Mantracks: a True Story of Fake Fossils

0:00 It’s November 1938.

0:02 Roland Thaxter Bird is standing in front of the display window

0:05 of an Indian Trading Post in the town of Gallup, New Mexico.

0:08 Roland works for the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology

0:11 for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City,

0:14 but such a prestigious role belies the man’s true character.

0:19 Just a few years earlier, Roland was a drifter,

0:21 wandering the American west living out of a compact

0:24 trailer hitched to the side of his rusty Harley.

0:26 Despite a sharp mind, childhood illness forced him to dropout of high school.

0:30 Life had delivered Roland few prospects until in 1932

0:34 he stumbled upon a fossilised jaw that would land him in the office of the most

0:39 famous fossil hunter of all time, Barnum Brown.

0:41 Now in his 60s, Barnum was, in a way, a dinosaur himself.

0:45 Barnum is better understood not as a paleontologist as we now know the word,

0:50 but as a transitional fossil between

0:52 Victorian-era treasure hunters and dedicated academics.

0:56 While Barnum took care to document a lot of his work,

0:59 he was still really close friends with dynamite.

1:02 [distant explosion] He had spent decades wandering America trading for fossils.

1:06 He spent years just floating down Alberta’s Red Deer River,

1:09 stopping to dig anywhere that looked promising.

1:12 And as paleontology matured,

1:13 the image of Barnum out in the field wearing a massive fur coat just felt,

1:18 even by 1930, anachronistic.

1:21 The Department of Vertebrate Paleontology was

1:23 no longer staffed by fossil hunters, but rather with career academics.

1:29 Barnum looked at Roland, and saw a fossil hunter.

1:32 Someone who could read a map, identify safe drinking water.

1:35 Someone that Barnum could send out west and expect to come back alive.

1:40 Barnum offered Roland a job on the spot,

1:42 and spent the following years mentoring him.

1:44 As Roland described it,

1:46 Barnum Brown’s tutorage was worth more than a millionaire could afford.

1:50 So after several years of shadowing Barnum,

1:53 this 1938 season was Roland’s first solo mission.

1:56 Barnum had given him a stack of loose leads

1:59 and a few odd jobs and let him loose on virgin territory,

2:02 trading out Roland’s motorcycle for a beat

2:05 up 1929 Buick belonging to the museum.

2:08 Roland was desperate to make this chance count.

2:11 He craved the opportunity to bring back something, anything,

2:14 that he could drop on a desk and prove himself to his idol.

2:18 And after several months out in the field it had amounted to… nothing.

2:23 He now found himself in Gallup, New Mexico,

2:25 picking up a fossilised plant that had been donated to the Museum.

2:28 One last odd job to make the most of his time out west.

2:32 While making conversation,

2:33 a local resident told Roland to swing by Jack Hill’s trading post.

2:38 [RESIDENT] “Got some o’ the damnedest tracks in stone ever I seen.

2:40 Look like they was made by a man maybe twelve feet high.” [Dan] Out here,

2:45 Roland was always hearing stories of wonders elsewhere,

2:48 locals all had some spectacular story they picked up from some fella.

2:52 But this was a first.

2:54 The footprints of the twelve foot man

2:56 were just a short walk from Roland’s hotel.

2:58 The weather that night had taken a turn, and it was now snowing.

3:01 Roland was looking through the showcase window at two large rock slabs.

3:05 What he hoped to be looking at was an ancient footprint of a prehistoric bear.

3:10 But obscured by snow, Roland couldn’t make anything of the footprints.

3:13 He avoided lingering by the window for too long,

3:16 for fear of arousing the store clerk.

3:18 After moving on and making a second “casual” pass,

3:21 Roland found the courage to step inside.

3:24 [bell rings] As he approached the slabs, he was disappointed.

3:27 By excavating these footprints onto separate slabs,

3:30 it was now impossible to measure the stride of the prints.

3:33 That would make Roland’s job harder,

3:35 and ultimately destroy a lot of the scientific value.

3:38 However any anxiety about scientific value was quickly dispelled.

3:43 [STORE CLERK] “Do you know of anything, have you ever seen anything that looked

3:46 like that before?” [ROLAND BIRD] “I’m afraid

3:50 your Jack Hill has found himself a pair

3:52 of fake footprints.” Instead of bear prints, or fossils of any kind,

3:57 someone had taken these rocks and chiseled

3:59 a caricature of a human footprint into them.

4:02 Why?

4:02 Who cares?

4:03 For the fun of it perhaps.

4:05 To scam a gullible traveler maybe.

4:07 It didn’t much matter.

4:08 This was of no value to Roland.

4:11 [ROLAND BIRD] “Who’s been carving these things out of stone

4:13 to fool people?” [STORE CLERK] “I don’t know much about ‘em.

4:15 All I know: they come from Glen Rose, Texas.

4:17 Mr.

4:17 Hill brought them west a couple weeks ago,

4:20 with some dinosaur footprints.” Dinosaur footprints… Now that’s interesting.

4:24 Could those be fakes as well?

4:26 Roland had never encountered fake dinosaur footprints before.

4:30 In hindsight, it seems like an obvious grift.

4:33 But regardless, if the prints were genuine,

4:35 Roland might have his trophy after all.

4:38 And if they’re also carvings, well, at least it would be interesting.

4:42 The dinosaur prints were at Jack Hill’s second store in Lupton,

4:46 what is now a 20 minute drive away.

4:48 Roland drove out into the snowy night to see these dinosaur prints.

4:52 And when he arrived at the store, he found that the prints were pristine.

4:57 Don’t misunderstand, they were also obvious carvings.

5:01 But the size and proportions were absolutely perfect.

5:04 The human footprints were cartoonish,

5:06 resembling the artist’s guess at what a human footprint would look like.

5:10 These dinosaur tracks were a different story.

5:14 They were so good that the creator must have been working from a reference.

5:19 That morning, Roland consulted his maps.

5:22 The museum had never been to Glen Rose.

5:24 The geologic map suggested a strong possibility of dinosaur tracks.

5:28 And no one was waiting for him back in New York.

5:31 Screw it.

5:32 [car engine] Roland hit the road [FOLK MUSIC]♪ Oh River Paluxy,

5:39 revealer of history.

5:42 No longer a mystery, those footprints in stone!

5:49 Both man and dinosaur roamed on your ancient shore.

5:56 River Paluxy, revealers of history.

6:03 During the Lower Cretaceous, this was part of a massive,

6:06 shallow continental shelf spanning from South Florida to Mexico.

6:11 We know this in part because of the limestone I’m standing on.

6:15 When marine organisms like coral and shrimp die their remains,

6:19 which contain a lot of calcium carbonate, break down into a firm lime mud.

6:24 And while this area was often under water,

6:27 it was shallow enough for dinosaurs to cross,

6:30 and the lime mud was an ideal surface for dinosaurs to leave impressions.

6:34 But what’s unique about this formation is that freshwater

6:38 streams would also deliver other forms of sediments,

6:41 covering the lime mud with silt and clay,

6:43 which would fill in the footprints, preserving those impressions.

6:48 So as this went on and the sediment was compacted,

6:51 the lime mud developed into limestone while

6:54 the silt developed into clay and marl.

6:57 Millions of years later, what we’re left with is this: The Glen Rose Formation,

7:02 an expanse of rock 20-feet deep,

7:04 with alternating layers of solid limestone, and softer, friable clay.

7:09 And this river, the Paluxy,

7:10 has spent hundreds of years carving through the rock- exposing

7:14 some of the most spectacular dinosaur footprints in the world.

7:18 [crickets chirping] Upon arriving in Glen Rose, and lacking a plan,

7:22 Bird heads to the center of town- the local courthouse.

7:25 As he approaches it, he spots something out of the corner of his eye.

7:28 He sees...

7:29 that.

7:32 [ROLAND BIRD] “It was a beauty, and there was no doubt that it was genuine.

7:35 It was all twenty inches of footprint perfection.,

7:38 made by a three-toed carnivore in mud which had

7:41 faithfully preserved every minute detail… A slab of such

7:44 prints alone would be a fine addition to any

7:47 museum collection.” A fine addition to any museum collection.

7:49 And here it was, being used as masonry.

7:52 Because as it turns out, the locals didn’t really think that much of it.

7:55 Apparently there were loads of similar prints down by the river.

7:59 After asking around, Bird was given the name James Ryals.

8:02 The poor bastard was known to chisel these footprints out

8:05 of the riverbed and try to sell them to anyone who’d pay.

8:08 If anyone could show Roland around, it was him.

8:11 [RYALS] “I’ve had a heap o’ fun at it.

8:13 Don’t put much food on the table, but then… what does?

8:17 Hereabouts, ‘bout the only money-makin’ jobs is cuttin’ cedar posts,

8:22 bootlegging’ and quarryin’ dinosaur footprints.

8:25 And the other two is hard, hard work.

8:27 Cuttin’ out dino tracks is hard enough,

8:30 but it’s a heap cooler.” The two met and Ryals agreed to show him around.

8:34 Because it was November, months removed from the dry season,

8:37 most of the footprints were underwater and filled with silt,

8:40 but James still managed to show Roland some

8:42 of the best quality footprints he had ever seen.

8:45 Then, in conversation, Roland alluded to the...

8:48 strange footprints he had seen in Jack Hill’s store.

8:51 Ryals immediately perked up.

8:54 [RYALS] “Oh, you mean the man tracks?” Let’s talk about footprints for a bit.

9:00 Looking again at those carved footprints from Gallup,

9:03 they resemble a human foot- but not a human footprint.

9:07 On hard surfaces, your footprint won’t be a perfect representation of your foot,

9:12 but rather a reflection of what parts of your foot

9:15 were contacting the ground and bearing the most weight.

9:18 So your big toe, which you rely on to push-off the ground,

9:21 presses down and has a visible connection to the ball of your foot.

9:25 Whereas your little toes, who are freeloaders,

9:27 curl up and only leave an impression of their pads.

9:31 In mud...

9:34 your foot will sink further into the ground,

9:36 giving a more complete look- but it will retain those anatomical details.

9:41 And the depth of the print will do a lot to communicate the shape of the foot.

9:45 For instance, your little toes will still curl,

9:47 but the rest of the toe will dig into the mud,

9:50 creating a clear elevation between the pad and ball.

9:53 Even if we ignore their obvious giant size,

9:56 the slabs from Gallup have numerous errors that you can recognise intuitively.

10:01 The toes are far too long.

10:03 The big toe is too narrow and its depression is far too deep.

10:06 The ball of the foot is too wide, while the heel of the foot is too narrow.

10:11 These errors compound to give the print a harsh triangular shape.

10:15 The arch is disproportionate and the ball is misshapen.

10:18 We could go on.

10:19 It’s just, it’s plainly awful.

