Creationists in Texas claim to have found a stone with footprints of a human and a dinosaur.
No, I’m not kidding.
Hoax “dinosaur and human footprints” claimed to be found in the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas.
Could you make this stuff up? Well, yeah, I guess some people think you could. Somebody did make this stuff up.
According to a report in the too-gullible Mineral Wells Index, long-time hoaxster and faux doctorate Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidence Museum announced the rock was found just outside Dinosaur Valley State Park. The area has been the site of more than one creationist hoax since 1960, and was an area rife with hoax dinosaur prints dating back to the 1930s. (See these notes on the warning signs of science hoaxes and history hoaxes.)
The estimated 140-pound stone was recovered in July 2000 from the bank of a creek that feeds the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, located about 53 miles south of Fort Worth. The find was made just outside Dinosaur Valley State Park, a popular destination for tourists known for its well-preserved dinosaur tracks and other fossils.
The limestone contains two distinct prints – one of a human footprint and one belonging to a dinosaur. The significance of the cement-hard fossil is that it shows the dinosaur print partially over and intersecting the human print.
In other words, the stone’s impressions indicate that the human stepped first, the dinosaur second. If proven genuine, the artifact would provide evidence that man and dinosaur roamed the Earth at the same time, according to those associated with the find and with its safekeeping. It could potentially toss out the window many commonly held scientific theories on evolution and the history of the world.
Except, as you can see, Dear Reader and Viewer, it’s a hoax. No dinosaur has a footprint exactly resembling the print of Fred Flintstone’s pet Dino, as the rock shows; nor do human footprints left in mud look like the print shown.
Dear God, save us from such tom-foolery, please.
To the newspaper’s credit, they consulted with an expert who knows better. The expert gave a conservative, scientific answer, however, when the rock deserved a chorus of derisive hoots:
However, Dr. Phillip Murry, a vertebrate paleontology instructor in the Geoscience department of Tarleton State University at Stephenville, Texas, stated in his response to an interview request: “There has never been a proven association of dinosaur (prints) with human footprints.”
The longtime amateur archeologist who found the fossil thinks that statement is now proven untrue.
“It is unbelievable, that’s what it is,” Alvis Delk, 72, said of what could be not only the find of a lifetime, but of mankind.
Delk is a current Stephenville and former Mineral Wells resident (1950-69) who said he found the rock eight years ago while on a hunt with a friend, James Bishop, also of Stephenville, and friend and current fiancee Elizabeth Harris.
Yes, it’s unbelievable.
For comparison, real hominid footprints look much different — the print below was left in a thin-layer of volcanic ash about 4 million years ago, 61 million years after dinosaurs went extinct, according to timelines corroborated by geologists, paleontologists, astronomers, nuclear physicists and biologists:
Print of a hominid, found at Laetoli, Tanzania, Africa; image from Stanford University. Photo: J. Reader/SPL
With luck, serious scientists will get a chance to analyze the prints soon, and note that they are hoaxes. If history is any guide, however, Baugh and his comrades will keep the rock from scientific analysis, claiming that scientists refuse to analyze it.
The rock is approximately 30 inches by 24 inches. The human footprint, with a deep big toe impression, measures 11 inches in length. Baugh said the theropod track was made by an Acrocanthosaurus. Baugh said this particular track was likely made by a juvenile Acrocanthosaurus, one he said was probably about 20 feet long, stood about 8 feet tall and walked stooped over, weighing a few tons.
Its tracks common in the Glen Rose area, the Acrocanthosaurus is a dinosaur that many experts believe existed primarily in North America during the mid-Cretaceous Period, approximately 125 million to 100 million years ago.
Baugh said Delk’s discovery casts doubts on that theory. Baugh said he believes both sets of prints were made “within minutes, or no more than hours of each other” about 4,500 years ago, around the time of Noah’s Flood. He said the clay-like material that the human and dinosaur stepped in soon hardened, becoming thick, dense limestone common in North Texas.
He said the human print matches seven others found in the same area, stating the museum has performed excavations since 1982 in the area Baugh has dubbed the “Alvis Delk Cretaceous Footprint” discovery.
This “find” comes as the State Board of Education begins rewriting science standards for Texas schools. The chairman of the SBOE is a committed creationist who publicly says he hopes to get creationism into the standards and textbooks in Texas, miseducating Texas students that creationism has a scientific basis.
Delk’s own daughter, Kristi Delk, is a geology major at Tarleton State University in Stephenville and holds different beliefs from her dad about the creation of Earth and the origins of man.
She said she wants to see data from more tests before jumping to any conclusions.
“I haven’t come to terms with it,” she said. “I am skeptical, actually.”
Listen to your daughter, Mr. Delk.
In a story Texas educators hope to keep completely unrelated to the foot prints hoax, Mineral Wells area schools showed gains in academic achievement on the Texas state test program.
