Human and Dinosaur Tracks Together

"My surprise was partly overcome by Ryals' casual reference to them as human footprints.  I smiled.  No man had ever existed in the Age of Reptiles." — Roland T. Bird, the paleontologist whose 1939 article started it, on the one "man track" he was shown in the riverbed¹

"Even though it would now be improper for creationists to continue to use the Paluxy data as evidence against evolution, in the light of these questions, there is still much that is not known about the tracks and continued research is in order." — John D. Morris, Institute for Creation Research, 1986²

Summary

For fifty years the best-known fossil argument in young-earth apologetics was that human footprints lie beside dinosaur footprints in the limestone bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas.  The claim appeared in a Seventh-day Adventist magazine in 1950, in The Genesis Flood in 1961, in the film Footprints in Stone in 1973, in an Institute for Creation Research pamphlet in 1976, and in John Morris's 1980 book.  This article follows the evidence from the first sighting in 1938 to the slab that a Glen Rose museum bought in 2008, and then asks what a real human track in Cretaceous rock would have to show.

The findings:

1. The claim began with carvings. In 1938 Roland Bird of the American Museum of Natural History saw two fifteen-inch "human" prints in a trading-post window in Gallup, New Mexico, and judged them fakes on sight.¹ Glen Rose residents carved tracks for sale during the Depression; the carver's method, down to the manure used for ageing, was told to creationist researchers by his nephew and is printed in Morris's own book.³ Every "human" print on a loose slab that has been cut open by someone outside the claim has shown rock layers ending at the edge of the print, which is what a chisel leaves and a foot does not.⁴
2. The prints in the riverbed were elongated dinosaur tracks. The trails at the Taylor site, the strongest evidence in the 1973 film and the 1980 book, are tracks of bipedal dinosaurs that pressed their soles and heels into soft mud. They are 55 to 70 cm long, with the toes subdued by mud collapse, erosion and later infilling.⁵ A creationist team from Loma Linda University said so in 1975.⁴ Glen Kuban mapped the sites from 1980 and published the explanation in a Cambridge University Press volume in 1989.⁶
3. The three toes came back in colour. From 1982 the "human" prints developed blue-grey and rust-brown three-toed outlines. The colour is a secondary sediment that filled the original tracks, with iron oxidising on its surface. Cores taken by Kuban and Ronnie Hastings in 1986 show the fill continuing below the surface, and Farlow's team reports the same from cores at the fill margins; ICR's own 1985 cores were reported as inconclusive and never shown.⁷ ICR's own chemistry found more iron inside the coloured areas than outside and "no evidence that any foreign chemical had been added."⁸
4. ICR withdrew the claim in January 1986, in the words of the man who wrote the 1980 book. The same page lists, four lines above the withdrawal, the thought that a reddish stain "can easily be accomplished by the application of certain readily available chemical agents."² That insinuation is quoted here with the withdrawal because the two sit together in the source; ICR closed it in 2013: "no direct evidence of evolutionary fraud has been uncovered."⁸ Films for Christ withdrew the film in December 1985.⁹ Creation Ministries International lists the Paluxy tracks among arguments creationists should not use.¹⁰
5. The later claims are weaker than the ones withdrawn. Carl Baugh's Creation Evidence Museum material (the "Humanus bauanthropus" mark of 1982, the "Sir George series", the re-cut Burdick print, a "fossil finger", a handprint, a tooth that turned out to be a fish's) was assessed by ICR in 1986 as "of uncertain origin" and "not comparable in quality" to the Taylor site.² The 2008 Delk slab, an eleven-inch "human" print under a dinosaur print, is a loose rock that by its promoters' own account sat in a living room for years before the human print was noticed.¹¹ It has no trackway, no field record, no mud push-up, and CT images that were taken offline in 2010. CMI's geologist concluded it "has no real apologetic value."¹²
6. A genuine human track in Cretaceous rock is a testable claim, and the test is one creationists wrote. ICR's 1976 pamphlet required mud push-up, deformed layers beneath the print, and a right-left trail at consistent stride, and said a single perfect print "would not be very convincing."¹³ Add what the accepted hominin track sites supply: heel strike, medial arch, adducted big toe and toe-off through it; excavation in place with the surface mapped; 3D data in an open format; and re-examination by people who do not own the specimen.¹⁴ No Paluxy claim meets even the 1976 version.