10:21 As Laurie Godfrey, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, put it:

10:25 the creator was clearly using the top of his foot as the reference,

10:29 rather than the bottom.

10:30 The sculptor made the print extremely detailed

10:33 because they wanted it to be “high quality”,

10:36 but in that detail gives us the tools to prove it’s inauthentic.

10:41 James Ryals’ invocation of “man tracks” was

10:43 too inviting of a phrase not to pursue.

10:46 Ryals led Roland on a brief walk, stopping to show him the pits where

10:50 he had quarried footprints from the river bed.

10:52 Stopping at a shallow hole by the edge of the river,

10:54 Ryals sloshed his shovel back and forth to stir the silt,

10:58 and let the current wash it clean.

11:00 The water revealed an ill-defined, oblong print, 15 inches long,

11:03 having clearly been made in soft mud that had collapsed before it was preserved.

11:08 It was too vague to take any information from.

11:12 This got Ryals talking about all the tracks that had been lost to erosion,

11:16 all the tracks that had been destroyed in floods over the years.

11:20 [RYALS] “Too bad, there used to be some fine things under [those stones].

11:23 I wish you could have seen them.” [ROLAND]

11:25 “What did the tracks look like?” [RYALS] “Eh...

11:28 Some was rounded-like.

11:29 Others was bigger and longer.” [ROLAND] “Any claws?

11:33 Did they show any signs of claws?” [RYALS] “The big ones did.

11:37 The littler, rounded ones, no.” James Ryals is describing sauropod footprints.

11:43 Roland fought to keep himself calm.

11:45 These tridactyl theropod prints were one thing,

11:48 a valuable find but common as far as fossilized dinosaur prints go.

11:53 Sauropod prints, however, were a whole different ball game.

11:56 The only sauropod prints discovered up to now were vague and undefined.

12:01 If Roland could find a sauropod print in this limestone… That...

12:05 was the fantasy, but the realistic path forward was to uncover

12:08 and document a high quality run of three-toed dinosaur prints.

12:12 While that might not make history,

12:14 it would be a valuable addition to the museum’s collection.

12:17 Over the next few days, Roland got to work with a pick, shovel and broom.

12:21 He found a run with a footprint so pristine

12:23 that it had preserved the curl in the dinosaur’s claw.

12:27 It’s hard to imagine doing better than that.

12:29 Roland cleaned the print, got his photos and did his documentation.

12:32 After a quick sandwich, it was time to go.

12:35 But Barnum had a rule: Always dig three feet beyond- you might just get lucky.

12:41 So Roland wandered along the river,

12:43 digging his three-feet in spirit if not in action.

12:45 He soon found himself standing in front of a sizable

12:48 pothole up on the ledge running above the river.

12:51 It looked like a simple cavity in the rock,

12:53 but there was something odd about it.

12:55 Roland started digging, shoveling dirt into the stream,

12:58 until his plate rang sharply against a margin in the depression.

13:01 Clearing the dirt Roland was standing in a three-foot long sauropod footprint.

13:06 The right hind foot.

13:08 But as we already know,

13:10 a footprint is one thing- a series of tracks is another thing entirely.

13:14 As it turns out, Bird didn’t find one print- he found three.

13:18 Each demonstrating the necessary four toes,

13:21 each reinforcing the authenticity of the others.

13:24 These sauropod tracks were the best ever documented,

13:27 but they were already exposed and weather worn.

13:30 As valuable as they may be,

13:32 their true value was as evidence of further tracks that remain under the rock.

13:36 So Roland took a cast of the right hind foot,

13:39 and returned to New York, trophy in hand.

13:42 Eager to lead a full excavation on the Paluxy River.

13:45 [harmonica music] Roland would get the opportunity

13:50 to write about this whole episode, from the carvings in Gallup to the “man like

13:54 tracks” shown to him by Ryals to his sauropod discovery,

13:58 in an article for Natural History in 1939.

14:01 It was from this area right behind me that Roland

14:05 Bird excavated over a hundred feet of trackway in 1941,

14:08 a trackway that is still on display to this day

14:12 in the Museum of Natural History in New York, New York.

14:15 [ambient chatter] James Ryals did not have an easy life.

14:22 A father to eight children,

14:24 anyone would struggle to put enough food on the table.

14:26 But James was a farmer in Glen Rose, Texas- a uniquely harsh situation.

14:31 Agriculture was historically the dominant industry in Glen Rose.

14:35 But the region wasn’t great for agriculture.

14:37 A reliance on cotton, poor farming techniques,

14:40 and completely unorganised flood control measures all depleted the soil,

14:44 sending the county’s agriculture into steep decline by the first World War.

14:48 By the Great Depression, it wasn’t enough for James simply to own a farm.

14:52 He needed to earn more money, and he opted to chisel dinosaur tracks out

14:56 of the Paluxy River bed to sell to whoever would pay.

15:00 So, after the chores were finished on the farm,

15:02 James and his wife, Cecil would head down to the river,

15:05 wielding a chisel made from the axle of an old Model T,

15:08 and an 8 pound sledge hammer, the two would get to work.

15:11 He would hold the chisel, she would swing the hammer.

15:14 Depending on the conditions, the trace fossil could take between a few hours

15:18 and a week to extract from the surrounding rock.

15:21 A dinosaur footprint could sell anywhere from $25 to $50.

15:25 Dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy River were first documented in early 1909,

15:29 when a 9 year-old boy named George Adams

15:32 discovered an oddly shaped depression in the river bed.

15:34 And he had skipped school that day and there’d been a flood in the area,

15:38 and he decided to go exploring in the local creek here.

15:42 And he found a, at the time he didn’t know it, a dinosaur track.

15:46 I’m Dennis Moore, I’m the curator of the Somervale

15:49 county historical society museum here in Glen Rose.

15:52 And so I guess he had to go back the next day, say I skipped school, and Mr.

15:56 MacDonald, the teacher, went out either that day or the next day and said,

15:59 “this is a dinosaur track.” So, we give George Adams the credit

16:03 for first getting the dinosaur tracks identified.

16:06 This story made the local papers,

16:07 and drew in a few interested folk from neighbouring villages.

16:10 That same year, George’s brother, the 22 year-old Ernest Adams,

16:14 was walking the river with a 15 year-old named Charlie Moss,

16:17 when Ernest Adams discovered a series of elongated tracks in the river bed,

16:22 unlike the three-toed prints his brother saw.

16:24 Ernest declares them to be “giant man tracks”,

16:27 and goes so far as to name his new species “Texanus Gargantuas”,

16:32 a prehistoric giant human.

16:34 With the benefit of a century of hindsight,

16:36 it’s hard to ignore the circumstances around this supposed discovery.

16:40 Ernest is a man of local legend.

16:43 To quote the cover copy of his biography: “Ernest T.

16:47 "Bull" Adams was the first-ever Rhodes Scholar from Baylor University,

16:51 but he spent most of his adult years on his knees

16:53 sifting through the dirt as he unearthed clues about the earliest humans.

16:57 He was a formidably brilliant lawyer and apt public official,

17:00 yet he tenderheartedly devoted much

17:02 of his professional career to representing the down-and-out.

17:05 Blessed with Herculean physical prowess that earned him his nickname,

17:09 this gentle giant was most at home while he

17:12 entranced youngsters from his hometown in Glen Rose, TX,

17:16 with yarns about his rugged, enigmatic life.” This paints the picture of a man

17:21 dedicated to being the smartest guy in the town,

17:23 if not the entire state of Texas.

17:26 To be blunt, it’s really easy to imagine Ernest’s

17:28 ego being threatened by his 9 year old brother’s discovery,

17:31 and immediately setting out to one up him.

17:34 Regardless of Ernest’s motivations, this story,

17:36 and the “giant man tracks” became something of a local myth: Yes sir,

17:40 our Ernest is one of the smartest men in Texas,

17:43 did you know he discovered giant human footprints down in the river bed?

17:47 Tall tales like this were a dime a dozen out West.

17:50 Small towns had social hierarchies,

17:52 complex family dynamics and a lot of boredom.

17:55 So when something interesting happened, it was really interesting.

17:59 Human footprints in the river bed didn’t just make Ernest unique,

18:03 it made Glen Rose unique.

18:05 The myth was aided by the fact that these tracks,

18:09 once exposed, became very fragile.

18:10 Neither of these trails were ever documented,

18:13 and they were lost to the Paluxy's infamous flooding.

18:16 Prior to the 1940s, Texas had no unified plan for water management.

18:21 Farmers instituted flood control measures as they saw fit,

18:24 and the unorganised mess caused floods to wreak havoc in the region.

18:28 Flooding on the Paluxy River was severe enough

18:30 to tear up the limestone layers of the river bed,

18:33 destroying any tracks and carrying the debris downstream,

18:36 dumping it into massive piles of stone slabs.

18:39 At some point in the 1930s, deep in the Great Depression,

18:42 a now adult George Adams looked upon one

18:45 of these piles of stone, and had an idea.

18:48 While James Ryals toiled under the hot sun

18:51 chiselling and torquing limestone out of a riverbed,

18:53 George blazed his own trail.

18:55 He picked a good slab out of a pile,

18:57 preferably one that already had a nice depression in it,

19:00 took it to a shady tree,

19:02 and sat beneath it finely chiselling a footprint into the slab.

19:05 It was easier work for a higher quality product,

19:08 all on a schedule convenient to him.

19:10 Upon completing the carving,

19:11 he would treat the print with hydrochloric acid to dull the chisel marks,

19:14 before covering the slab in manure for several days

19:17 to give the track the appearance of a uniform age.

19:20 These dinosaur tracks sold on loose slabs were

19:23 something of a cottage industry in Glen Rose,

19:25 and it’s impossible to know precisely how many were genuine versus carvings.

19:30 These weren’t great acts of deception,

19:32 the slabs were sold to tourists or local residents,

19:35 typically ending up as garden ornaments.

19:37 And look, this was Glen Rose in the Great Depression.

19:40 If some passerby on their way to California could afford

19:43 to part ways with 25 whole dollars for a novelty stone slab,

19:48 that money was better off with George Adams anyway.

19:51 Many residents may have gotten a piece of this pie,

19:54 but what made George noteworthy wasn’t that he carved, it was what he carved.

19:59 You had the classic tridactyl prints that he discovered as a child.

20:02 But he also carved tracks of the saber toothed tiger, and most critically,

20:06 a giant human footprint matching the dimensions of Ernest’s Texanus Gargantus.

20:11 But the giant man tracks weren’t as popular as the dinosaur tracks,

20:15 typically going for around half the price.

20:17 Whether this is because giant humans were less interesting than dinosaurs,

20:20 or because they were more obviously fake- who knows?

20:24 But it was one of these sets of man tracks

20:25 that found its way to Jack Hill’s store in Gallup,

20:28 New Mexico, where they were presented as genuine.