Additional resources:
- Glen Kuban’s description of earlier “man track” hoaxes around the Paluxy River in the area of Glen Rose, Texas, near Dinosaur Valley State Park
- Overview of dinosaur tracking, again by Glen Kuban (pay attention to Kuban; he’s good)
- Dinosaur Valley State Park website. Dinosaur Valley is not the “best” park in Texas’s outstanding system of more than 100 outstanding parks, but it’s a jewel. It operates on a shoestring, but it operates with some of the most dedicated government employees anywhere, in one of the most dedicated government agencies anywhere. You should go see the park. Camp there. Spend a lot of time in the river and elsewhere looking at tracks. Talk to the rangers. This is the real stuff, folks, in the wild. You can touch prehistory. God left it there for you, and to irritate creationists to the brink of screaming insanity. Go see it.
- Texas Citizens for Science
- Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas – note the hoax footprints are already shown in the masthead of this site
- Baugh’s “scientific publication” of the description of the prints
- For comparison, Leakey’s and Hay’s 1979 paper in Nature on the Laetoli footprints; “When a volcanic eruption sent a rain of ash over what is now Tanzania, an adult and child, probably both Australopithecus afarensis, set out to watch the show — leaving, as a poignant souvenir, perfect and very modern-looking footprints, preserved in the ashfall.”
________________________
Gary Hurd at Stones and Bones, who Is a bit of an expert in this stuff, calls “fake.“
Here is how to fake a patina that will look like this fake fossil: Brush the surface with vinegar, and then sprinkle with baking powder followed by baking soda, and let dry. Repeat until you are happy with the results. This is not the only way, or even the best way. But it is simple, and will fool the average fool. Especially easy if they want to be fooled.
So, having spent a little bit more time on the photo of this fake, I feel that I understand a bit more about how it was produced. A legitimate dinosaur track was found and removed. Incompetent, unprofessional “Cleaning” damaged it. An parital overprint, or simple erosion depression was “improved” by adding “toes.” The faked surfaces were smothed over with a simple kitchen concoction to make a “patina.” Artifact fabricators next bury the fake for a year or two, or they smear it with fertilizer and leave it exposed. This helps weather the object and obscure tool marks.
- Panda’s Thumb is on the case, too. Thank heaven.
- Locals are skeptical: Somervelle Salon.
- Even Little Green Footballs won’t fall for it: The Alvis Delk Cretaceous Fakeprint. (But see earlier)
- As usual, we discover Pharyngula beat us to it, debunked it earlier.
Did you find this post useful, or entertaining? Vote to share it with others — click the “Digg” button above; list it on Reddit or other services, if you have memberships there. Link to this post from your own blog. Help spread the word this hoax is coming.
Help stamp out hoaxes; run with the word:
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
[…] Hoaxsters ready to teach creationism to Texas kids” Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub blog here. Godfrey L 1985. “Footnotes of an Anatomist,” Creation/Evolution, Issue 15, Volume 5, […]
LikeLike
[…] “I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”" […]
LikeLike
[…] ini hanyalah hoax sebagaimana dibahas di Fred Flintstone waded here: Hoaxsters ready to teach creationism to Texas kids. Selain itu, bentuk fosil kaki itu sangat jauh berbeda dengan fosil telapak kaki humanoid yang […]
LikeLike
[…] ini hanyalah hoax sebagaimana dibahas di Fred Flintstone waded here: Hoaxsters ready to teach creationism to Texas kids. Selain itu, bentuk fosil kaki itu sangat jauh berbeda dengan fosil telapak kaki humanoid yang […]
LikeLike
[…] Fred Flintstone waded here: Hoaxsters ready to teach creationism to Texas kids […]
LikeLike
Chief, and I use that term with sarcasm held back, kindly quit pretending that religious belief and scientific theory are either the same thing or interchangable terms
LikeLike
If you don’t speak English, use the Google Translate tool. It works well.
LikeLike
Очень интересно,только английским не владею.
LikeLike
There is no reason to suppose ancient Human habitation of America and sufficient to propose that all habitation of America derives from the three parental Human families: Negroe, Caucasian and Mongolian. This places Indians at the peak of Human evolution, entitled to due and appropriate respect as owners and governors of the Planet. The biblical model of the 3 wise men, and of the holy trinity, conform to this Tribe of Christs who are heirs of the lands, entitled to harvest the taxes and other proceeds of the occupation of the land by lesser entitled individuals.
This is just.
LikeLike
[…] Dinosaur and human tracks together! Get yours from eBay! Remember the latest Paluxy River hoax set of a dinosaur print and human print in the same stone? (See “Fred Flintstone waded here.”) […]
LikeLike
Dear Christian friends:
the degree of anxiety conveyed by the schism over Creation and Evolution reveals the flaw in your entire society.
