laboratory, and 
his pile of fake artefacts. 
[81:08] Mantracks may be fake artefacts, 
but they are still artefacts.
[81:12] They are not the imprint of human 
feet left in ancient lime mud,  
[81:16] but they are a human imprint. 
Sure, they’re a trivial curiosity,  
[81:21] a sideshow of crank science even amongst the 
crank science of Young Earth Creationism,  
[81:26] but within that they are this fascinating, 
weird, quirky anthropological artefact.
[81:33] I love mantracks, like, really, what an amazing 
hoax that has managed to just keep chugging for  
[81:41] so long, kept alive into the twenty first 
century almost entirely by one man. As a  
[81:47] connoisseur of fakes, frauds, and scams, 
I firmly believe that the Delk print and  
[81:52] Burdick Right belong in a museum, but displayed 
for what they are, not what they claim to be. 
[81:59] When I visited Baugh’s shack I was 
giddy to finally see them in person  
[82:03] with my own eyes. What amazing relics of 
the absolute hot mess we call humanity.
[82:10] The fact that there are so many of 
them has a perverse beauty to it.
[82:15] They are silly, wholly unpersuasive to 
anyone who isn’t thirsty to be persuaded,  
[82:21] but there are people thirsty to be persuaded,  
[82:24] and so cropped up the niche trade of 
producing fake fossils to sell to Carl Baugh
[82:34] Ultimately the mantracks are little more than a 
footnote in the history of Glen Rose, an oddity  
[82:39] from almost a century ago that has persisted, 
drawing in all manner of odd characters over the  
[82:44] years, but Glen Rose isn’t the mantracks capital 
of Texas: it’s the dinosaur capital of Texas.
[83:03] The town has embraced this identity, 
dinosaurs are everywhere in Glen Rose  
[83:08] because dinosaurs, the footprints they left, 
are literally the bedrock the town sits on.
[83:15] In 1968, the Texas Parks and Wildlife 
Department acquired 347 acres of land  
[83:20] surrounding the Paluxy River 
to convert into a state park.
[83:23] The park’s signature attractions are 
these massive fibre-glass sculptures,  
[83:26] named Rex and Bronto. These were among a 
number of life-sized sculptures commissioned  
[83:30] by Sinclair Oil as part of their Dinoland 
exhibit at the 1964 New York World Fair.
[83:36] Sinclair Oil was the key financier to 
the American Museum of Natural History,  
[83:40] and they partially financed Bird’s sauropod 
excavation in 1940. Sinclair would end up  
[83:45] donating these sculptures to the State 
Park in time for its grand opening.
[83:49] The Dinosaur Valley State Park opened to 
the public in October of 1970. Roland Bird  
[83:54] was present at the opening, returning to the old 
stomping ground for the first time in 30 years.
[83:59] The state park has been credited to Bird, 
it’s been credited to the politicians who  
[84:03] signed it into legal existence, and those 
are fair achievements, it is their legacy. 
[84:09] But it’s also the legacy of Glen Rose itself, and 
its cast of misfits and weirdos. James and Cecil  
[84:15] Ryals chiseling footprints out of the bedrock with 
an old car axle, Charlie Moss and Ernest Adams  
[84:20] “discovering” Texanus Gargantus on the riverbed, 
and George Adams, the mailman, sitting under a  
[84:26] tree, carving a footprint into a slab that would 
wind its way to a trading post in New Mexico.