Verdict:  dead, and dead by the claimants' own tests.  The order article records Paluxy as a withdrawn claim;  this article records why it was withdrawn and why nothing since has revived it.  The one strength the creationist side can keep is that its own people did the killing:  a Loma Linda biologist in 1975, a creationist-raised amateur from 1980, and ICR's president in 1986.

Part 1: What was claimed, in the claimants' words

The Glen Rose Formation is Lower Cretaceous limestone, laid down on a shallow carbonate shelf of the ancestral Gulf of Mexico.  Dinosaur tracks were first reported from it in 1917, and the bed of the Paluxy River west of Glen Rose carries thousands of them:  three-toed tracks of a large theropod, most likely Acrocanthosaurus, and the sauropod trackways that made the river famous.¹⁵  Nobody disputes the dinosaur tracks.  The dispute is about a second kind of mark that locals called "man tracks" or "moccasin tracks."

Bird, 1939.  Roland T. Bird collected fossils for Barnum Brown at the American Museum of Natural History.  In the autumn of 1938, snowed in at Gallup, New Mexico, he saw two slabs in an Indian trader's window, each showing "the near-likeness of a human foot, perfect in every detail.  But each imprint was 15 inches long!"¹  He told the clerk, "I'm afraid your Jack Hill has found himself a pair of fake footprints."¹  Then he learned that Hill's other store, at Lupton, held four three-toed dinosaur tracks in the same stone, and that both kinds came from Glen Rose.  The dinosaur carvings were so good that the carver must have worked from real originals, so Bird drove to Texas to find them.  There Jim Ryals, a farmer whose land bordered the track ledges, mentioned "the man tracks" as a matter of course and showed him one:  "something about 15 inches long with a curious elongated heel."¹  Bird wrote that it "had been made by some hitherto unknown dinosaur or reptile," that the mud had been very soft, and that "the track lacked definition on which to base conclusions.  There was only the one."¹  He closed the article with the carver:  "All the prints in Jack Hill's had been well done too well done, the only reason to suspect them."¹

Bird's 1939 article is the founding document of the claim, and it says the opposite of what the claim says.  Bird explained later, in a 1976 letter to the Texas paleontologist Wann Langston, that he had put the "man tracks" in for colour because the article was aimed at the oil man who funded Brown's fieldwork:  "I made the unfortunate mistake of describing all too well both the fake and the real variety in the first article I turned out for Natural History."¹⁶  Farlow, who annotated Bird's memoir, calls the article "Bird's 1939 exercise in grantsmanship" and its consequence "dramatic "blowback.""¹⁷

Burdick, 1950.  Clifford Burdick, a consulting geologist from Tucson and a founder of the Deluge Society, visited Glen Rose, bought one of the "long-toed" slabs, and wrote the first creationist account, "When GIANTS Roamed the Earth," in the Adventist magazine Signs of the Times in July 1950.  The article itself could not be obtained for this piece;  what it argued reaches us through three witnesses who read it.  Bird read it as saying that he "could not deny the 'man tracks' were NOT human."¹⁶  Kuban says Burdick "implied that Bird himself had reported and excavated genuine human tracks from the Paluxy."¹⁸  And A. E. Wilder-Smith, restating Burdick in 1968, wrote that "The giant human tracks have perfectly clear toe, heel and arch imprints."¹⁹  Burdick's photographs went into The Genesis Flood in 1961, which is where Stanley Taylor of Films for Christ read of them.³

Taylor, 1968 to 1973.  Taylor took a film crew to Glen Rose in 1968, met Burdick, heard the residents' stories, and excavated back into the riverbank at what became the Taylor site.  The result was Footprints in Stone, released by Films for Christ in 1973.  Morris's 1986 account of what Taylor found is careful:  "Taylor never found perfect human footprints, but the prints found did have significant indications of a human foot and possessed no features incompatible with a human foot, so far as could be seen.  No other animal was known which could have made these markings."²

ICR, 1976.  The Institute for Creation Research's Impact No. 35, by John D. Morris, opens:  "One of the most shattering pieces of evidence comes from the Paluxy River basin in central Texas, near the town of Glen Rose, where fossilized tracks of man and dinosaur appear together."¹³  It reports that "over a hundred such trails have been studied," that "Quite a few of the tracks are in the 16-inch range, but several trails are of a man with a seven-foot stride and a foot of 21 1/2 inches in length," and it concedes that "Seldom does one find a perfect footprint in the Glen Rose formation, a print that clearly shows all the features of a human foot."¹³  The same pamphlet sets out, in ICR's words, what a genuine track must show.  Part 7 returns to it.