Life is a natural process the civilizing of which must also follow as natural a course as possible by keeping close to indigenous understandings of life and indulging in hygiene. There is no instinct to disagree. That reaction to fear runs contrary to social and economic ecology but persists in this debate. I propose a remedy:
Before determining cause and effect, accept the most obvious explanation of our presence in this moment, in terms of the most idealized of pasts, and of the most perfected of futures. I suggest by way of the theory I refer to below, that the languages of Religion and of Numbers, to speak of the Father of Science, have identical origins derived from studying the form and process of the Solar System, and I stand for proof that the modern collective Mind is the one present at Creation and will always be present, “though Heaven and Earth melt away.”
If I can divert your discussion a bit further, I offer our Potlatch belief system in exchange for your University, because we base all education on the Story of the individual within the greater Tribe, and then other facts and professions are considered in that context. We value things higher than the monetary systems can by extending the effect of these properties beyond Life, to the realm of Heaven and of what Heaven intends; this opens us to Jesus completely and convinces us to continue our story in terms of His. That has always been the glue holding America together.
Numbers prove both Creation and Evolution, without providing anyone a clearer view of God than any other.
Until better information on the latter point is canvassed, we ourselves appear weighted with burdens and blessed with a glory, but nowhere authorized to disagree among ourselves over Jesus Christ.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/5/31/736997/-Dear-John-Letter-to-Eddie-and-the-Premier
http://jesusjamey.dailykos.com/
LikeLike
[…] […]
LikeLike
[…] […]
LikeLike
Lower, first off evolution doesn’t attempt to explain how life started. Evolution explains what happened after life started.
Second, despite your illusion to the contrary, the theory of abiogenesis hasn’t been proven false.
Now notice I said the theory of abiogenesis…not the theory of evolution.
Lastly, if you want to claim that God created all life on this planet and pretend that it’s something other then just religious faith…you’re going to have to scientifically prove God. Have fun with that.
LikeLike
[…] […]
LikeLike
Lowerleavell, you’re welcome regarding the posts exposing Baugh as a charlatan.
Ed, I think the vacant home was in Irving, Texas, USA, next to a church, if it is the one in this link: http://paleo.cc/paluxy/degrees.htm. The original article included a photo of it when it was printed in NCSE Reports. There may have been one in Arlington, too. The one in Burleson, Texas, that I mentioned was a big church called Burleson Baptist Temple at the time, although it is called The Church At Burleson now. It’s hard to keep track of all of Baugh’s bogus Alma Maters.
LikeLike
Ok, I have a few minutes (finally) to write a post:
You said, “No geologist has any difficulty explaining how a forest get’s fossilized, and creationist claims about them are so far departed from reality that most geologists can’t tell what they’re talking about.”
I am not too familiar with this discussion, but if I’m not mistaken, this is related to Mt. St. Helens as well. After the eruption, Spirit Lake was laden with tons of timber that was blown over by the eruption. After some time, they began to get waterlogged and sink, (some even with roots), vertically…exactly as we see in Yellowstone. If I’m not mistaken, it demonstrated that a disaster could produce petrified forests.
You said, “A few people who haven’t thought about it might think there’s an argument in thermodynamics, but Joe, anyone who understands that life itself “violates” the second law of thermodynamics understands the claim is a complete hoax. Creationists still sputter about it to people who don’t understand that we burn calories to live.”
I’m not sure I follow Ed, because even things alive are subject to decay and death. However, what you just said about burning calories to follows the line of entropy in that all usable energy is being used up. But on the flip side, wouldn’t your argument go to demonstrate that life itself is a “miracle” because it cannot occur naturally because of thermodynamics? If life is contrary to the law, then it couldn’t have come into existence naturally, right?
You said, “When the facts show a scientist to be in error, the scientist admits error and issues a correction. When the facts show a creationist to be in error, the creationist yells louder and does his best to get to the mail box to send more copies of the error out, as fact, before the truth can be known.”
So, does this apply to the theory that life arose spontaneously and naturally? I’m waiting for a retraction by mainstream science that demonstrates that this is simply not scientifically possible. Instead of admitting their error, evolutionary scientists are putting all their eggs into the basket of proving it to be true, though all known science indicates it to be virtually impossible.
You stated that the only hoax you can think of as an actual hoax is Piltdown Man. You do realize it took 40 years to “expose” Piltdown Man right?
What about Haeckel? Manufacturing data and fudging scales and drawings doesn’t qualify as a fraud?
AIG reports that some texts are still saying that the “Miller/Urey” experiment of 1953 supposedly produced the building blocks of life in a test tube, though this is completely false because they used a hydrogen-rich atmosphere.
What about archaeoraptor?
