---
title: 'Mantracks: a True Story of Fake Fossils'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=2UDXdqqJQPE'
video_id: '2UDXdqqJQPE'
date: 2026-07-10
---

# Mantracks: a True Story of Fake Fossils

> Source: [Mantracks: a True Story of Fake Fossils](https://youtube.com/watch?v=2UDXdqqJQPE)

## Summary

This video explores the true story of the 'mantracks' of Glen Rose, Texas, where carved human-like footprints in limestone were presented as evidence of humans coexisting with dinosaurs. It traces the history from Roland Bird's 1938 discovery of fake footprints to the creationist movement's adoption of these carvings as proof of a young Earth, and the subsequent debunking by scientists.

### Key Points

- **Roland Bird's Discovery** [0:00] — In 1938, Roland Bird, a paleontologist, saw carved human footprints at a trading post in Gallup, New Mexico, which led him to Glen Rose, Texas, where he discovered genuine dinosaur footprints.
- **Genuine Dinosaur Prints** [4:57] — Bird found pristine dinosaur footprints in Glen Rose, which were clearly genuine and well-preserved, unlike the crude human carvings.
- **The 'Man Tracks'** [8:58] — Local James Ryals showed Bird 'man tracks'—elongated, vague footprints that were later identified as sauropod tracks, not human.
- **Sauropod Discovery** [12:05] — Bird discovered a three-foot-long sauropod footprint, the best ever documented, leading to a major excavation in 1941.
- **Origin of the Carvings** [15:25] — George Adams, a local mailman, carved fake footprints during the Great Depression to sell to tourists, including 'giant man tracks' that later fueled creationist claims.
- **Creationist Adoption** [22:06] — Creationists like Clifford Burdick used the carved footprints as evidence for flood geology and human-dinosaur coexistence, misrepresenting Bird's findings.
- **The Genesis Flood** [31:53] — The 1961 book 'The Genesis Flood' by Whitcomb and Morris popularized young-earth creationism, citing the Paluxy tracks as evidence.
- **Stanley Taylor's Film** [40:41] — In 1968, filmmaker Stanley Taylor made 'Footprints in Stone', a documentary claiming human and dinosaur tracks together, which became a creationist staple.
- **Glen Kuban's Debunking** [48:29] — Biologist Glen Kuban investigated the tracks in the 1980s and conclusively proved they were dinosaur tracks or carvings, leading to retractions by some creationists.
- **Carl Baugh's Museum** [49:45] — Carl Baugh opened the Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, displaying fake artifacts like the 'London Hammer' and 'Delk Print' to promote young-earth creationism.
- **Retraction and Legacy** [70:39] — By 1985, creationists John Morris and Paul Taylor retracted their claims, but Carl Baugh continued promoting the mantracks, which remain a curiosity.

### Conclusion

The mantracks of Glen Rose are a fascinating case study of how fake fossils can be used to support pseudoscientific claims, but they also highlight the importance of scientific investigation and the eventual correction of misinformation.

## Transcript

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

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

Wait,  
what does Burdick sound like?

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

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

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

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

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