Sharing My Story

From Alpha-Omega #96 January February 2001 This continues
some of my adventures at the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum.

Utopia— Texas That is

Several months ago we received a call from Becky Gring
from Utopia, Texas who reported that she had discovered
some very strange rock impressions (looked like human
footprints) in a river bed near where she lives. Utopia
is in south Texas a hundred or so miles west of San Antonio.
Becky wanted to know how to make a mold of the tracks.
I relayed some advice to her from Joe Taylor on how to
do it. Several days later she called back and said she
had used a different method. She used modeling clay
rather than the suggested plaster. The clay worked very
well and she was able to get a very good mold of the
submerged track. She made some casts of it and sent
us one of them. I was the one who opened the package
when it arrived and my first impression was that it
could very well be a small human track. There was a
definite heel and ball impression though the
toes were not readily apparent. It is possible
that the individual (if indeed it was human) was
running with the ball of the foot making the initial
impressions.

This was interesting enough to have two members of
our Mt. Blanco Fossil Excavation team, Aaron Judkins
(from Glen Rose) and Phillip Hall (from near Fort Worth)
travel to Utopia to check it out. They were able to
make very similar molds of the first rack and several
others. Their molds were essentially the same as the
one made by Becky Gring. They also observed some other
track impressions but they weren't as good as the one
Becky had sent to us. These "tracks" if they were that
were found in Cretaceous limestone to that found in the
Paluxy River. Becky has been directed to us by Dr. Carl Baugh.
Perhaps just as interesting was a trilobite found in the
same strata. This was definitely a misplaced fossil as
Trilobites were supposed to have died out by the Permian
period perhaps 100 million years earlier.

There is a certain amount of networking among Creationist
organizations. For example, Dr. Baugh of the Creation
Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas has used Joe Taylor
to supervise his Colorado Dinosaur dig and Joe is often
a technical consultant/expert with the dinosaur and human
tracks at the Paluxy River. We have had a number of
field jacked dinosaur bones from the Colorado dig here in
the museum that are waiting for the finances to prepare
and restore them.

Triassic Tracks

Another story is of a Mr. Walton Koemel who lives near
Lemesa, Texas. He bought several molds (one very large
and two very small) in of animal tracks made from
Triassic strata near a river bed in Knox County, Texas.
Joe gave them a possible ID as dinosaur tracks. The small
track Joe thought might be a baby sauropod dinosaur track.
Mr. Koemel was very appreciative of Joe's opinion and
later took the tracks to nearby Texas Tech University
(in Lubbock) where he showed them to Dr. Sankar Chatterjee.

Dr. Chatterjee is a well known evolutionary paleontologist
famous for finding fossil birds in the Triassic strata.
The large impressions he dismissed as natural occurring
erosional features. The small impressions however he was
very excited about and said they were made by an
unidentified mammal. In terms of evolution it would be
very early for mammals in the fossil record. From a
creationist perspective this would simply show that
these animals were living then and appear fully formed
with no intermediate forms. Most of the supposed early
mammals were similar to shrews. Mr. Koemel did not reveal
the location of the tracks to Dr. Chatterjee, but returned
to our museum on several occasions and once took Joe to
the Discovery site so Joe could get a first hand look.

Joe's evaluation of the large impressions was similar to
Chatterjee's that they were natural occurring rock features
that were not made by animals or man.