I’ll grant you that there are many creationists who are slow. However, I appreciate that AIG was quick to separate from Baugh in this matter (not that AIG is perfect). You’re making this claim as indicative of practically all creationists, but that is simply not true. After looking at what you guys are saying about Baugh (never heard of him before this discussion), I have no problem in agreeing that what he has put out there is a hoax. You’re not going to find creationists rallying behind a liar, ok? If we are rallying around Baugh, please demonstrate that by showing either AIG or ICR or even the Discovery Institute, which claims Baugh’s find, is legit. Either side of this discussion, I’m sure you will find fringe voices.
You said, “It does nothing of the kind. The sediments from Mt. St. Helens show a quick deposit of mud from a volcanic event, and nothing more. It doesn’t even show erosion. It shows deposits. The erosion hadn’t even begun when creationists started claiming it shows Grand Canyon-like stuff. There is nothing any geologist has ever found in those deposits that anyone has ever written up as evidence of any sort of proof, or any kind of support, for a quick creation of the Grand Canyon. That is pure hoax.”
I’m a little bit confused. How does a small 140 ft. deep canyon demonstrate deposits? It was the erosion of the deposits that caused the canyon, wasn’t it? From what I understand, the only claim by creationists is that Mt. St. Helens demonstrated that carving out of a canyon need not take millions of years, but could happen in days, months, or even a few years by mudflow, as the result of a catastrophe. That’s what happened at Mt. St. Helens. I don’t see any hoax going on there.
You said, “No, the volcanic eruption is no hoax. The claims that it demonstrates quick creation, instead of a disaster, are hoaxes.”
No, it is the creationists who are saying that it is the result of a disaster. If no one had witnessed the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine evolutionistic scientists evaluating the canyon and saying that it took the Tuttle River millions of years to form the canyon. But it didn’t happen that way at all! The same goes with the Grand Canyon (as we’ve talked about in length). You want to talk hoaxes? How long did evolutionists say that the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon? Forming the Grand Canyon needn’t have taken millions of years. It could have happened as a result of a major catastrophe…like…a flood (not to say that the Grand Canyon is the result of a volcano, but that erosion of the Canyon could have happened rapidly).
You said, “I’m particularly perturbed about some dating of rocks creationists have done at the site. As you know, in a volcanic eruption, magma can pick up older rocks. These older rocks are clearly distinguishable in a magma conglomeration.
Creationists have ground up old rocks and magma and sent the stuff to labs for dating. This is hoax from the start. That’s not the way to get a pure sample, and it would be done that way ONLY if one wished to get a wrong answer.”
I know nothing of this, so I cannot comment. It sounds like they were attempting to demonstrate that even in a newly formed canyon you can get old dating rocks – I’m not sure, so I can’t say.
Ediacaran;
Thanks for your post. It really does demonstrate that Baugh is bogus.
LikeLike
lowerleavell, I think you must have missed the jury’s verdict, if you think it is still out regarding Baugh. Many of his fellow creationists even recognize that he is a charlatan.
For example, see http://paleo.cc/paluxy/whatbau.htm.
You can read more details about Baugh’s bogus degrees and “universities” here:
http://paleo.cc/paluxy/degrees.htm
If you visit the following page from Baugh’s website, you’ll see a photo of one of his “universities” that is actually a photo of The Church at Burleson (TCAB), in Burleson, Texas, with the church sign cropped from the right side of the photo: http://www.creationism.org/cem/disv1fr.htm
I could only find a small thumbnail photo of TCAB’s church sign online at the moment, in case you wanted to see what you’re missing in Baugh’s photo (although it was taken from a different angle): http://bmaaharvesthouse.org/sitebuilder/images/TCAB_Pics_001-79×120.jpg
LikeLike
Joe said:
I’ve only listed those incidents where people who knew better promoted a story contrary to the facts. Lady Hope wasn’t at Darwin’s bedside, and she knew it. No geologist has any difficulty explaining how a forest get’s fossilized, and creationist claims about them are so far departed from reality that most geologists can’t tell what they’re talking about. A few people who haven’t thought about it might think there’s an argument in thermodynamics, but Joe, anyone who understands that life itself “violates” the second law of thermodynamics understands the claim is a complete hoax. Creationists still sputter about it to people who don’t understand that we burn calories to live.
Each of the cases I cited is a claim made with intent to hoax. Contrast that to the cases you cite, where scientists say “what is this?” or “I think this might be . . .” (though it later turns out it isn’t).
The only thing that comes close to an intentional hoax is the Piltdown Man episode, and I think a fair reading demonstrates that it was a practical joke that went horribly awry (an elephant bone carved into a cricket bat? Only an Englishman might understand that joke — but these were all Englishmen, except de Chardin, who was in on the joke).
When the facts show a scientist to be in error, the scientist admits error and issues a correction. When the facts show a creationist to be in error, the creationist yells louder and does his best to get to the mail box to send more copies of the error out, as fact, before the truth can be known.