Morris, 1980.  Tracking Those Incredible Dinosaurs and the People Who Knew Them is the fullest statement of the case:  240 pages of local history, maps and photographs, written while Morris taught at the University of Oklahoma.  Its claim for the Taylor site is that "four or possibly five clear human trails have been found.  They are known as (as seen on the accompanying map) the Taylor Trail, the Turnage Trail, the Giant Run, the Ryals Trail, and the Beierle Trail."³  Its argument against Bird is that "a cloud of mystery still hangs over much of the work that he did."³  Its concessions are large, and they matter later:  it prints the carver's recipe, agrees that one famous loose print is a carving, says most researchers think Burdick's print is a carving, and admits that some "man" trails are three-toed dinosaur tracks "in which the mud has squeezed back in to cover the outer two toes, leaving an elongated marking."³

Baugh, 1982 to 1987.  Carl Baugh, a Baptist pastor, began digging on the McFall farm on 15 March 1982 and opened the Creation Evidence Museum beside the river in 1984.²⁰  His 1987 book, written with Clifford Wilson, claims a sixteen-inch "human" print named "Humanus Bauanthropus" eighteen inches from a dinosaur track, a "Sir George series" of six twelve-inch prints, a print "under twelve inches of solid limestone and four inches of marl," a handprint, a "fossil human finger," and a re-cut Burdick print that "is a genuine human footprint laid down among dinosaur tracks."²⁰  Baugh's material is treated in Part 6.  Even in 1986 ICR distanced itself:  "The various controversial prints labeled as human by Carl Baugh in recent years are of uncertain origin, and at best are not comparable in quality to prints at the sites discussed above, thereby providing no support for the original position."²

That is the claim.  It was never one thing.  It was loose slabs, riverbed trails, erosion marks on the State Park ledge, and the McFall ledge, and the evidence against each is different.

Part 2: The carving trade of the 1930s

Glen Rose was a poor agricultural town, and in the Depression its riverbed was a resource.  Morris's book records that Jim and Cecil Ryals quarried prints "because they found it difficult to feed their family of eight children," using a chisel made from a Model-T axle and an eight-pound sledge, and that Ryals "estimates that over the years he quarried about 100 dinosaur tracks, but only about 10 human tracks."³  Quarried tracks were real.  Carved tracks were the other trade.

The carver was George Adams.  In 1970 his nephew Wayland "Slim" Adams described the method to a group of creationists, and Morris printed it:  "With hammer and chisel, skilled hands could produce a track (dinosaur or human) complete in all details.  Some carved "human" tracks were produced in giant sizes.  A center-punch might be used to produce raindrops in the track.  Now the problem was to remove the chisel marks.  This was easily done with muriatic acid.  Aging was accomplished by covering the carving with manure and letting it rest for a few days in a cool place."³  Ryals added a tell:  carvers punched their raindrops "never within an inch or so of the edge," to avoid cracking the slab.³  Farlow's team, which includes Kuban, identifies the Gallup slabs Bird saw as "forgeries carved by a local entrepreneur (George Adams himself) for sale to unsuspecting tourists."¹⁷

Bird's judgement on the Lupton dinosaur carvings is worth having in full, because it is the judgement of a man who had handled real tracks for years:  "there was something too suspiciously perfect about the three-toed outlines.  The matrix was exactly the same as that of the human-looking prints in Gallup.  The claws of the prints were too perfect.  When a beast pulls a claw out of mud, he doesn't leave a perfect copy; the mud slurps about a bit."¹⁶

