Paluxy Fossil Human Footprints – special Genesis Week, Episode 33, season 2

This is the full transcript of the Paluxy Fossil Human Footprints special edition of Genesis Week.

 

The complete interview with Dr. Baugh can be seen here:

 

 

We’re going to examine the profound evidence that dinosaurs and humans lived together in this special edition of Genesis Week.
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And welcome to this episode of Genesis Week, the weekly program of creationary commentary on news, views and events pertaining to the origins controversy, made possible by the supporters of CORE Ottawa, Citizens for Origins Research and Education, and carried on the Christianima network – christianima.com – Christian cinema at its finest. Bringing you the best in pirate broadcasting, we set up in the hyperbaric biosphere of Creation Evidence Museum so we could continue to bring you the information the anticreationists don’t want you to see or hear, and giving glory to our Creator while doing it. We believe God gave you an intelligently designed brain, and He expects you to use it. Remember if you get lost in cyberspace, you can just punch in wazooloo.com or genesisweek.com and you can find us, and also subscribe to our youtube channel to get extras like CrEvo rants and full interviews with our guests. I’m your host, Ian Juby.
The Paluxy river meanders through the heart of Glen Rose, Texas. A beautiful community which has been a lightning rod for controversy. It’s nothing that the town has ever done, Glen Rose is one of my favourite places on planet earth, a beautiful little town with a tremendous number of fossil dinosaur tracks. In amongst those dinosaur tracks however, are fossil HUMAN footprints which have been uncovered over the years since the 1930’s.
A lot of the evidence we deal with on this show can be INTERPRETED within an evolutionary construct, and our focus is that this same evidence can also be interpreted – usually better – within a young earth creation construct. However, I have never heard an evolutionist attempt to interpret the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs within the confines of evolutionary theory. Such coexistence defies evolutionary theory! Plain and simple! Leading evolutionary scholars have said so in print. Staunch evolutionist and paleontologist Dr. Louis Jacobs
wrote in his book “In quest of the African Dinosaur” that the “co-occurance of men and dinosaurs. Such an association would dispel an Earth with vast antiquity. The entire history of creation, including the day of rest, could be accommodated in the seven biblical days of the Genesis myth. Evolution would be vanquished.” (pg 261)

As I’ve pointed out on this show in the past, evolution is, essentially not falsifiable. For something to be falsifiable, there must be some way to test it – that if the theory were not true, it would be at least possible to scientifically demonstrate it. So, does this make the theory falsifiable? Yes, and no. You see the problem isn’t the potential falsifiability, it’s the fact that WHEN – not if – WHEN the theory of evolution is falsified, evolutionary theory then CHANGES – the theory itself evolves to CONFORM to the evidence. That this has happened can be demonstrated countless times, and we’ve provided many examples on this very show. If a living dinosaur were found today, I can already predict what would happen: Leading evolutionary scholars would say “Isn’t it amazing that dinosaurs have survived all these millions of years.” And evolution would not be falsified, but rather it would conform to the new evidence that would have originally falsified it. The Paluxy fossil human footprints would suddenly be acknowledged as legitimate, and not a problem for evolution – though I will also make a second prediction for the present: I predict that the information and evidence I present in this show will spurn a more aggressive anti-creation response than any other show. So, let’s get down to the evidence, shall we?

First up: The tracks are nothing more than carvings!
Ya, ya, I’ve heard this one before and it’s utter nonsense. Let’s dispel this myth right away: The vast majority of the tracks have been excavated from underneath solid limestone. I’ve personally been involved in the removal of that limestone, it is a LOT of hard work. Many eye witnesses have participated in the removal of that overburden, only to see the human footprints found for themselves. So, making such an argument is simply ignorance of the facts.

Second up: The Taylor Trail. The Taylor Trail is probably the most famous of the trails of fossil footprints in the Paluxy, and the evidence that most people cite as proof that the human footprints are not human footprints.
The Taylor Trail is a series of 14 dinosaur footprints in a right-left-right pattern. A dinosaur walked in the mud, and shortly thereafter, a human stepped in the dinosaur’s footprints for 13 of those steps. The 14th step stepped beside the dinosaur track.