20:31 It was there that, by sheer coincidence,

20:33 they would be encountered by an assistant

20:36 to history’s most famous fossil hunter.

20:38 If it weren’t for that encounter and Roland Bird’s

20:40 dramatic account of them in his Natural History article,

20:43 these slabs would be entirely forgotten outside of Glen Rose.

20:47 But within Glen Rose, the story is remembered.

20:50 George Adams was the local mailman,

20:52 who sold a few carved footprints to survive the Great Depression.

20:56 We only know of him because his family

20:58 and community worked to preserve his memory.

21:01 And sometimes, those stories get a little distorted,

21:03 they add a little narrative flare;

21:05 they become exaggerated in the way that all stories do.

21:08 Sometimes facts alone can’t convey how much a person meant to their community.

21:14 So while Ernest Adams certainly did not

21:16 discover giant human footprints in the Paluxy Riverbed,

21:19 the story offers countless insights into the lives and history of this village.

21:24 A history that is both unimportant and invaluable.

21:28 So let’s just take a second to appreciate all this, and listen to Mary Adams,

21:32 Ernest’s daughter, recount her father’s life.

21:35 [MARY ADAMS] "His most outstanding contribution, however,

21:38 was his finding of footprints of man and dinosaur

21:40 tracks in the same geologic strata in the Paluxy River.

21:44 This confirms the biblical account of creation as stated

21:48 in Genesis… This finding also disproves the theory of evolution,

21:52 which claims that the dinosaur was extinct

21:55 for 55 million years before man quote “evolved”.” Sorry,

22:00 what was that about Genesis?

22:06 Have you ever noticed how creationists seem to love dinosaurs?

22:10 You might think that the discovery

22:12 of dinosaurs would wreak havoc on Christianity,

22:14 striking out huge portions of the Bible

22:17 and sending churches all across the nation into chaos.

22:20 But as it turns out, when dinosaurs first started being discovered

22:23 many denominations were extremely cool with them.

22:27 As early as 1902, the Seventh-Day Adventist newspaper Signs of the Times

22:32 was publishing articles and essays on the subject of dinosaurs.

22:36 Both discussing their theological implications

22:38 but also just… geeking out about dinosaurs.

22:42 This niche was spearheaded by a man named George McCready Price,

22:46 a devoted Adventist who loved himself a dinosaur.

22:50 Price’s faith wasn’t just unthreatened by dinosaurs- he

22:54 argued that they were proof of Biblical authority.

22:57 We’re finding the buried remains of all

22:59 these creatures that no longer inhabit the world.

23:01 What could have caused it?

23:03 Well, it’s obvious- The Genesis flood, the one with Noah and the Ark.

23:08 Price would develop this thought,

23:10 resulting in the theory of “flood geology”- claiming the geology

23:14 of the Earth as it exists today, the continents,

23:17 mountain ranges, canyons, soil composition,

23:20 the whole lot, all result from Noah’s flood,

23:24 a paradigm where geology has two points in history, pre and post flood.

23:30 It follows that all fossilised organisms

23:32 that are uncovered were victims of the flood.

23:35 This theory necessitates that all fossilised creatures

23:37 were wiped out in the same extinction event,

23:41 and they must have existed contemporaneously pre-flood.

23:45 That means that dinosaurs must have existed pre-flood alongside humanity.

23:51 The point of this theory is to provide

23:53 support to a literal interpretation of the Bible.

23:56 So while it’s not a necessary component of flood geology,

23:59 one of the theory’s core tenets is that the Earth

24:02 is only about six to ten thousand years old, reflecting Biblical history.

24:07 And as of 1940, all of this was… not popular.

24:12 Even within evangelical circles of the early 20th century,

24:16 this was perceived as crank.

24:18 But one of the few people who did believe in flood geology,

24:22 was a man named Clifford Burdick.

24:25 A geologist from Tuscon, Arizona, at first glance,

24:28 Burdick looks and behaves like your standard crank or quack from this era.

24:32 He spent his life lying about his education,

24:35 he was most comfortable applying his science out West,

24:38 far from peer-review, and like a quack doctor,

24:41 you trusted his diagnosis at your own peril.

24:44 But despite seeming like a perfect fit for your John R Brinkley archetype,

24:48 he differs in one essential aspect:

24:51 Clifford Burdick never met a theory he couldn’t believe.

24:56 [LEONARD NEMOY] Dr.

24:57 Clifford Burdick has been to Mount Ararat four times.

25:00 He failed to locate Noah’s Ark, but his scientific mind recognized other clues.

25:06 [DAN] Burdick was an advocate of flood geology,

25:08 yet he would go on to become flood geology’s

25:11 greatest enemy by the sheer force of his passionate incompetence,

25:16 a man so easily misled and so convinced in his erroneous beliefs,

25:21 that even his staunchest allies would come to fear him.

25:26 Trusting Burdick on anything was to risk utter humiliation.

25:31 Okay, so, for our purposes Burdick comes onto the scene

25:34 in the forties but to illustrate just what kind of guy he was,

25:39 just the way in which the man was

25:42 a prototype Fox Mulder who just… wanted to believe,

25:46 let’s skip ahead for a minute to the seventies and talk about the Moab Skeleton.

25:51 In 1971, a man named Lin Ottinger discovered major portions

25:55 of two human skeletons in the Keystone Azurite Mine in Moab, Utah.

26:00 Within days, archaeologist John Marwitt was brought

26:03 in to document and investigate the find.

26:06 The remains were found in loose blowsand, which was near,

26:09 but entirely distinct from, the hard sandstone around the remains.

26:13 For Marwitt, this was unquestionably a Native American burial,

26:17 only a few hundred years old.

26:20 But Marwitt was accompanied by a freelance writer Fran Barnes,

26:23 who reported on the discovery in the local newspaper,

26:26 putting a very familiar spin on this whole situation.

26:30 You know how this goes:

26:31 because the bones were found near 100 million year old rock,

26:35 the bones were 100 million years old.

26:37 Check-mate evolutionists.

26:39 Clifford Burdick read this news report and published his own article

26:44 in 1973 based solely on the claims of Barnes and Ottinger,

26:48 distorting the data to really drive the idea that these were

26:52 fossilised human remains found within Cretaceous

26:55 rock just like a dinosaur fossil.

26:58 Burdick pushed this claim for over a decade, making the Moab Skeleton a very big

27:04 deal to an incredibly small group of Creationists.

27:07 Ottinger began showcasing the bones at numerous creationist events,

27:11 and it was the star attraction of the Bible-Science

27:15 Association meeting held in Glen Rose in 1983.

27:18 Despite Marwitt’s dating of the skeleton being quite well known,

27:22 an attendee was willing to pay ten-thousand dollars for the Moab Skeleton.

27:27 It probably lost some value after 1989,

27:30 when UCLA carried out carbon dating on a sample

27:34 and confirmed that the remains were only about 200 years old.

27:39 You could say he got… boned by that one!

27:43 [laughter turns to coughing fit] But before all that, in 1943,

27:47 Burdick was a member of the Deluge Geology Society in Los Angeles,

27:52 one of the many attempts at establishing

27:54 an organisation that would take flood geology seriously.

27:58 Burdick is assigned to a team focused

28:01 on finding evidence of human coexistence with dinosaurs.

28:04 Flood geology has countless bugbears,

28:06 but its two foundational concerns are the age of the Earth,

28:10 and the concept of evolution.

28:12 If humans could be shown to have coexisted with dinosaurs,

28:16 then evolution as we know it is cooked,

28:18 and it would raise doubts about the geological timeline.

28:21 Clifford and his friends took an interest in Bird’s Natural History article.

28:25 They wanted to see Ryals’ “man track” from the river bed with their own eyes,

28:29 and conduct a legitimate excavation of the river

28:31 to see if the tracks were genuine.

28:33 After years of failing to raise funds, the project was quietly forgotten.

28:38 But Clifford Burdick didn’t forget.

28:40 He ventured out solo to conduct his own investigation,

28:43 and was immediately side-tracked.

28:45 Burdick was seemingly able to trace the carved man

28:48 tracks Bird saw in Gallup to their new owner,

28:50 the operator of a roadside museum in Arizona named Allen Berry.

28:55 Upon inspection, Burdick became convinced that the prints were genuine,

28:58 and thus these tracks were the same “man-like track” Bird saw in the river bed.

29:04 This would cause Burdick to fixate on Man Tracks,

29:07 making numerous sporadic trips to Glen Rose over the next forty years.

29:11 In 1950, Burdick would publish an article in Signs

29:14 of the Times where he made his ultimate argument:

29:17 humans did not evolve, in fact, we have degenerated.

29:22 “Not only has man decreased in stature," Wait, what does Burdick sound like?

29:27 [BURDICK] We did find many evidences,

29:29 we were kinda surprised about what we did find

29:31 that supported the theory that there was an ark.

29:35 [laugh] Okay then.

29:36 [imitation of BURDICK] “Not only has man decreased in stature

29:39 from a magnificent specimen ten or twelve feet tall,

29:42 to an average today of less than six feet,

29:45 but his average life has shortened from many

29:47 centuries to little more than half a century.

29:50 Where do we find any human evolution

29:53 here?” Burdick claims that Roland saw so many

29:56 human tracks that it was “impossible to deny

29:59 their existence.” But, wouldn’t you know it,

30:01 the tracks have all been quarried and sold off.

30:04 He took this rhetoric further in 1955 with a second article.

30:08 Burdick bends and distorts Roland’s account to an extent

30:11 that even the sloppiest hack journalist wouldn’t dare to try today.

30:15 Burdick combines, rearranges and outright rewrites different portions

30:19 of the Natural History article to completely reframe Bird’s motivations.

30:23 [“ROLAND T BIRD”] "This put things in an entirely new light,

30:25 even the possibility of such

30:27 an association [dinosaur and human] seemed incredible..

30:31 The surroundings were lower Cretaceous in age,

30:33 rock exposures roughly 120,000,000 years

30:35 old—very definitely the age of reptiles.

30:38 Could I have been mistaken in my first conclusions?

30:41 I am afraid Mr.

30:42 Hill has found himself a pair of fake footprints." As Burdick tells it,

30:47 Roland saw the man tracks in Gallup and was so blown away,

30:50 so terrified by the significance of this discovery

30:53 and its consequences for Darwinian evolution,

30:56 that he raced to Glen Rose to confirm their authenticity.

31:00 Then, Ryals’ mystery footprint was so perfect

31:03 that it caused Roland to have an existential crisis.

31:06 His ‘dogmatic’ belief in evolution was being shattered

31:09 by the Paluxy River and it was easier to deny,

31:13 deny, deny than accept the reality of Biblical creation.