Cutting the slabs open.  The decisive test for a loose print is a saw.  A foot pressed into layered mud bends the layers down under the print;  a chisel cuts across them, so the layers end at the print's edge.  This is the test ICR's 1976 pamphlet itself proposed.¹³  Berney Neufeld of Loma Linda University applied it in the early 1970s to the "human" and "dinosaur" prints held by Columbia Union College, an Adventist college in Maryland, and reported in the creationist journal Origins in 1975:  "In each instance the rock layers end abruptly at the edge of the track, indicating that they are not the result of a foot stepping into soft mud but are produced by carving."⁴  A real dinosaur track bought from the McFall family and cut at Loma Linda showed the layers bending down under it.⁴  Neufeld's conclusion was that both the college's collection and Burdick's "may well be carvings from that period."⁴  Morris agreed about the college print by 1980:  "The banding in the rock showed no deformation at all, and all agree that it is a carving."³

The Burdick print.  Burdick's fourteen-inch "human" print is the one carving that is still on display, at Baugh's museum.  Its provenance, in Morris's words, is that Burdick bought it from a Rev. Beddoe of Arizona, who had bought it from Peesee Hudson, in whose Glen Rose knick-knack store "Many things had been sold … including some of George Adam's carvings," and that "Tracing the print proved impossible."³  It has been sawn three times.  Loma Linda's cut was "equivocal.  Some cross sections give a slight indication of carving, others of conformation."⁴  Morris wrote in 1980 that "most researchers feel that Burdick's track is a carving."³  Baugh had a lapidarist cut it again and reported that "The heel section showed disturbance laminations; beneath the great toe displayed clear pressure laminations and shifting disturbance," and concluded, "This track came from Glen Rose and is a genuine human footprint laid down among dinosaur tracks."²⁰  Kuban and the geologist Gregg Wilkerson examined the print and its sections and reported "subsurface features which truncate at the print's surface," and more:  "the orientation of algal fossils in the rock suggests that the original "up" direction was the side opposite the alleged footprint.  In other words, evidently the carver unwittingly created the print on what was originally the bottom side of the rock."²¹  They also note that at least four loose "long-toed" slabs, including Burdick's and the two Bird saw in Gallup, share the same style, "possibly indicating a common carver."²¹  Nobody independent has examined Baugh's cut, and nobody has asked to.  The honest statement is that two of three sectionings found carving or found nothing, the third was made by the print's owner, and the print came through a store that sold carvings.

What the carvings prove and what they do not.  They prove that the first "human" prints from Glen Rose, the ones that went into The Genesis Flood and launched the claim, were fakes made for tourists.  They do not prove that every print in the riverbed was faked;  a trail excavated from under undisturbed limestone cannot be a carving, and Taylor's crew did excavate.  Morris's 1986 article makes this point and it is fair:  "New human-like trails, as well as fresh prints in existing trails, were found, where there was no possibility of carving."²  That is why the riverbed trails need a different explanation, and that is Part 3.

Part 3: The Taylor site and the elongated tracks

The Taylor site is a stretch of riverbed about three miles west of Glen Rose, uncovered by Taylor's crew between 1968 and 1972.  It holds a trail of deep, clear three-toed dinosaur tracks and several shallower trails that Taylor and Morris called human:  the Taylor Trail, the Turnage Trail, the Giant Run and the Ryals Trail.  What those trails look like is not in dispute.  Kuban's description, from the peer-reviewed volume of the first international dinosaur-track symposium, is this:  "The most renowned "man" trail on the site is the Taylor (IIS) Trail, containing 15 known tracks, most of which are large and elongate.  The gait pattern is irregular, including some short, wide paces, and other long, narrow paces."⁵  The tracks are shallow, "2-5 cm in most cases," and "It was the basically oblong shape of the ball and metatarsal region that was often focused on as manlike, although this portion alone is typically over 35 cm long."⁵  Milne and Schafersman, working from the creationists' own photographs in 1983, gave the Taylor trail "an average print length of 16 inches and an average stride of 54 inches (maximum stride, 91 inches)."²²

A sixteen-inch foot is not a human foot.  On the usual ratio of foot length to stature, about 0.15, it belongs to a person around 2.7 m tall;  ICR's 21½-inch prints would need someone near 3.6 m.  No creationist model claims humans of that size as a population;  Morris in 1976 raised Genesis 6:4 as a possibility, and the figures are given here only for scale.¹³