That’s a significant difference in behavior, and ethics.
Only “yet to be determined” in fantasy land. There are no two-ton men with size 11 feet who leave perfect footprints showing articulated toes in the print. There is no evidence of humans or near-humans older than 7 million years, let alone 65 million years or more. Never have been, never will be.
It does nothing of the kind. The sediments from Mt. St. Helens show a quick deposit of mud from a volcanic event, and nothing more. It doesn’t even show erosion. It shows deposits. The erosion hadn’t even begun when creationists started claiming it shows Grand Canyon-like stuff. There is nothing any geologist has ever found in those deposits that anyone has ever written up as evidence of any sort of proof, or any kind of support, for a quick creation of the Grand Canyon. That is pure hoax.
<Millions of years need not be necessary to dramatically change the landscape. If you haven’t been to Mt. St. Helens, I recommend that you do. It’s incredible! Mt. St. Helens is no hoax.
No, the volcanic eruption is no hoax. The claims that it demonstrates quick creation, instead of a disaster, are hoaxes.
I’m particularly perturbed about some dating of rocks creationists have done at the site. As you know, in a volcanic eruption, magma can pick up older rocks. These older rocks are clearly distinguishable in a magma conglomeration.
Creationists have ground up old rocks and magma and sent the stuff to labs for dating. This is hoax from the start. That’s not the way to get a pure sample, and it would be done that way ONLY if one wished to get a wrong answer.
What is it about the truth that scares creationists?
LikeLike
Tim White, a distinguished paleontologist, noted that a bone that some had wondered might be hominid was, instead cetacean. How, exactly, is that a hoax? Once again, you seem to think that asking “what is this?” makes science something less than a quest to find out what things are. I’m missing the point. What I see instead is a rather mean-spirited attempt to denigrate science and scientists. White joked about “Flipperpithecus,” I gather from a couple of scanty reports. That doesn’t make it a joke, either.
I would note that, once again, creationism sheds no light on any part of the matter. The bone was found by a paleontologist in the field, and identified not hominid by another paleontologist who specializes in hominids. Digging and identifying seems always to be done by scientists, never by creationists. Why is that?
And then, when the bone IS identified as a transitional whale fossil, creationists claim, falsely so far as I can see, that it was a hoax of some sort.
What’s up with that?
LikeLike
1. Baugh has claimed for years to have a doctorate, though the Australian univesrity which granted the degree was reputedly housed in a vacant home in
ArlingtonBurleson [see post from Ediacaran, below, for longer, more accurate account], Texas. How much more do you need to know about the man to determine whether he’s a professional hoaxer? His name is attached to almost every creationist hoax of the last 30 years. Is there one credible contribution he has ever made to science? Religion?2. “Nebraska Man” took about 14 months from discovery to indentification, as I recall. There never was a claim that it was hominid, but a question about whether it might be. To keep trying to paint this as a hoax is dishonest, I think. Science works best when serious questions are posed publicly. To suggest that this was anything other than a curious mystery is unfair, inaccurate, and uncharitable.
3. I don’t think Ota Benga was presented as a “missing link” by any scientist. That wasn’t a scientific idea at the time of the St. Louis World’s Fair. Remember, Neanderthal Man had been discovered in 1856. “Missing link” is a strained attempt to suggest we know less than we do, a point made plain when, with every discovery of new fossils showing transitions, creationsits claim there are two more missing links. Again, we have a situation that is not what the creationists keep trying to paint it.
More later
LikeLike
Regarding the “dino/man” footprints in question here, I for one hope that they do give the footprints to “experts” for testing. I went on to Baugh’s website and he is adamant that these are authentic. So, if they are fake, Baugh is either grossly mistaken, or a good liar. I don’t know anything about him personally to back up his character or not, but even though I’m very doubtful, the jury hasn’t yet come back in with a verdict.
You said, “Nebraska Man was no hoax.”
It may be that it was not an intentional hoax on the part of evolutionists, but it was five years before Science would publish a retraction. Of all the “hoaxes”, I’ll agree that Nebraska man was probably one of the smallest.
“Benga’s care was taken over by a group of Christian missionaries anxious to make sure he didn’t look African and thereby, they feared, lend credence to evolution theory.”
I’m sure that you are reading into the missionaries intentions. Who knows what they were? It may be that they felt sorry for the poor guy and hoped to “Christianize” him by force (which is always wrong). Who knows their hearts?
The hoax that I believe was committed with Benga is that a homo-sapien was presented to the public as “missing link” type creature, which is horrific to do to someone. I’m glad that he was able to roam the zoo freely – at least they gave him some dignity above a chimp, though not much. He was a man, and should have been treated as one. You’re right; it is a sad, sad story. Stories like this lend itself to seeing evolution as fostering racism in those who have black skin or may be pigmies, which is abominable.