31:17 Bird would be made aware of these articles,

31:19 and while he was outraged at being so misrepresented,

31:22 he ultimately viewed it as harmless.

31:24 Signs of the Times was a niche Adventist

31:27 newspaper and he had better things to be doing.

31:29 But Clifford Budick had just opened the Genesis

31:33 Floodgates… [BURDICK] We did find many evidences,

31:35 we were kinda surprised about what we did find

31:37 that supported the theory that there was an ark.

31:40 And because that the mountain was covered with water at one time.

31:44 And this is one of the evidences.

31:45 We found great bodies of salt above six thousand feet,

31:49 which indicate that the water was much

31:51 higher than six thousand feet at one time.

31:53 In 1961, seminarian John C.

31:55 Whitcomb, Jr.

31:56 and hydraulic engineer Henry M.

31:58 Morris released their landmark creationist book, The Genesis Flood.

32:03 In the book, Whitcomb and Morris make

32:05 their scientific argument for flood geology and young-earth creationism.

32:09 By this point in the 1960s, there had been a two decade movement of evangelical

32:14 scientists trying to reconcile modern science with Biblical authority,

32:18 which was itself built on hundreds of years of apologetics,

32:22 but a schism was forming.

32:24 In the mainstream this manifested in a growing support for liberal theology,

32:29 a school of thought which allowed for the Bible to be interpreted

32:33 as a complicated and nuanced collection

32:35 of ancient literature with its own historical contexts.

32:39 A great example is Day-Age Theory,

32:42 which argued that the days in Genesis were metaphoric,

32:45 each day referring to millions or even billions of years.

32:49 This allowed for the existence of “old-earth creationists”,

32:53 evangelicals who could accept the true age of the Earth,

32:56 without it threatening their beliefs.

32:58 But flood geology is a product of Christian fundamentalism.

33:02 The doctrine of Biblical inerrancy does

33:05 not permit something like Day-Age Theory.

33:07 The Bible says creation took six days,

33:10 so the earth was created in six literal 24-hour days.

33:14 And the earth itself is around six-thousand years old.

33:18 Young-earth creationists had, by 1960, spent 20 years trying and failing to make

33:23 a convincing scientific argument to their evangelical peers.

33:27 It’s not really an exaggeration to say they had been bullied out of the room.

33:31 The thing is that this entire subject had already had its day in court:

33:36 god-fearing natural philosophers and later geologists took

33:39 the theory very seriously in the 1700s and 1800s.

33:44 The idea that fossils and geologic layers were artefacts left

33:48 behind by Noah’s flood was one of the first theories proposed.

33:52 The Biblical account of creation was by and large

33:56 the default supposition that other theories were competing against,

33:59 and it was systematically discarded over the course of two hundred years

34:05 as the evidence across dozens

34:07 of scientific disciplines simply didn’t support it.

34:11 Saying that George McCready Price developed the concept of flood geology

34:15 that Witcomb and Morris then ran with is not strictly inaccurate,

34:20 but the more nuanced version would be to say that by being a combination

34:25 of ignorant and dismissive of the work

34:27 that had already been done by his own predecessors,

34:31 Price re-invented an already debunked theory.

34:35 And The Genesis Flood is no different.

34:38 It is pure pseudoscience constructed entirely of motivated reasoning.

34:42 Neither Morris nor Whitcomb have a background in geology,

34:45 which causes some problems in their scientific argument for flood geology.

34:50 The resulting work was so poor, so misleading,

34:53 that it prompted an 11,000 word response from an Adventist geology professor.

35:00 “It is almost incredible that such an effort,

35:01 which must have cost an enormous amount of work and money,

35:04 has been made for such a bad procedure

35:06 as this.” But despite his scathing critique of their science,

35:10 his foundational critique remained spiritual in nature.

35:14 “The most tragic aspect of the fundamentalist conception

35:17 seems to me that his standpoint requires scientific proof,

35:20 so that he must somehow live in fear

35:23 of the results of developing scientific work,

35:25 because indeed this development could then also disprove the reliability

35:28 of the Holy Scriptures.” This alludes

35:30 to a cognitive dissonance within many evangelicals,

35:33 who were growing increasingly anxious in the technological

35:36 and social turmoil of the 20th century.

35:39 The church was losing its unofficial

35:42 but otherwise functional position of supreme authority,

35:45 and political policies like Jim Crow,

35:47 tenuously justified by appeals to scripture,

35:50 were in the process of being torn down.

35:53 These groups clung to Biblical literalism because if you cede that some

35:58 parts are abstract or poetic or only relevant within a historical context,

36:04 then the entire Bible is open to such challenges.

36:07 And if you use the Bible as the justification for monstrous policies,

36:11 obviously those policies are going to be the first to be challenged.

36:16 That audience, evangelical laymen,

36:17 were the real target audience of The Genesis Flood.

36:21 The purpose of the book was not

36:24 to win over stuffy Adventist academics or Presbyterian journalists,

36:28 but provide a comforting narrative to everyday church-goers.

36:32 No metaphorical interpretation, no backsliding or unanswered questions.

36:37 It is in this environment that the protestant belief that scripture

36:41 should be accessible to the laity metastasizes into full anti-intellectualism:

36:46 the belief that the shallowest, least-informed reading is not merely worth

36:51 discussion but is in fact more legitimate.

36:54 This is where we get the theology of Kent Hovind,

36:57 where primacy is given to a childish and strictly literal

37:00 interpretation that presents the Bible as a single unified text authored

37:04 by God from end to end in its current form

37:08 for the enlightenment of English-speaking modern

37:11 white evangelical protestants in the American south.

37:14 [KENT HOVIND] If what you’re proposing is true,

37:17 then there’s no possible way the average person

37:19 in the world can read this book and understand it.

37:22 Ummm...

37:24 The God that I worship...

37:25 wrote a book that anybody can read and understand the vast majority of it,

37:28 and this book clearly says God made everything in six days,

37:31 they were days just like we have today,

37:33 I think the Big Bang theory is one of the most

37:35 ridiculous ideas I’ve ever heard of in the world,

37:36 and I think we’ll have an interesting discussion on that tonight.

37:39 I think, uh...

37:41 if you gave this book to five thousand people and said

37:43 ‘read this, tell me what it says.’ All five thousand

37:46 would come back and say ‘this is saying he made it

37:49 in six days’ This simplistic theology creates an equally simplistic geology:

37:55 things are what they look like to a child.

37:58 If a child would conclude that the Grand Canyon was carved by the receding

38:02 waters of the flood then any argument otherwise was just muddying the waters.

38:08 The Genesis Flood sets out to correct the growing dissonance between

38:12 science and the Bible by arguing that science was, in fact,

38:16 correct and useful and was responsible

38:18 for the myriad technological innovations of the modern age,

38:21 it was scientists and their interpretations who couldn’t be trusted.

38:26 The shift is the argument that the science actually proves the Bible,

38:30 and has all along, but scientists,

38:33 either blinded by their secularism or perhaps willfully corrupt,

38:37 were obfuscating that; the faithful had the real science.

38:43 The Genesis Flood suggests that there is

38:45 no conflict between science and the Bible, because they are the same,

38:49 and thus the litmus test for any conclusion is agreement with the scripture.

38:54 In a single stroke it is thus able to depoliticize religion,

38:58 imbuing it with the perceived objectivity of science,

39:02 and from that inheriting its authority.

39:05 Science in this context is not a system of iterative

39:08 theories and tests and investigations and predictions, but a mythology,

39:13 a twin sibling of religion, with an authority that can simply be

39:17 claimed by performing its rites and rituals.

39:19 The book is the passion play performance of the idea of science,

39:24 the vocabulary and aesthetics, flattened into a simple, unambiguous fable.

39:29 What’s more, that performance is easy: it’s so simple a child could do it.

39:35 Within the context of evangelicalism, The Genesis Flood was tectonic.

39:40 It transformed young-earth creationism from an obscure

39:43 long-debunked doctrine into something with broad appeal.

39:47 Readers didn’t need to understand it- they didn’t even need to read it.

39:52 They just needed to accept it.

39:54 The Genesis Flood was quoted in church,

39:56 creationist organisations would be built around the book,

40:00 and it has been a staple of the evangelical

40:04 homeschooling curriculum for going on 60 years.

40:07 It energized an entire movement of fundamentalists to put on lab coats or whip

40:12 together a volunteer field excavation and perform

40:14 some science to affirm the Bible.

40:17 And one of the book's most spectacular

40:19 revelations was the coexistence of man and dinosaur,

40:22 and their evidence for this… was the Gallup Slabs.

40:26 Authenticated by none other than paleontologist

40:28 Roland T Bird… according to Clifford Burdick.

40:33 [STAN TAYLOR] Basically there are two major views:

40:36 one origin by evolution, two origin by special creation.

40:41 In 1968, Reverend Stanley Taylor travelled to Glen Rose, Texas.

40:46 Taylor ran a small evangelical film production house,

40:49 he’d read The Genesis Flood, and wanted to see these tracks for himself.

40:53 He invited Clifford Burdick to meet him in Glen Rose to show

40:57 him the tracks and document the footprints as part of a proposed film.

41:01 For Burdick, this was a question of restoring credibility.

41:04 Burdick was adept at tracking down Man Tracks on loose slabs,

41:08 and had started his own collection of the specimens

41:10 that he claimed to be genuine trace fossils.

41:14 This included a pair of human feet that have

41:16 come to be known as the Burdick Slabs,

41:18 which he claims to have bought from a Reverend in Arizona,

41:21 as well as some dinosaur prints and giant

41:24 cat footprints all quite obviously originating from George Adams.

41:28 Burdick even traced the slabs back to a knick-knack shop

41:31 in Glen Rose that was known to flip George’s carvings.

41:34 So Taylor meets Burdick, sees these slabs,

41:37 asks around, and puts it all together: they’re carvings.

41:40 But he’s open to the possibility that the Man

41:44 Tracks are replicas of genuine prints from the past.

41:48 So Taylor focuses on the river, and conducts his own original excavation.

41:52 Taylor was a Reverend and filmmaker,

41:54 so he wasn’t at all trained or qualified to be doing

41:57 this, but with the support of the old timers like Charlie Moss and James Ryals,

42:01 Taylor and his volunteer crew from the Lubbock Texas Bible Church,

42:05 were able to make a genuine discovery.

42:08 The Taylor Trail is relevant enough to be listed on Google Maps.

42:11 What drew Taylor to this run of prints is that it heavily featured the poor,

42:15 elongated tracks that paleontologists would typically write off.

42:19 When you look at the trackway as a whole,

42:22 it’s obvious that a dinosaur left the prints.

42:24 But a few individual prints bear enough

42:27 of a resemblance to a human print to satisfy Taylor.

42:31 The excavation was captured on 16mm film,

42:33 and combined with interviews and a few random

42:37 set pieces to create the documentary Footprints in Stone.