Over many years, several individuals have suggested that the human footprints are nothing more than elongated dinosaur tracks. Perhaps where the dinosaur slid as it was walking, or perhaps walking on its heels, and thus the heel of the dinosaur makes a human heel shaped depression. Perhaps the toe impressions were infilled or the mud collapsed in, leaving a vaguely human footprint shaped depression?
A very impressive sounding story – which does not line up with the evidence. For example, as you go down the trail, the human footprints shift around within the dinosaur footprints – sometimes even overlapping the dinosaur track. If it was walking on its heels, was the dinosaur walking on dislocated heels? Evidently its heel fell off and made its own impression at the 14th footprint, because the human footprint landed in one footprint of a completely different dinosaur, going in the opposite direction. It was argued that the heel of the dinosaur made the heel of the human footprint, but as you can see, it’s the exact opposite – toe impressions are visible in the human footprint, and the human toes are in the heel of the dinosaur footprint, while the heel of the human footprint is in the left toe of the dinosaur track! Several of the human footprints in the trail reveal distinct toe impressions – including the spectacular -3B which has indents from all five toes preserved, the ball, the arch and the heel.

Furthermore, the Upper Taylor trail, which is further upstream in the Paluxy river and is probably the continuation of the human trail from the Taylor Trail, gives us further indication that the human footprints and dinosaur tracks are completely separate entities. For example, the #4 human footprint overlaps a dinosaur track. First of all, notice that other dinosaur tracks do not have any indication of a “human like depression.” Secondly, notice what has happened to the #4 human footprint and the dinosaur track it stepped upon: over the years, differential erosion has RAISED the dinosaur track, while eroding the human footprint.
What is differential erosion? If you have two different rocks exposed to the elements – say, in a river bed, one rock is harder than the other. Well, the softer rock will be eroded away quickly while the harder rock gets eroded slowly. They erode differently – differential erosion.
So we can see in this immediate area that many of the dinosaur tracks actually become raised in the river bed because of differential erosion – where the dinosaur step made the rock harder than the surrounding rock, so the river has eroded away the rock in the riverbed, but the dinosaur track itself erodes more slowly, and so it becomes raised from the riverbed over time. Well the #4 human footprint has eroded FASTER than the riverbed, while the dinosaur track became raised. These are very clearly NOT the same footprint – in other words, it is NOT an elongated dinosaur track. If they were one and the same track, they would erode in unison. In fact, the human footprint has spectacularly preserved impressions from all five toes!
The impact the fossil footprints have had on peoples lives over the years is significant to say the least, as you can see in this interview recorded previously.

One person whose life was profoundly impacted by the Paluxy fossil footprints became one of its most outspoken proponents. The path his life took thus inspired countless others, including myself. Aside from Jesus Christ Himself, probably no other person has been more responsible for my involvement in the Creation movement than this man. So if you’re one of my haters,now you now who to blame! Dr. Carl Baugh is the founder and director of Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas, a museum he constructed as a result of his own first-hand discoveries on the banks of the Paluxy river. He was the host of Creation in the 21st century for some 11 years, and I was quite privileged to be on his show many times, it is such an honour to have him on mine – welcome to the show Dr. Baugh!

>>Well it’s a tremendous honour to be on with you. I esteem your work, your abilities as a scientist, as a researcher, and as a Christian. And to be compared to individuals who have impacted you, to me, is a tremendous compliment and I’m delighted to be identified with you, and whatever encouragement I can give you to follow the path of truth, I want to uh, substantiate and I want to embelish; not only to encourage, but I want it to be an avalanche of hope for individuals to see that truth can be ascertained.

>>Well thank you, now I do have to tell you in advance, I know on your show we joked around a lot, but on my show, we’re really serious here. Very serious. So… okay, okay, I’m kidding.

>> I understand that, I see very well what you’re talking about, it’s a pleasure to be with you on this informal basis.

>>I’d like to start with your story. When you first went to Glen Rose, you were of evolutionary persuasion, were you not?

>>That is correct; let me explain. When I came to Glen Rose, I had been of evolutionary persuasion, but I accommodated because of what I thought was genuine evidence of long geologic ages, I had accommodated those long ages to the point where I had become a progressive creationist, or a long-age creationist. In the past, I had within my own thought process and philosophic make-up, espoused evolutionary tenets. But when I came to Glen Rose, I still held to the long ages, which are evolutionary in prospect. So while I called myself a “creationist” I had not espoused direct, recent, scientific and Biblical creation. Now there are many in our camp who are in the very same position; that is they believe there is evidence supporting long geologic ages in the Biblical record, or they accommodate a progressive creation, which is essentially theistic evolution. So that was my position when I came to the Paluxy river in 1982.

>>So now what happened that year? Because you went there as part of your degree to do first hand excavations of dinosaur tracks, but that was when the “shocker” came, was it not?