You said, “I don’t know anything about a dolphin’s rib hoax.”
“Flipperpithecus” was the name given to the 1983 hoax of a dolphin bone that was thought to be a hominid fossil. It was said tongue in cheek at that time that archaeologists want to find hominid fossils so bad that everything is a hominid fossil!
You said, “These few incidents, most of which can be called hoaxes only by mislabeling, do not approach the sheer number of hoaxes creationists have pulled — the Lady Hope Hoax, the boot in the coal hoax, the several different “man-tracks” hoaxes out of the Paluxy River (of which category this is just the latest), the polystrate fossil trees hoax, the polystrate whale fossil hoax, the thermodynamics hoax, the Darwin-to-Hitler hoax, the Darwin-to-Stalin hoax, the Darwin as racist hoax, the Darwin as hunter of Tasmanians hoax, the Darwin as collector of corpses hoax, the “no fossils” hoaxes, the dozens of quote-mine hoaxes (Gould, Eldredge, Darwin, various Huxleys, Asa Gray, Watson and Crick, and many others), the Mt.-St.-Helens-eruption-shows-Noah’s-flood-to-be-accurate hoax, the polonium haloes hoaxes, the Lucy’s knee hoax, and more I haven’t remembered.”
Ed, you simply want to put anything that Creationists purport as a hoax. You think that Creationism in general is a hoax, so of course everything is a hoax. You’re not being objective here by any standard, Ed. I mean, this case of the footprints may very well be a hoax (even if dinos and humans lived at the same time, it would be one incredible find!), but that is yet to be determined. In your list of creationist’s hoaxes, many of these things that you purport to be hoaxes are in fact true – for example, Mt. St. Helens does demonstrate how the Grand Canyon could have eroded rapidly as the result of a catastrophe. Millions of years need not be necessary to dramatically change the landscape. If you haven’t been to Mt. St. Helens, I recommend that you do. It’s incredible! Mt. St. Helens is no hoax.
You said, “What I’ve done with this post is expose a hoax. There’s no defense for it, period. I’m defending no hoax I know of. But if you wish to suggest scientists are either as lazy, brazen, or dishonest as creationists, you’re not paying close attention. Considering how many more scientists than creationists there are in the fields, creationist hoaxes occur at a per capita rate about 10,000 times as often as science
hoaxes.”
I am glad that you defend no evolutionist hoax. That’s a step in the right direction. What is happening here though is that you are changing the definition of hoax for evolutionists so that many of their “hoaxes” are nothing of the kind, but rather, “incidents” of “mislabeling.” Accompany that with the belief that pretty much everything that creationism has ever put out there as being a hoax and definitely, the percentage is way up there for creationists. Again, if this is a hoax (which is yet to be determined by a scientific expert) then it should be exposed as such. My only point in getting involved in this whole thread was to demonstrate that you slander creationists but throw your own objective credibility out the window at the same time by making statements like this:
You said, “If there is any excuse for this crudely carved, inaccurate print hoax, you’ve not found it yet. Mr. Delk should know better, but he’s a rank amateur, and may be swayed from the truth by blinding faith. Carl Baugh is a crook, I think, and if Greg Abbott were alive today, he’d be in a peck o’ trouble with the Texas attorney general’s office.”
You’ve got them tarred and feathered without a trial. They very well may be found guilty, and I’m not defending them, but the issue I have taken on this thread is that you prop this up as being characteristic of all Creationism. My point is that you can, and many Creationists do, use the hoaxes of Evolutionists to demonstrate that anyone can falsify evidence to try and prove a point. For my part, I take extreme issue to both sides when they do that because it takes credibility, objectivity, and a real discussion of ideas off the table. If this thing is a fake (and I wouldn’t doubt it is), I’m just as upset, if not more, than you Ed.
On the flipside, I for one am much more comfortable defending evidence than defending those who are presenting evidence. All people are fallible, sinful, and make mistakes. This whole discussion proves it on both sides. To say one is more so than the other is like saying that a 1,000 foot fall is better than a 10,000 foot fall. Both kill you.
LikeLike
Didn’t forget them at all.
Nebraska Man was no hoax. A farmer in Nebraska found some fossil teeth, took them to his dentist who said they looked like human teeth. (The farmer was Christian, by the way; dentist, too, so far as I’ve been able to smoke out.) They sent the teeth to the American Museum of Natural History, which published drawings of them with the question, “are these hominid teeth?” Within three months a couple of American fossil experts answered that they were teeth of an ancient, extinct pig.
Porcine teeth look a lot like hominid teeth. Professional paleontologists can tell them apart, but often other experts, including human dentists, cannot.
There was never any science publication that made any claim beyond the facts: Teeth, once unidentified, finally identified as pig teeth. No hoax — except, of course, for the creationist hoax that there was a hoax. Is that what you’re claiming?