42:40 [FOLK MUSIC]♪ Oh river Paluxy,

42:43 revealers of history,♪♪ oh what is this mystery of footprints in stone?

42:52 Did man and dinosaur roam on your ancient shore?

42:59 Oh river Paluxy, revealer of history.

43:06 Released in January 1973,

43:08 this film had essentially become lost media until a quite

43:12 damaged and extremely faded copy surfaced online in 2023.

43:16 The documentary is amateurish, bumbling, comically inept, and, well, bad.

43:21 Contemporary reviews of the film painted it as incompetent

43:25 even for a low budget doc from that era.

43:28 The camera gets as close to the titular footprints in stone as it can,

43:32 but Stan and his son Paul, working the camera,

43:34 are severely limited by their equipment,

43:37 mostly showing blobby tracks in wide shots,

43:40 rendered further illegible to contemporary viewers

43:42 through the poor quality of most projections.

43:46 Due to those limitations, and the general challenge of photographing

43:49 the bright limestone along the Paluxy,

43:51 the crew make heavy use of movie magic- using water and oil to essentially

43:57 paint the feet into the depressions to better sell them to the camera.

44:01 To put on my filmmaker hat for a moment here,

44:04 the resolution that they’re working with in terms of dynamic

44:07 range and detail means that this wetting overwhelms all other considerations.

44:12 The surface of the rock is so flattened by the photography that whatever Stan

44:17 chooses to paint onto the rock becomes the only thing that you can make out,

44:22 it’s quite manipulative.

44:25 But despite that, Taylor was clearly making

44:27 an effort at doing legitimate work here,

44:29 and makes the savvy decision to omit the carved footprints entirely..

44:34 Instead, Taylor leans heavily on the testimonies of the old timers.

44:39 The problem is that many of the key

44:41 players were either incredibly old or incredibly dead.

44:44 So Taylor’s interviews with them feature very dubious claims.

44:48 [RESIDENT] Now I do know that quite a few people,

44:50 I think that are real reliable people,

44:52 that said when they were younger, forty and fifty and sixty years ago,

44:56 that there were tracks here in the river and they saw ‘em and they certainly,

45:00 if they weren’t human tracks they couldn’t tell it.

45:02 [JAMES RYALS] If they wasn’t a human print I

45:05 have never been able to figure out what they were.

45:09 [STAN TAYLOR] You saw them right along with dinosaur footprints?

45:11 [JAMES RYALS] I’ve seen them all together and right along down and, uhh...

45:17 [JAMES RYALS] I, at that time, I’ve...

45:19 seen ‘em.

45:20 Where the man would step in...

45:24 a dinosaur’s print after he’d passed over.

45:29 Some of them had wore sandals or some kind of moccasins in the track they made!

45:35 Some of them had to be barefooted because

45:37 the mud had come up between their toes!

45:39 [STAN TAYLOR] Now did you count five toes?

45:40 [JAMES RYALS] Sure, just naturally as my own foot.

45:43 [STAN TAYLOR] Was there an arch in the foot?

45:44 [JAMES RYALS] Just a very slightly arch.

45:46 So there you go, evolution debunked.

45:49 The film also features interviews with various creationists,

45:52 including Clifford Burdick and Genesis Flood author Henry Morris.

45:56 But notably there was not a single secular voice in the film.

46:00 The only skeptics included were old-earth creationists.

46:04 So even the dissent was toothless.

46:07 Footprints in Stone became a core text for creationist organisations.

46:11 The film was screened at churches all across the United States.

46:14 It could be rented through mail order for $30,

46:16 but if you were playing the film for a secular public school,

46:19 they’d loan it to you for free.

46:21 Given that this was a 16mm film distributed by mail order,

46:25 the roll out of Footprints in Stone was slow- but its influence is undeniable.

46:31 [FOLK MUSIC]♪ Both skeptic and believer♪♪ have come from far

46:37 and wide to peer into your waters and♪♪ stand in odd surprise!

46:45 Could man have lived at that time when dinosaurs walked here?

46:52 Then geologic tables are incorrect I fear.

46:58 Throughout all of this, from the fifties to the eighties,

47:02 Glen Rose had become an obscure tourist destination for fundamentalist pilgrims.

47:06 Back in the 40s Emmett McFall bought land on the Paluxy River and erected a sign

47:11 offering the curious a tour of the dinosaur

47:14 and “giant men tracks” on his property.

47:16 Prior to his death in 1959, George Adams would still carve the odd footprint.

47:21 This slab, produced sometime in the early 50s, is probably his best work.

47:26 It has some problems,

47:27 but it’s a night and day improvement on his work 25 years prior.

47:31 At some point, the influx of Man

47:33 Track pilgrims became too much for Ernest Adams.

47:35 The story goes that Ernest “ordered” the local merchants

47:38 to spread the word that all human tracks were fake.

47:41 This isn’t framed as a confession or anything of that sort,

47:44 but instead as him protecting his small town from the world’s attention.

47:48 That didn’t do much to dispel rumours, and only muddied matters further.

47:52 Despite decades of excavations producing no documentation

47:55 of man tracks as well-defined as the carvings,

47:59 the oblong tracks being uncovered were convincing enough for tourists

48:03 to accept the testimonies of old timers and send them home satisfied.

48:08 If they could find this in an afternoon,

48:11 perfect human prints are certainly under there...

48:15 somewhere.

48:16 By 1980, the buzz around these footprints in the Paluxy River bed was

48:19 beginning to bleed out of evangelical

48:21 circles and catch the attention of secularists,

48:24 or at least people not already immersed

48:26 in the niche politics of young earth creationism.

48:29 One such individual was Glen Kuban,

48:31 a then-recent biology graduate who in his own words was “leaning towards

48:36 strict creationism” and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

48:40 Quick sidebar here, but while Glen’s

48:42 entrance into the story is seemingly unremarkable,

48:45 he sticks around and does just an absolutely tremendous amount of work,

48:53 both primary research and just collating and documenting what everybody

48:59 else was up to, for going on forty years now.

49:05 Indeed this whole story would be very difficult

49:08 to tell if not for the foundation laid by Glen.

49:12 To Glen the claim of fossilized human footprints would be huge,

49:16 if true, but on arrival it clearly wasn’t.

49:19 As Glen saw it this whole thing was seemingly just a big misunderstanding.

49:23 These lay people had a clear interest in the footprints,

49:26 like him, but had absolutely no familiarity with the subject.

49:30 Tourists were turning up at the river and just kinda wandering,

49:33 maybe getting a local to show them around.

49:36 So maybe if Glen helped get accessible

49:38 explanations on topics like erosion and dinosaur

49:41 footprints out into the world that could help clear this whole thing up.

49:45 But then Carl Baugh arrived in Glen Rose.

49:49 Baugh is your classic charlatan.

49:52 We know very little about his life prior to arriving in Glen Rose,

49:55 and what we do know is contradictory and full of holes.

49:58 Back in 1996 Kaylois Henry did a profile of Baugh for the Dallas Observer,

50:03 and despite the article’s clear deference to the Creationist argument,

50:07 she can’t pin much down about Baugh before he arrives in Glen Rose

50:12 “Only one thing about Baugh's academic

50:14 history can be established with any certainty:

50:17 In 1959, he earned a three-year "graduate of theology"

50:21 degree from then-unaccredited Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri.

50:27 The rest of his purported academic

50:30 credentials appear to be flimsy correspondence-course degrees,

50:33 and even these have changed between books and articles written by Baugh.” Baugh

50:38 was lured to Glen Rose by The Genesis Flood and Footprints in Stone.

50:42 And he immediately got digging.

50:45 He first made his presence known on June 16, 1982,

50:48 when he invited reporters from Fort Worth and Dallas to witness

50:52 the discovery of “twenty-four Tyrannosaurus prints” and various new Man Tracks.

50:57 A lot of this history was preserved by Ronnie Hastings,

51:00 Texan high school physics teacher who lived close to Glen Rose.

51:04 He caught wind of Baugh’s announcement

51:06 and attended the excavation alongside the media.

51:09 This began what would be an almost 3

51:11 year long documentation of Baugh’s activities in Glen Rose.

51:14 Hastings noted that Baugh’s crew, like Taylor’s,

51:17 were volunteers from local church groups.

51:20 But he noted that these volunteers took far

51:22 more care in their work than Baugh himself.

51:25 Carl Baugh was quick to draw conclusions and quick to pivot.

51:28 He had no issue contradicting himself,

51:30 and had no issue playing games with skeptics.

51:32 He could see toe marks on the tracks,

51:34 if you can’t see them, that’s a skill issue.

51:36 [CARL BAUGH] Within the side of the dinosaur track,

51:39 actually the human footprint comes over to right here...

51:43 Now I’m going to wet my foot and step down

51:46 in that, and I think it should even be plainer then.

51:58 [Dan] Okay so, we need to stop for a second

52:00 and really point out how absurd this whole thing has been.

52:03 Paleontology, or in this case Paleoichnology,

52:06 the study of trace fossils, is an exceptionally complex field,

52:10 combining the already complicated topics of geology,

52:14 biology and, in our case, anatomy.

52:16 But throughout this entire saga,

52:18 the Mantrack phenomenon has been driven by individuals

52:21 with absolutely no experience in this field.

52:24 It’s been local farmers, filmmakers, and tourists,

52:27 all making shockingly confident identifications of trace fossils.

52:32 And some of the claims they wrote are just nonsense.

52:35 In this Moral Majority Report article from 1985,

52:38 the author claims that the footprints are so well

52:41 preserved because they were buried rapidly by Noah’s flood.

52:44 We’ve already covered that violent floods can

52:46 literally rip apart the stone river bed.

52:49 The original mud prints had to be buried gently to avoid being washed away.

52:54 The quality of the prints opposes the flood narrative, it does not support it.

53:00 But don’t think that it was just creationists running their mouth about this.

53:04 The most absurd claim we found came from an atheist skeptic.

53:07 “It seems obvious that pranksters intent on faking the evidence hitched up

53:11 their pants legs and had a good time paddling around in bare feet

53:15 in the soft limestone in order to make it appear that both humans

53:18 and dinosaurs walked the Earth at the same ancient time.” The soft… limestone.

53:25 This is just rowdy teenagers stomping around,

53:28 punching 4 inch deep holes in the rock.

53:31 This incompetence can also be seen

53:33 in the work of Taylor and Baugh’s respective digs.

53:36 Neither excavation cleaned up after themselves,

53:38 leaving the site littered with trash.

53:41 Stanley Taylor attempted to do a legitimate excavation;

53:44 including the full field documentation that had

53:47 been universally absent since Bird left.

53:49 But Taylor had no idea what he was doing.

53:52 So even the most basic exercises stumped him.