>>You are exactly right – I was completing the masters degree in archaeology, and my mentor, Dr. Clifford Wilson, assigned me a project, he said if you’re going to refer to the fossil record, you need to actually work in the fossil record, so you need to excavate at least one genuine, original dinosaur footprint, and document the process along the way. So I assembled a small team of able-bodied individuals, and oversaw the operation, they did most of the work until I got to the delicate operation, I selected an area along the McFall ledge and we began to remove original overburden of limestone that was some seven to eight inches thick. And once we removed a slab of the limestone, then I worked delicately through the clay marl to the print layer below; and I was following a trail of dinosaur footprints, because that trail led into the bank at that point. And that trail had been exposed by the floodwaters of the Paluxy river. So where it had left the clay marl and left the overburden of rock, I had them remove a slab of rock, and I delicately followed that trail. We started with 19 dinosaur footprints, and you mentioned a shocker. As we continued and three more dinosaur tracks were excavated, I called a halt to the excavations because I had three times as many as my mentor had required. I had documented the process, and so the team said “Let us just remove one more small slab of original rock” – and that’s quite a laborious task! “Let us do that, you just tell us what to do and we’ll do the work.” So they removed that, and then I delicately excavated that material – that clay marl, it took quite a few hours to do that. And I called the excavation again. And amazingly, Charles Hiltebidle, one of my associates in this project, said “let me just dig under the ledge a little bit.” So he dug under the ledge a little bit, and he called “director – come back please.”
I came back, and he said “you know there appears to be – I learned from you how to delicately excavate through the clay marl, there appears to be an oval shape” I said “oh, it’s probably just another dinosaur tracks, which we had plenty of dinosaur tracks – I’m fulfilling my obligations. And he said “well, it’s rather rounded – you may want to take over here” and so I did. So I continued to excavate under the lip, and that was only about four inches thick, and that was not a dinosaur track, it was the heel of a human footprint – so we removed that slab, and I continued to excavate, uncovering and original, 16 inch human footprint the dominant great toe, the other four toes, metatarsal arch, the ball of the foot, the medial section of the longitudinal arch, the lateral section of the longitudinal arch including the lateral bulge, the amazing thing is – this was 17 inches from a dinosaur footprint that we had just excavated a few hours before, on the same day!
Ian – this blew my mind, literally! You understand my paradigm embraced the long age concept, and man and dinosaur had been separated by at least 64 million years, in that concept – even though that’s just an assignment of age, but these footprints at Glen Rose, these dinosaur tracks are assigned 110 million years in age, and so here we have them separated from early man by almost 110 million years, even by evolutionary standards. And by the theistic evolution or progressive creation standard, this didn’t fit at all! So, for the next four days and nights, I didn’t sleep a wink! This wrecked what I’d embraced – what I had taught publically, what I’d gone on radio and television and taught. And it embraced what I felt comfortable with in my own thought process. So, it was a shocker – and it totally revolutionized the direction of my life.
>>Indeed, of course this shocker that you discovered was only the first of many – we lost a good common friend a while back, Professor M.E. Clark, and there was actually one of the Paluxy footprints that was named after him, what can you tell us about the “Clark track?”

>>Well the Clark track is a splendid footprint, and uh, Professor Clark and I excavated it. I learned shortly after beginning these excavations I learned that I had to be on site, move to the scene, and I learned that I always needed an associate with me, cause the evolutionary community pointed back to the fact that during the depression, genuine human footprints had been discovered among dinosaurs tracks, so one local enterprising individual carved a few dinosaur tracks and a few human footprints, sold them to passers by, during the depression, and thus the evolutionary community had an “out” – a human footprint had been carved! Well only one man did so, and all his prints are accounted for, the footprints since then that have been discovered have not been carved, and we now have a mechanism to determine with scientific validity the genuineness of a human footprint because of the compression density underneath. Having said that, Professor Clark was with me, and we excavated at a new site, and at this new site, we were following a trail of dinosaur tracks, Acrocanthosaurus, dinosaur footprints, and as we followed that, we came across the first of a short series of human footprints. Now, they were just under 12 inches in length, it’s called the Clark print, just about 12 inches in length, and an amazing thing about this track, the mud was so tacky, that when the individual pulled his foot out, or went forward, he dropped a bit of mud and the great toe infilled and rose up – but that shows that the great toe was there, and the other toes were depressed. And then we have the metatarsal arch, we have the medial section of the longitudinal arch, we have the heel calcaneus section, and very intriguingly Ian, just in the last few hours, it’s been pointed out to me by one of our researchers, that the lateral outside section of the longitudinal arch is an area that I have known for some years, bulges when you add compression to it. The outside of the human foot barely bulges in contour, but when you press down into mud or step on a substrate, it bulges, and this creates the longitudinal section, the longitudinal arch, and it’s very distinctive. It is there in the Clark print, but it is essentially identical to the Laetoli prints! You’re familiar with the Laetoli prints?