The creationist dissent came first.  Neufeld's Loma Linda team studied the elongate series in 1970 and reported in 1975 that the trail on the McFall farm "cannot be both man and dinosaur," because "several of them show the print of a three-toed dinosaur" at its downriver end.⁴  Of a second series they wrote:  "If any track in a series is from a dinosaur, it must be assumed that the entire series was made by the same creature.  The elongate tracks of Series 2 probably represent the last vestiges of a three-toed dinosaur trackway."⁴  Of the State Park ledge "man tracks," the ones most visited by tourists, they wrote that these are "not tracks at all, but represent random erosion marks in the surface of the limestone plate," in a layer that holds no dinosaur tracks either.⁴  Morris's 1986 article acknowledges that the Taylor prints "did possess features which were problematic, prompting creationist Berney Neufeld later to label them as shallow, eroded dinosaur tracks."²  Neufeld's answer to the question that follows, whether this sinks the Flood, was no:  "It may be only evidence that those men at that time did not cohabitate with dinosaurs."⁴

Kuban's explanation.  Glen Kuban came to the Paluxy in 1980, by Hastings's account "hoping to find clear evidence" of human tracks, as Taylor had.⁷  What he found, mapping the sites through the dry summers of 1980 to 1985, was that the "human" prints were one end of a continuous series.  At the Alfred West site, which creationists had largely ignored, "Elongate footprints with metatarsal impressions actually outnumber the digitigrade tracks," and the same trails contain clear three-toed prints, prints with the toes half collapsed, and oblong prints with no toes at all.⁵  "One can visualize how IIW13 and IIW14 would become very humanlike if the digit impressions were further obscured by erosion."⁵  The mechanism is a bipedal dinosaur walking flat-footed, pressing its metatarsus into soft mud:  "Numerous elongate dinosaur tracks with apparent metatarsal impressions occur in the Paluxy River bed, near Glen Rose, Texas.  These tracks vary somewhat in size, shape, and clarity, but are typically 55 to 70 cm long (including the metatarsal segment), and 25 to 40 cm wide (across the digits).  In many cases the digit impressions on such tracks are indistinct, due to mud collapse, erosion, or a combination of factors — causing some to resemble giant human footprints, for which they have been mistaken by some creationists and local residents."⁵  The likely makers are slender ornithomimid theropods, smaller than the Acrocanthosaurus that left the big three-toed tracks.²³

Bird had said the same thing in private in 1976, from watching chickens:  "Let us consider a large predatory carnosaur wading in deep, almost fluid mud that also rises well above this animal's ankle.  The feet sink deeply; as each foot is withdrawn with all three toes compressed together for easy extraction, muds that were extruded outward and upward on penetration, slump partially back, leaving only this character-less, oblong cavity."¹⁶  Morris's 1980 book concedes the mechanism for some trails and denies it for others:  "Bird was only partially right.  There are several trails of "three-toed" dinosaur tracks in which the mud has squeezed back in to cover the outer two toes, leaving an elongated marking.  Some of the reported man trails are of this kind and will be discussed in a later chapter.  But there are others which are definitely not forgeries and which do not in any of their tracks show evidence of having been made by anything other than a man."³  The word "metatarsal" does not occur in the book.  The question was always whether the Taylor site's own trails were of that kind, and the colour answered it.

The mechanism is observed elsewhere.  Metatarsal theropod tracks are now known from many sites.  Richard Thulborn, in the same 1989 volume, compared Kuban's Paluxy tracks with the flat-footed prints at Lark Quarry in Queensland, noting one difference:  "the metapodium imprint is deeper than the digit imprints in the Paluxy River examples whereas it is shallower than the digit impressions in the Lark Quarry footprints."⁶  Gatesy and colleagues described Late Triassic theropod trackways from Greenland "made by theropods walking on substrates of different consistency and sinking to variable depths, that preserve three-dimensional records of foot movement," and reconstructed in three dimensions "theropod foot movements producing an elongate print in deep mud."²⁴  In 2004 a CMI geologist, Emil Silvestru, examined human-like prints that creationists had found at Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, and concluded, citing Kuban, that "on closer examination they seem to be metatarsal dinosaur footprints."²⁵  That is the creationist movement using Kuban's explanation as its own.