Ota Benga has a sad story. Brought to America — in slavery, really — to demonstrate diversity of humans at the St. Louis World’s Fair, after the fair he was moved to New York, where he was invited to live at the Bronx Zoo. The zookeepers invited him to hang around the monkey house, which was unfortunate at best, and downright racist at worst. To their credit, some African-American preachers complained — and he was allowed to roam the zoo grounds more freely. It was thought that his tribe had been wiped out or was otherwise unfindable, so he could not return to Congo.
Benga’s care was taken over by a group of Christian missionaries anxious to make sure he didn’t look African and thereby, they feared, lend credence to evolution theory. So his teeth were capped (they had been filed to a point previously), he was decked out in a suit, and moved to Lynchburg, Va., to attend seminary. That made him crazy, but his new guardians refused to allow him to go back to Africa. He ran away from the seminary and took a job in a tobacco factory. When his guardians refused for some years to allow him to return to Africa, he committed suicide.
I’m not sure what sort of hoax you think might have been committed in this tragic story, but I’m unaware of any.
I don’t know anything about a dolphin’s rib hoax.
Haeckel’s embryoes would still be in the books had biologists not corrected them. Do not make the mistake that creationist hoaxers generally make, however, and claim that there was nothing in Haeckel’s work to support evolution. In Texas, we replaced Haeckel’s drawings with actual photographs that demonstrate the similarities exhibited by embryoes in development. While it is inaccurate to say that embryoes recapitulate stages of evolution in development, it is quite accurate to note that embryoes of rather diverse species do go through the same stages.
You’ve mentioned only one incident that involves human fossils. You’ve mentioned nothing that wasn’t corrected by scientists, and nothing that once corrected, supports creationism.
Archaeoraptor is unfortunate, but has nothing to do with human fossils, and may not have been a hoax to begin with (a Chinese farmer had glued together two rocks he thought should have been together, creating a bit of a hybrid feathered dinosaur that looked like a newly identified one — but x-ray analysis showed the problem before a description was published). Archaeoraptor has led to a new line of creationist hoaxes claiming that all feathered dinosaurs are fakes (there are hundreds, and they are not fakes), or that all Chinese fossils are fakes. A scientist’s error is all but guaranteed to lead to at least three new creationist hoaxes. Science hoaxes are rare; creationist hoaxes keep creationism alive. That’s a distinction I think we should recognize.
These few incidents, most of which can be called hoaxes only by mislabeling, do not approach the sheer number of hoaxes creationists have pulled — the Lady Hope Hoax, the boot in the coal hoax, the several different “man-tracks” hoaxes out of the Paluxy River (of which category this is just the latest), the polystrate fossil trees hoax, the polystrate whale fossil hoax, the thermodynamics hoax, the Darwin-to-Hitler hoax, the Darwin-to-Stalin hoax, the Darwin as racist hoax, the Darwin as hunter of Tasmanians hoax, the Darwin as collector of corpses hoax, the “no fossils” hoaxes, the dozens of quote-mine hoaxes (Gould, Eldredge, Darwin, various Huxleys, Asa Gray, Watson and Crick, and many others), the Mt.-St.-Helens-eruption-shows-Noah’s-flood-to-be-accurate hoax, the polonium haloes hoaxes, the Lucy’s knee hoax, and more I haven’t remembered.
Need we mention the hoaxes creationists have tried in federal court, in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania? Does brazenness increase the hoax quotient at all?
What I’ve done with this post is expose a hoax. There’s no defense for it, period. I’m defending no hoax I know of. But if you wish to suggest scientists are either as lazy, brazen, or dishonest as creationists, you’re not paying close attention. Considering how many more scientists than creationists there are in the fields, creationist hoaxes occur at a per capita rate about 10,000 times as often as science hoaxes.
If there is any excuse for this crudely carved, inaccurate print hoax, you’ve not found it yet. Mr. Delk should know better, but he’s a rank amateur, and may be swayed from the truth by blinding faith. Carl Baugh is a crook, I think, and if Greg Abbott were alive today, he’d be in a peck o’ trouble with the Texas attorney general’s office.
LikeLike
You also forgot Nebraska man, Ota Benga (who was a man who was put in a zoo in the 20th century as the closest thing to the missing link!), passing a dolphin’s rib off as a missing link, Haeckel’s embryos (though not hominid fossils, but just a plain hoax). Haeckel was a great example of evolutionists being slow to “let go of the old ones.” We can also move to other areas, like Archaeoraptor?
I’m not defending those who within the Creationist movement who would try to fudge what should be either seen as true or false based on its own merit, but I’m saying that you are not being consistent by name pointing at the Creationists without at least giving consideration to the fact that Evolutionists have been doing the same thing, if not a whole lot worse, from the very get-go of the theory. As always, I’m attempting to lend a voice to consistency.