53:55 Taylor’s measurements were wildly inaccurate, which he seemed to be aware of.

53:59 Even individual footprints were getting approximate measurements,

54:03 because he lacked the confidence to make a decisive measurement.

54:07 Observational errors of a similar magnitude were found throughout his work.

54:11 Needless to say, these errors taint

54:14 Taylor’s analysis and render his conclusions worthless.

54:17 So if Stanley Taylor’s excavation of a genuine trackway

54:20 was such a debacle in spite of his best efforts,

54:24 what hope do you and I have just vibe checking the river bed?

54:29 Limestone is notoriously deceptive when it comes to trackways.

54:33 River erosion produces intricate surfaces with numerous depressions.

54:37 One major example is Karren weathering,

54:39 a chemical reaction that produces cavities

54:42 that can be misinterpreted as toe marks.

54:45 In terms of erosion of the dinosaur prints themselves,

54:47 there are too many factors to even name.

54:50 You have the erosion that occurs when the lime mud is fresh,

54:53 where the mud will collapse in on itself or the print

54:55 will just begin to fall apart as the tide comes in.

54:59 And that erosion is entirely separate from the erosion that occurs

55:03 once the track is unearthed as limestone 100 million years later.

55:08 Then there’s the weird curve balls.

55:09 The trackmaker could have slipped in the mud.

55:11 You might be dealing with an undertrack,

55:13 where the lime mud was already buried under clay or algae,

55:17 giving you a softer, shallower print.

55:19 Or maybe you’re looking at the burrow of an ancient

55:22 shrimp- that one has tricked Baugh a few times.

55:25 So the paleontologist has all of these factors to consider,

55:28 while typically lacking the most crucial detail: what made the track?

55:33 It’s rare to know what species or even genus you’re dealing with.

55:37 So yeah, when Roland Bird was shown

55:40 a vague footprint that lacked all definition,

55:43 as a scientist he did just have to shrug and move on to the next track.

55:48 Individual tracks, especially poor tracks, aren’t good for much.

55:52 But when you have a series of them,

55:54 the paleontologist can start to piece it all together.

55:57 We’ve already done this.

55:58 The Taylor Trail featured elongated tracks that were

56:01 very appealing to our human pattern recognising brains,

56:05 but in the context of the whole trail, those are just one-off weird prints.

56:10 So it should be clear by now why statements like this hurt so badly.

56:16 “The tracks were clear.

56:18 I remember how the skin between the little toe and the one next to it had grown

56:22 together on the right foot.” [Dan] There are more

56:25 layers to this than the Glen Rose formation itself.

56:28 Charlie Moss was a bootlegger and pecan farmer,

56:30 who is quoted here making a perfect ID

56:33 on a human footprint he saw over half a century prior,

56:37 where he has presumed a deformity

56:39 in the trackmaker’s anatomy to explain a defect.

56:42 The same behaviour can be seen from Jim

56:45 Hall when he attended Carl Baugh’s expedition in 1985.

56:49 Hall spoke about finding ‘skid marks’ where

56:51 a person had almost slipped in the mud.

56:54 Carl Baugh has continued to carry out annual expeditions

56:57 to the Paluxy River bed even through to today.

57:00 For the low price of $15 per person per day,

57:03 you too can help Carl Baugh unlock the secrets of the ancient world.

57:07 You will need to bring your own equipment.

57:09 Carl recommends several tools, but creative substitution is encouraged.

57:13 Guests are invited to bring their imaginations with them to the river,

57:17 and find a story in the rock.

57:19 [CARL BAUGH] 'Kay, the outside of the track is here,

57:22 the digit goes around like that, but it’s still infilled,

57:25 the central digit goes like that but it’s infilled,

57:28 the near digit goes that far but it’s infilled,

57:31 we swing around and this is the hallux back of the foot.

57:35 So here’s the outline...

57:37 of this little juvenile track.

57:41 But it still needs to weather.

57:44 It’s a beautiful little thing, and it’s a continuation of that trail.

57:50 Is that an accurate identification of an acrocanthosaurus track?

57:55 How should I know?

57:55 Do you have any idea how difficult all this is?

58:00 When Carl Baugh arrived in Glen Rose,

58:03 he represented a seismic shift in this whole thing.

58:06 Where Taylor and Burdick sought actual respectability,

58:09 Carl immediately began pumping out a constant stream of disinformation.

58:14 When he began his excavations in Glen Rose,

58:16 he was seemingly completely clueless when it came to dinosaurs.

58:19 His early footprints were erroneously

58:22 credited to “Tyrannosaurus” and “Brontosaurus” seemingly

58:24 because of the Sinclair fibre glass models beside the parking lot.

58:28 Baugh’s 1982 excavation was a barrage of claims fired at Ronnie Hastings,

58:33 but one in particular foreshadowed what was to come.

58:36 On October 20, 1982, Baugh brought out a cigar box and showed Hastings

58:41 his best evidence of a young-earth: The London Hammer.

58:44 This would be the first of a vast collection of “out-of-place artifacts”.

58:48 As the name implies, these are artifacts that are made noteworthy specifically

58:52 because of the context in which they are found, appearing out of place.

58:57 The London Hammer is a great example of how these supposed artifacts are used.

59:01 The hammer was supposedly found “completely encased” in Cretaceous rock.

59:06 Therefore, the hammer is as old as the dinosaur tracks,

59:09 therefore, humans and dinosaurs.

59:11 However, there is no documentation of where the hammer was found,

59:14 and the story of its discovery keeps changing.

59:17 Baugh today says it was unearthed “completely encased”,

59:21 but other accounts had the handle either sticking out from a rock nodule,

59:25 or even just found loose by a creek.

59:28 If that were the case,

59:30 the hammer being embedded in a limey matrix like this isn’t shocking.

59:34 But the magic of out-of-place artifacts is

59:36 that the critical context can always be withheld or distorted.

59:40 Every one of Baugh’s artifacts or fossils comes into his possession years,

59:44 and often decades, after their discovery.

59:47 In many cases, there will be numerous tests that could

59:49 be carried out to verify the authenticity of his artifacts,

59:53 but Baugh refuses to have them done.

59:55 Rather than bring in qualified third-parties

59:57 to carry out mainstream analysis of the hammer,

1:00:00 Baugh instead carries out his own crank experiments

1:00:02 with spiral CT scans being a particular favourite.

1:00:06 Typically these CT scans are carried out by medical

1:00:09 technicians who seemingly have no idea what they’re doing.

1:00:12 Our favourite example of this is Baugh’s “fossilised human finger”.

1:00:16 [CARL BAUGH] One of the more intriguing and gratifying of these original

1:00:20 artifacts owned by the Creation Evidence Museum is a little finger.

1:00:26 In that Moral Majority story with Jim Hall,

1:00:28 Hall says that we’ve got enough human footprints.

1:00:31 We’re good for footprints.

1:00:33 The next step is to find fossilised human remains in this strata.

1:00:37 And almost immediately, Baugh comes across this “fossilised human

1:00:41 finger” that was discovered on the Paluxy.

1:00:44 What a coincidence.

1:00:46 It’s just an interestingly shaped rock,

1:00:49 but that hasn’t stopped Baugh from making all sorts of insane claims about it.

1:00:53 [CARL BAUGH] This particular finger had been

1:00:56 analyzed first of all by spiral CAT scan.

1:00:59 It’s been demonstrated to be...

1:01:01 genuine.

1:01:02 That is we have the distal, the medial, and the proximal...

1:01:07 joints showing with spiral CAT scan.

1:01:10 We have the actual bone...

1:01:11 being read by spiral CAT scan.

1:01:14 We have the actual cartilaginous ligaments being read by spiral CAT scan.

1:01:18 But that isn’t all: we have the fingernail and the cuticle,

1:01:22 and the taper read by spiral CAT scan.

1:01:25 The scan has a darker area toward the center because that’s the point

1:01:29 with the greatest amount of rock for the radiation to pass through.

1:01:33 But it… kinda vaguely looks like what you imagine your bone would look like,

1:01:38 so that’s Baugh’s angle.

1:01:39 Incidentally, Glen Kuban received an email from a woman in 2012,

1:01:43 claiming that she was the one to discover the stone.

1:01:46 She told Glen that she leant it to Carl to be returned soon after,

1:01:50 but Carl just stole it,

1:01:51 refusing to give it back to her for almost 30 years at that point.

1:01:55 Carl Baugh assembled a collection of these artifacts so rapidly

1:01:59 that he found himself wanting for somewhere to put it all.

1:02:03 [Narrator] But perhaps equally fascinating is the roadside attraction to be

1:02:06 found on the parcel of land at the very mouth,

1:02:10 the very gate to the state park itself.

1:02:13 Occupied by a fundamentalist Christian creationist,

1:02:16 the Creationist Evidences Museum is a tiny complex of trailer houses and other

1:02:22 debris that act like a tourist trap magnet on many unsuspecting park visitors.

1:02:29 For a few dollars a loner or a whole family can

1:02:32 enjoy the hilarious misinformation and fiction on exhibit in the museum.

1:02:37 [Dan] Originally a double wide trailer it has

1:02:40 since been expanded into a larger permanent structure.

1:02:42 We have, of course, the aforementioned London Hammer and fossilised finger.

1:02:46 The Moab Skeleton that Burdick pushed for over a decade?

1:02:49 Baugh was the guy who bought it in 1983,

1:02:52 and he displayed it in the museum at least until the early 90s.

1:02:56 On my trip to Glen Rose I was unable to locate the artefact in the museum,

1:03:00 but I was able to have a brief interaction

1:03:02 with Baugh as he was on his way out for lunch.

1:03:05 I asked him if I had just missed it

1:03:08 somewhere in the chaos or if it was in storage.

1:03:11 He told me in a very cagey tone

1:03:13 that there is some evidence that the artefact might

1:03:17 be intrusive and in the interest of “the truth”

1:03:20 they had decided to remove it from display.

1:03:23 He also insisted repeatedly that it’s not “in storage” but “in security”

1:03:28 though admittedly the difference between those is lost on me.

1:03:33 On a tour of the newest addition to the museum,

1:03:35 a Potempkin laboratory where two volunteers cosplay as scientists,

1:03:39 we were shown two pieces of coprolite, aka fossilized excrement,

1:03:43 and told that one was two snakes fighting,

1:03:45 and the other was a baby dinosaur who had just hatched and was, quote,

1:03:49 “cowering in fear because it saw the flood

1:03:52 coming.” And how could I forget Carl’s Hyperbaric Chamber.

1:03:55 This piece of cutting-edge technology began construction in the early 1990s.

1:04:00 It’s a structure so important to Baugh

1:04:02 that this entire building was erected around it.

1:04:05 The chamber recreates the atmospheric

1:04:08 and electromagnetic conditions of the pre-flood Earth.