>>Oh! yes I am

>>and the larger Laetoli print, and they have a metatarsal arch, they have a philanges trench, those are human! And leading scholars have admitted so, while the evolutionary community in general does not want to admit so. But in the Laetoli prints, especially the larger series, you see distinctively that bulge in the lateral section of the longitudinal arch, indicating modern human cause to the print. The same is true in the Clark print.

>>Okay, and thank you so much for being on the show today, and sharing both your story and the lessons you’ve learned, I know the viewers will really appreciate this, so thank you from all of us.

>>Thank you General!

>>I would highly highly recommend visiting Creation Evidence Museum in person if you can, where you can see much of the evidence we discussed first hand. The Creation Evidence Museum is also producing regular webcasts every week now, and you can watch those videos as well as get further information on the museum at their website CreationEvidence.org
David Lines was the technical producer for this interview, and we thank him for this. This interview was edited for television, however you can catch the entire interview on our YouTube channel, just head on over to GenesisWeek.com.
Stick around, we’ll be right back after this short break.

This show sponsored in part by Canada’s first permanent Creation Museum, in the heart of Alberta’s dinosaur beds, the Big Valley Creation Science Museum. bvcsm.com

And by Genesis Park.com get your own beautiful hard covered copy of the Chronicles of Dinosauria, the history and mystery of dinosaurs and man. Now available from New Leaf Publishing.

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Welcome back to Genesis Week, where we are discussing the famous Paluxy fossil human and dinosaur footprints.

Sometimes the human tracks were fortunately removed from the riverbed, before laws against such action were invoked, and thus the tracks are preserved in spectacular condition. One such track is the is the Willett track. We have the testimony of O.W. Willett who removed this single track from a trail of footprints exposed by a flash flood in the 1950’s. The hole from the removed rock is still visible today, on the park ledge, and even after some 60 years of erosion, the tracks leading up to, and away from the hole, are also still visible today, at least one of them still has visible toe impressions. But the Willett track itself is clearly a human
footprint.Sometimes loose tracks are brought to light which could be carvings. So Dr. Baugh had the brainstorm to use spiral CAT scans to examine the tracks. A spiral CAT scan is basically a 3dimensional X-ray. As you’ve all see X-rays, the denser an object is, the whiter it is on the image. Muscles basically do not show up at all, while bones show up bright white. Using CT scans, we can examine density variations inside the rock of the tracks. If the track is genuine, we can see that the foot compressed the mud in areas, which then hardened into rock, like we see here under the toes of the Delk track. You can see immediately under the toes it is more white, showing higher density.
In contrast, this is a track which we know was carved by a local Glen Rose resident, Bull Adams. Notice the lack of higher density rock under the toes of the track.
So we have genuine, fossil human footprints scattered throughout the dinosaur tracks in Glen Rose Texas – which by the way is not the only place this has been found, but rather it is simply the most famous. As we heard from Louis Jacobs, finding evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived together would mean three things: The earth is young, evolution is falsified, and the creation account of the Bible would be correct. We have just falsified evolution and an old earth. We have just provided powerful evidence that the Biblical account of creation is correct. If evolution was wrong about this, and the Bible was correct, what else is it right about? That same Bible warns us that once we die, we stand in judgment before that Creator, to give an account of our lives. That Creator, who created a body to sacrifice for you and for me, came to earth in the form of a human named Jesus Christ. He said that in order to enter into heaven and eternal life, you must be born again. What does that mean? You first have to understand that none of us is righteous – not one. Just look at the ten commandments, which I’m sure all of us would say are good standards for righteousness, and yet if you look at them, you’ll find you have violated them. God cannot allow even one drop of sin into the new heaven and new earth. So being born is simply a choice to change your ways, acknowledge that you have sinned against God, ask Him for forgiveness. He promises you entrance into the new heaven and new earth, eternal life, and even the gift of the Holy Ghost for your time here on earth! But you must, by asking for His help, turn from your sins.
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Remember those words of hope and warning from our Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ who said “I am the way the truth and the life – no man comes to the Father but through me.” See you next week.
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In this special edition of Genesis Week, we examine the Paluxy fossil human footprints and interview Dr. Carl Baugh, founder of Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas, whose life was radically changed when he discovered fossil human footprints among dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy.

Random References:
Creation Evidence Museum:
http://creationevidence.org

And David Lines’ YouTube channel which hosts CEM’s videos:
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7RJGhG-ZpPn14OOVD1x8WA

“In quest of the African Dinosaur,” Dr. Louis Jacobs, page 261

Dr. Don Patton’s exhaustive page on his research on the Paluxy tracks:
http://bible.ca/tracks

CT scans of the “Delk Track”

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