LikeLike
(do we need to go over all the hoaxes of evolutionists over the years even just in the hominoid fossils?)
Probably so. I’m aware of only two cases where it might be possible to claim scientists actually promoted false fossils. One of the cases seems most likely just an elaborate practical joke gone wrong (Piltdown); the other a case of rampant national pride (Japan Man). Both cases were smoked out by other scientists, neither had a significant effect on science — and Piltdown was exposed largely because it ran contrary to evolution theory, not in support of it, so scientists kept trying to figure out what the facts were.
In contrast, creationists not only continue to invent hoaxes like this one in the post above, they don’t let go of the old ones. Were there only two creationist hoaxes, it would be good. If we expand to include hoaxes that don’t involve fossils themselves, but just bizarre claims, then the creationist hoaxes quickly multiply.
LikeLike
Ed, you asked me to make a comment here, so here goes:
It appears that evolutionists aren’t the only ones who can produce false fossils and information (do we need to go over all the hoaxes of evolutionists over the years even just in the hominoid fossils?).
I personally wouldn’t expect to find human fossils with dinosaurs. Even if they lived together on the planet at the same time, I would think that humans would have enough good sense to stay away from those things! Those things were big! Just because you don’t find tigers and humans living in the same exact sq. mile, they both inhabit the same planet at the same time. Even though there are over several billion people on the planet to make footprints, it would be extrememly rare to find a fossilized footprint of a lion or tiger with a human’s. Now remove that several thousand years, and what do you find? Well, I guess humans and tigers never lived at the same time…
Also, I believe the population before the flood to have been less than a billion thereby making the chances of a footprint together with a dino even smaller (though dinosaurs did not die out as a result of the flood – I assume Noah brought some eggs or babies on board). A smaller population, especially one that lived in close proximity with each other, would have left a very small (if almost non-existent) “footprint” on the world.
I would be most discouraged by creationists if it were actually Carl Baugh who had personally found it and were trying to “sell it” as real. However, it isn’t smart to publish the findings until verified of their authenticity, so I am very disappointed in how easily they were “duped” if indeed this claim ends up being false (as it appears to be).
LikeLike
[…] “I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”” […]
LikeLike
These guys did weigh between 1,000 pounds and a ton, according to the hoaxers.
LikeLike
Devona Says:
August 6, 2008 at 3:25 pm
It’s a hoax, of course.
First thing I noticed in the photo of the “two footprints” is that both are approximately the same depth.
Does the hoaxer maintain that early man weighed a couple tons too?
—————————————————————————
Not that I believe it is real, but not all dinasours weighed “a couple tons”.
LikeLike
I would expect time travelers to wear boots. I would not expect dinosaur foot prints to look as if made by a cookie cutter.
LikeLike
Well, just as I expected from folks who don’t want to believe in God. Having too much fun are you!!??? It’s a finite life here on earth but eternity after that. As you wish.
LikeLike
I went to the Dinosaur Valley State Park on vacation last June and I have some pictures of the three-toed footprints with me on my iPod. They look nothing like that hoax ‘Dino’ footprint. They are much more angular and have more of a pointed heel (I assume that part of the foot is the heel anyway). The ‘Dino’ print sure looks fake to me.
LikeLike
It’s a hoax, of course.
First thing I noticed in the photo of the “two footprints” is that both are approximately the same depth.
Does the hoaxer maintain that early man weighed a couple tons too?
LikeLike
[…] Nice try, pal. I’ll bet you were chuffed when you “stumbled across” an example of My boys’ amateurish […]
LikeLike
I think I got the format problem fixed, Ediacaran. Merci beaucoups.
LikeLike
Ed, the last paragraph included in the first blockquote needs to be “de-blockquoted”, since I gather it is your words instead of the Mineral Wells Index.
For a first-hand account of a trip to fake “Dr.” Carl Baugh’s Creation Evidence Museum, written for the not-so-gullible Dallas Observer, see
http://www.dallasobserver.com/2008-03-20/news/battle-against-teaching-evolution-in-texas-begins/1
It discusses what the charlatans there try to foist on the typical folk in their intended audience.
It also gives a wonderful discussion of the tomfoolery at the Texas State Board of Education.
Helpfully, it has a link to a section countering the creationist arguments (the section also appeared in the print version:
http://dallasobserver.com/2008-03-20/news/arguments-creationists-make-to-counter-evolution/
LikeLike
Here’s hoping this hoax will be blown out of the water soon and that so-called Creationism or ID or whatever will not be taught in science classes in public schools. Some of my in-laws would be prone to believe in the hoaxes as they say, “Evolution’s only a theory, not a fact”; I can only hope my stepchildren, grandchildren, nieces and nephews would be a lot smarter than that. I can’t so much as discuss evolution with my wife because it’s “atheistic.”
LikeLike