1:04:11 This will cause any organisms placed in the chamber to rapidly return

1:04:15 to their pre-flood forms- Lizards will become

1:04:18 Edenic dinosaurs in just a few generations.

1:04:22 Oaky, so, Carl has, like, three hyperbaric chambers,

1:04:26 two small ones and a huge one.

1:04:29 Back in the 90s he put a copperhead snake

1:04:31 in one of the small ones for three weeks,

1:04:34 and milked it for venom both before and after.

1:04:38 Carl’s claim is that they sent the venom to a secular

1:04:42 scientist who said that the venom had transformed into serum.

1:04:47 Now, that claim is just kind of nonsense built

1:04:49 on the fact that “serum” and “venom” sound alike,

1:04:52 and thus the listener might infer for themselves that “serum”

1:04:56 is the opposite of “venom,” but setting that aside this is,

1:05:00 at least, an actual experiment.

1:05:02 This is the hard science that has eluded creationism for so long.

1:05:07 The main problem is that that earlier chamber was too small,

1:05:11 you can’t run an experiment with live animals

1:05:13 for longer than a few days for mammals, maybe a few weeks for reptiles.

1:05:18 Hence Carl’s massive chamber that is intended

1:05:21 to contain a fully self-sustaining ecosystem simulating pre-flood earth.

1:05:26 It will provide irrefutable proof against

1:05:29 Darwinian evolution and the geologic timeline.

1:05:32 And Carl Baugh will be recognised for the 30-plus years

1:05:35 of work it took to bring this all to fruition.

1:05:40 It’s empty.

1:05:42 [Narrator] Assuming this theory to be accurate,

1:05:44 it is furthermore the producer’s assumption

1:05:46 that this hyperbaric biosphere has been left

1:05:49 intact only because it would be prohibitively expensive to have it hauled away,

1:05:54 and too difficult to dispose of by one’s self.

1:05:58 [Dan] But in the early days when the Museum was still just a trailer,

1:06:01 Carl’s marquee attraction was Clifford Burdick’s footprint.

1:06:04 An elderly Burdick had returned to Glen Rose in 1983,

1:06:08 and Baugh had convinced Clifford to sell him one of his slabs,

1:06:12 the so-named Burdick Right, now conspicuously split in two.

1:06:16 Though make a mental note of the fact that all

1:06:18 my footage of the print is split into even more pieces.

1:06:22 Why was it split in two?

1:06:23 Because over a decade earlier, in the 70s,

1:06:27 a team of scientists from Columbia Union College and Loma Linda

1:06:31 University conducted an investigation into the loose

1:06:34 slabs carved by George Adams.

1:06:36 They’d collected as many slabs as they could get their hand

1:06:38 on and sectioned them to determine if they were natural depressions.

1:06:42 They concluded that Burdick’s prints were likely carved.

1:06:46 It would be hard for Baugh not to know of this study,

1:06:48 they weren’t subtle in their work.

1:06:51 But over the decades, Baugh has assembled a truly absurd number of these things.

1:06:55 None are more meaningful than any other, and they all share the same key traits.

1:07:00 First of all, they all crop up out of nowhere,

1:07:03 with a wafting story about being found years if not

1:07:06 decades earlier by a friend of a friend of a friend.

1:07:10 This makes tracing the prints basically impossible.

1:07:13 It also helps justify the complete lack of documentation.

1:07:16 Second, very few photos of these prints are in wide circulation,

1:07:20 with the most prominent being constrained to only the best angles.

1:07:25 Now, from a good angle these tracks look more compelling,

1:07:29 but it’s still possible to debunk them.

1:07:31 The A.M Coffee Print is a perfectly

1:07:34 flat depression with an overly straight instep.

1:07:36 The Willet Print has monstrous toes that imply

1:07:39 that the person’s strongest toe was this middle one.

1:07:41 And the Zapata Print has freakish proportions on the ball and through the arch.

1:07:46 But it really needs to be stressed how unconvincing these prints are in person.

1:07:52 When you see these in person, from the bad angles,

1:07:55 the idea that these are trace fossils is just comical.

1:07:59 Like, seriously, you can see the tool marks.

1:08:02 George did what he could, but you can see the tool marks.

1:08:06 What are we doing here?

1:08:08 But the true masterpiece in Baugh’s collection is this: The Delk Print.

1:08:14 Originally discovered in July of 2000,

1:08:16 this piece of paleontologic perfection was found

1:08:19 on the Paluxy River by amateur archaeologist Alvis Delk.

1:08:23 The slab was supposedly found loose in a pile

1:08:25 of rocks along a creek that flows into the river.

1:08:28 Delk took the slab home,

1:08:30 thinking that it only contained the tridactyl dinosaur print.

1:08:33 It wasn’t until May of 2008,

1:08:35 when Delk suffered a bad fall from a ladder and needed money for medical bills,

1:08:39 that he brushed up the specimen and noticed the human print.

1:08:43 As an archeologist, recognising that this represented comically

1:08:47 definitive evidence of the coexistence of man and dinosaur,

1:08:50 explicitly “disproving Darwinian evolution” and ‘changing world history’,

1:08:55 Delk did the obvious thing… and sold the specimen

1:08:58 to the crank who runs a roadside attraction outside town.

1:09:01 Never mind the fact that Delk’s archeological experience came...

1:09:06 from attending Baugh’s annual digs!

1:09:08 But who cares?

1:09:09 Let’s just marvel at this thing.

1:09:11 It’s so good.

1:09:12 Carl Baugh has called the human print an “ideal specimen”,

1:09:16 ignoring the obvious anthropomorphic flaws.

1:09:18 The big toe is two miles deep,

1:09:20 the two middle toes are far too long and splayed out like god only knows what,

1:09:25 and we have a razor sharp instep.

1:09:27 Viewed from a more acute angle

1:09:29 the footprint turns into clearly impossible nonsense.

1:09:33 But we have a whole second print to analyse,

1:09:35 and this “juvenile Acrocanthosaurus” print has its own problems.

1:09:40 When you contrast it with a genuine juvy Acro track,

1:09:43 the difference becomes fairly obvious.

1:09:45 The digits are too short, the depression on the whole is too flat,

1:09:48 lacking any indication of claw marks that often appear so pronounced.

1:09:52 What it better resembles is, of course, a carving.

1:09:56 You can just see the layers that Delk carved through.

1:10:00 With your eyes.

1:10:02 But what makes the Delk Print so magical is just how brazen it is.

1:10:06 A “perfect” Acro track over the top of an “ideal”

1:10:10 human track on a Cretaceous limestone slab found

1:10:13 on the Paluxy River and layered specifically so that the human

1:10:17 track would have had to pre-date the dinosaur track.

1:10:21 It’s hard to dream of a more spectacular specimen.

1:10:25 It's like forging your report card and giving yourself all A-double-plusses

1:10:30 with a bonus note that you are indeed very handsome and a generous lover.

1:10:36 I love it so much.

1:10:39 By the early 1980s, Man Track Mania had peaked.

1:10:42 Stanley Taylor and Henry Morris had passed their torches

1:10:45 to their respective sons who continued to push the Man Track claims,

1:10:49 albeit with some increasing timidity.

1:10:52 By late 1985, Glen Kuban and Ronnie Hastings

1:10:55 were working with a small team of secular academics.

1:10:58 Glen had assembled his own massive body of work

1:11:00 debunking the “man track” claims on the Taylor Trail,

1:11:03 while the rest of the team put together

1:11:06 a 68 page special edition of the Creation/Evolution journal,

1:11:09 focusing solely on the Paluxy River’s Man Tracks.

1:11:13 It debunked misinformation surrounding the anatomy, geology,

1:11:16 and anthropology of Man Tracks, among other things.

1:11:19 Today, the authors would just drop this article like a bomb.

1:11:23 But Glen Kuban invited Paul Taylor and John Morris

1:11:26 down to the Paluxy River to reevaluate their claims,

1:11:29 challenge Glen, and really just get their story straight.

1:11:32 And in a turn of events that would never,

1:11:35 ever happen today- Taylor and Morris came to the river in good faith.

1:11:39 They already had concerns about the quality

1:11:41 of the work that creationists had carried out,

1:11:43 they accepted the evidence against the Man Tracks,

1:11:46 and took steps to fix the situation.

1:11:48 John Morris ceased publication of his 1980 book

1:11:51 advocating for the Paluxy mantracks and as Glen

1:11:54 Kuban understands it Paul Taylor straight up

1:11:56 destroyed all copies of Footprints in Stone.

1:11:59 John Morris released a carefully worded statement

1:12:02 that stopped short of a full retraction,

1:12:04 but he hits all the necessary beats to earn full credit.

1:12:08 ‘All the existing tracks in the river bed were made by dinosaurs,

1:12:11 the old timers’ testimonies are questionable,

1:12:13 creationism can’t rely on the Paluxy River for evidence of a young-earth.’

1:12:17 “...several years ago when I spoke at ICR and I said “John,

1:12:21 why did you withdraw your book?” He no longer sells the book.

1:12:25 He says, “Brother Hovind I’ve got a whole warehouse full of those books,

1:12:28 and I’d love to be able to sell them." He said,

1:12:30 "But I just cannot in good conscience continue to support the footprint

1:12:34 idea in Texas." There was a movie made called the Footprints in Stone...

1:12:38 that movie went around the circuit for a while

1:12:40 showing the dinosaur and human footprints together.

1:12:42 And then they withdrew their movie off the market.

1:12:45 So, you’ll get some people who’ll give you some flak and say,

1:12:48 “Oh the creationists don’t support those human footprint ideas anymore.

1:12:52 Well...

1:12:53 [Dan] People like Hovind and Baugh took the wrong lesson from all this.

1:12:57 Never compromise, never apologize, never retract.

1:13:01 Or else you’ll end up with warehouses full

1:13:04 of books you cannot in good conscience continue to sell.

1:13:07 Carl Baugh flip flopped on accepting the secular evidence,

1:13:10 though ultimately rejected it,

1:13:11 and he has continued to promote Man Tracks for the past 40 years.

1:13:16 Baugh was always on the fringes of these creationist organisations,

1:13:20 but this has made him radioactive even to his most extreme creationist peers.

1:13:26 [Narrator] Dr.

1:13:27 Carl Baugh is a noted scientist and researcher.

1:13:30 He joins Kenneth Copeland for an extraordinary video tape teaching series:

1:13:34 Evidences for Creation.

1:13:36 [Dan] Creationism is a philosophy, but it’s also a product.

1:13:39 While sectarian infighting is older than

1:13:41 the Young Earth even thinks it could be,

1:13:43 creationist infighting today is dominated by commercial interests.

1:13:48 While Clifford Burdick spent his entire career tied up

1:13:51 in young-earth creationism simply for the love of the game,

1:13:54 the modern creationist movement is dominated by books,

1:13:57 the lecture circuit, homeschooling resources,

1:14:00 and attractions like Creation Museums.

1:14:03 Answers in Genesis is a young-earth creationist

1:14:06 organisation founded and operated by Ken Ham.

1:14:08 AiG is best known for its Creation

1:14:11 Museum in Kentucky and companion Ark Experience,

1:14:13 the gold standard of their genre.

1:14:16 Creationist Museums were a response to creationism’s

1:14:19 continued inability to break into public schools.

1:14:22 After decades of failure, these organisations decided that if they

1:14:26 can’t bring creationism to the children,

1:14:28 the children should be brought to the creationism.

1:14:31 This dovetails with homeschooling,

1:14:32 the other major compromise that creationists had to settle for.

1:14:36 These museums may be one of the only

1:14:40 excursions some homeschooled fundamentalist kids ever see.

1:14:43 Museums like Ken Hams’, and the ICR’s Discovery Center here in Dallas,

1:14:47 are both the product of decades of creationists

1:14:50 mastering the art of proselytising with a secular costume.

1:14:54 Here, they can control both sides of the message,

1:14:57 and use the language of museums

1:15:00 to create propaganda with a relatively deft hand.

1:15:03 The ICR Discovery Center is a slick operation,

1:15:06 a large glass and stone building in Dallas that plays the part of a museum well,

1:15:11 even as the corner-cutting makes itself obvious.

1:15:14 [distant chatter] That’s, that’s just cardboard.

1:15:22 It’s printed on cardboard.

1:15:24 [rainforest sounds] Oh my god.

1:15:28 Oh wow.

1:15:31 The world’s tiniest stegosaurus.

1:15:36 Tiny steggo!

1:15:37 By contrast, Carl Baugh’s collection of random junk,

1:15:40 including utterly unrelated ephemera like a ten foot

1:15:43 tall statue of former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry,

1:15:46 is so shameless and so sloppy that it

1:15:49 offends people like Ken Ham on a deep level.

1:15:52 Despite ostensibly being allies,

1:15:54 Ken Ham has been attacking Baugh’s claims and his credibility for over 20 years.

1:16:00 While these groups are allies in a political sense,

1:16:03 that spirit of cooperation is in tension:

1:16:06 they are courting the same increasingly insular audience,

1:16:09 competing to sell them their books,

1:16:11 their lecture serieses, and tickets to their museums.

1:16:15 But from the outside they appear homogenous, so if Carl is an embarrassment who

1:16:20 claims that velociraptors were designed by god

1:16:23 to cut grass in the garden of Eden then it makes everyone look bad.

1:16:27 [CARL BAUGH] These are velociraptors.

1:16:29 Models of velociraptors, and it’s that claw that gives them the reputation

1:16:34 of having sickles that would just cut your gut out, y'know.

1:16:38 [JIM SCUDDER] Right, well that’s what we’ve seen in the movies.

1:16:40 [CARL BAUGH] Well yes, but in reality that’s not the case.

1:16:44 In the fossil record we have canes that grew, that today,

1:16:48 like the Lycopsid clubmoss is 18 inches, but in the fossil record 120 feet tall!

1:16:56 To harvest those would require a sickle...

1:16:59 built in.

1:17:01 And if you didn’t harvest them, they’d take over the entire landscape.

1:17:05 [JIM SCUDDER] So there was a creature that God created that had

1:17:07 that sickle built in and that would also help keep the canes in check.

1:17:12 [CARL BAUGH] It’s the balance in nature.

1:17:14 But at the core all of them are

1:17:17 peddling variations of the same bundle of misinformation,

1:17:19 in a very literal sense.

1:17:22 After publishing The Genesis Flood,

1:17:24 Henry Morris goes on to found the Institute for Creation Research.

1:17:28 Ken Ham, who was raised in the nascent creationist movement in Australia,

1:17:32 comes across a copy of the book while he’s

1:17:34 in university in the 70s and it fully radicalizes him.

1:17:38 He moves to the US in 1987 to work for the ICR before

1:17:42 breaking away to form the organization

1:17:44 that would become Answers in Genesis in 1993.

1:17:48 And as we already discussed, The Genesis Flood is the book that convinced

1:17:52 Baugh to move to Texas in the first place.

1:17:54 So Ham and Morris warning people to stay

1:17:58 away from Baugh’s fraudulent artefacts while sharing

1:18:00 his claim that Noah brought dinosaurs onto

1:18:03 the ark is creating a difference without distinction.

1:18:06 The thing Baugh understood before any of the rest of them

1:18:10 is that if you deal with scientists in good faith,

1:18:12 you will be humiliated, you will have to make retractions, you will lose.

1:18:17 So just keep your head down and plow right on through.

1:18:21 The Burdick track was cut in half by Loma Linda in the 70s,

1:18:25 a decade before Baugh bought it, and then somewhere along the way it was

1:18:29 cut into even more pieces for even more tests,

1:18:32 that even more confirmed it was even more just a carving.

1:18:37 And it doesn’t matter.

1:18:38 The thing has been a known carving since Burdick acquired it in the fifties,

1:18:43 and there it is, in Baugh’s museum, where it’s gonna sit forever.

1:18:47 Baugh may be a pariah on the fringes of an already fringe belief,

1:18:51 but he cracked the meta in the eighties.

1:18:54 People have been making fun of his unfinished hyperbaric

1:18:57 chamber being a year or two away from operation...

1:19:01 for as long as it has existed.

1:19:03 He was posting through it before posting was even invented.

1:19:07 Morris and Ham have way more in common with Baugh than they would like to admit.

1:19:13 They conflict with him on a personal level,

1:19:16 find his displays cheap and sensationalist because...

1:19:19 well...

1:19:20 they are, but they have wholly adopted science as performance.

1:19:25 While they do a better job with the cosplay,

1:19:28 their “research institutes” are larger and better equipped,

1:19:31 and their websites do a lot of posturing about data and research,

1:19:35 they are ultimately playing Baugh’s game:

1:19:38 Never compromise, never apologize, never retract.

1:19:42 Part of that cosplay is, of course, the performance of being led by data,

1:19:47 but, maybe it goes without saying, that’s just not true.

1:19:51 These organizations, performing as researchers and scientists,

1:19:54 must walk a very silly wire.

1:19:57 The 50th anniversary edition of The Genesis Flood

1:20:00 hasn’t been updated in over forty nine printings, but...

1:20:04 like, why would it be?

1:20:06 It doesn’t matter.

1:20:07 If you get a copy today, theGallup Slab material,

1:20:10 the stuff that cites Burdick citing Bird,

1:20:12 stuff that’s been debunked for fifty years, sits entirely unchanged.

1:20:17 The book doesn’t need revisions, it doesn’t need updates,

1:20:21 it doesn’t need to change with changing data.

1:20:24 In fact to do so would be counter to the purpose of its existence.

1:20:29 The fact that science is constantly shifting with new data,

1:20:32 new findings, new insights,

1:20:34 is the very thing that the audience for The Genesis Flood sees as a weakness,

1:20:39 sees as proof that science is untrustworthy.

1:20:42 So naturally a science textbook for anti-science must never change.

1:20:49 [acoustic guitar music] And so we come back to Baugh,

1:21:01 to his silly roadside attraction with its silly pretend laboratory,

1:21:05 and his pile of fake artefacts.

1:21:08 Mantracks may be fake artefacts, but they are still artefacts.

1:21:12 They are not the imprint of human feet left in ancient lime mud,

1:21:16 but they are a human imprint.

1:21:19 Sure, they’re a trivial curiosity, a sideshow of crank science even amongst

1:21:23 the crank science of Young Earth Creationism,

1:21:26 but within that they are this fascinating,

1:21:30 weird, quirky anthropological artefact.

1:21:33 I love man tracks, like, really,

1:21:36 what an amazing hoax that has managed to just keep chugging for so long,

1:21:41 kept alive into the twenty first century almost entirely by one man.

1:21:47 As a connoisseur of fakes, frauds, and scams,

1:21:50 I firmly believe that the Delk print and Burdick Right belong in a museum,

1:21:55 but displayed for what they are, not what they claim to be.

1:21:59 When I visited Baugh’s shack I was giddy

1:22:02 to finally see them in person with my own eyes.

1:22:04 What amazing relics of the absolute hot mess we call humanity.

1:22:10 The fact that there are so many of them has a perverse beauty to it.

1:22:15 They are silly, wholly unpersuasive to anyone who isn’t thirsty to be persuaded,

1:22:21 but there are people thirsty to be persuaded,

1:22:24 and so cropped up the niche trade of producing fake fossils to sell to Carl

1:22:30 Baugh Ultimately the mantracks are little more than

1:22:36 a footnote in the history of Glen Rose,

1:22:38 an oddity from almost a century ago that has persisted,

1:22:42 drawing in all manner of odd characters over the years,

1:22:45 but Glen Rose isn’t the mantracks capital of Texas:

1:22:48 it’s the dinosaur capital of Texas.

1:22:51 [acoustic guitar music] The town has embraced this identity,

1:23:05 dinosaurs are everywhere in Glen Rose because dinosaurs,

1:23:08 the footprints they left, are literally the bedrock the town sits on.

1:23:15 In 1968, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department acquired 347 acres

1:23:19 of land surrounding the Paluxy River to convert into a state park.

1:23:23 The park’s signature attractions are these massive fibre-glass sculptures,

1:23:26 named Rex and Bronto.

1:23:28 These were among a number of life-sized sculptures commissioned by Sinclair Oil

1:23:31 as part of their Dinoland exhibit at the 1964 New York World Fair.

1:23:36 Sinclair Oil was the key financier to the American Museum of Natural History,

1:23:40 and they partially financed Bird’s sauropod excavation in 1940.

1:23:44 Sinclair would end up donating these sculptures

1:23:46 to the State Park in time for its grand opening.

1:23:49 The Dinosaur Valley State Park opened to the public in October of 1970.

1:23:53 Roland Bird was present at the opening,

1:23:55 returning to the old stomping ground for the first time in 30 years.

1:23:59 The state park has been credited to Bird,

1:24:01 it’s been credited to the politicians who signed it into legal existence,

1:24:05 and those are fair achievements, it is their legacy.

1:24:09 But it’s also the legacy of Glen Rose itself,

1:24:11 and its cast of misfits and weirdos.

1:24:13 James and Cecil Ryals chiseling footprints out

1:24:16 of the bedrock with an old car axle,

1:24:18 Charlie Moss and Ernest Adams “discovering” Texanus Gargantus on the riverbed,

1:24:23 and George Adams, the mailman, sitting under a tree,

1:24:26 carving a footprint into a slab that would wind

1:24:29 its way to a trading post in New Mexico.

1:24:31 [acoustic guitar music]