The editors of the symposium volume, David Gillette and Martin Lockley, summed it up:  "Kuban (Chapter 7) clearly demonstrated the dinosaurian (theropod) affinity of the problematic so-called "man tracks" of Texas, thereby settling a long standing evolution-creation debate."⁶  That sentence was written in 1989.  What made it possible was something that happened to the tracks themselves between 1982 and 1985.

Part 4: Infilling and colour

In 1982 Kuban noticed that the shallow "human" prints at the Taylor site were acquiring colour.  Morris described it in 1986, and his description is the one to use because it is the claimant's:  "The prints in the trail which I have called the "Taylor Trail," consisting of numerous readily visible elongated impressions in a left-right sequence, have changed into what appear to be tridactyl (three-toed) prints, evidently of some unidentified dinosaur. … In almost each of the prints in the trail, three large "toes" have appeared, similar to nearby dinosaur tracks.  These toes, typically, are coloration phenomena only, with no impressions, in most cases."²  The colour is blue-grey where the surface is fresh and rust-brown where it has been exposed, and it outlines a three-toed dinosaur foot at the front of every "human" print in the Taylor, Turnage and Ryals trails.

What the colour is.  Kuban's 1989 paper on the colour distinctions states the explanation that every later worker has accepted:  "The blue-grey color evidently represents a secondary sediment infilling of the original track depressions; the rust color evidently represents oxidation of iron on the surface of the infilling material.  This is supported by studies of core samples."²⁶  The tracks were pressed into lime mud, filled with a different, iron-rich sediment before the surface hardened, and the fill is what the river is now etching out.  Farlow's team, writing in 2012, gives the field evidence:  "Cores taken at the margin of the fillings show that the original footprints were several centimeters deep before sediment filled them.  Moreover, with repeated exposure due to low river levels during droughts, the iron-rich infilling sediment has in places oxidized to a reddish-brown color, making print outlines even more distinct."¹⁷  This is why a 2 to 5 cm oblong depression can be the remains of a much deeper three-toed track:  the fill brought the floor of the toes up nearly flush with the surface and left the deeper heel and ball as the visible hollow.  It also explains Morris's puzzle of 1986, that erosion had somehow "improved" the trackways:  the river was removing a fill, not carving a track.

Could it have been painted on?  Morris's 1986 article listed, among six "mysterious points," that "Applying a reddish stain to a rock surface can easily be accomplished by the application of certain readily available chemical agents."²  He later told Nature the same, in a letter Hastings describes as "repeating the fraud possibility."²⁷  Three kinds of evidence answer it, and two of them are ICR's own.

First, cores.  ICR took cores through the "claws" of one print in November 1985, each an inch and a half across;  Morris reported them as "inconclusive," and Hastings records that he never showed them.²  Kuban and Hastings took seven smaller cores in September 1986, with the state park's permission, and "found, as we predicted and in contradistinction to John Morris' statements, a clear subsurface boundary coinciding with the surface boundary.  The boundary on the surface extends several centimeters below, the blue-gray to gray material inside the track contrasting clearly with the ivory to tan limestone material outside."⁷  A paint sits on a surface;  this did not.

Second, the recipe.  Morris had said limestone could be stained with hydrochloric acid and iron sulfate.  Kuban and Hastings tried it:  "we found that rusty stains could indeed be produced.  The color resembled that of some colorations at the Taylor site which had been surface-oxidized.  This was especially true using just the iron sulfate solution.  But there the resemblance ended.  The true stains had a mere topical appearance."²⁷

Third, ICR's own chemistry, reported by Morris in 2013:  "Our chemical analysis confirmed that the colored areas contained more iron inside than outside, and we could find no evidence that any foreign chemical had been added."⁸  He adds:  "We looked diligently for evidence of foul play, but as yet no direct evidence of evolutionary fraud has been uncovered."⁸

Hastings drew the logical conclusion in 1987:  "The ICR has declared that either the colorations show the tracks to have been dinosaurian all along or they are fraudulant.  By their own logic, the cores Kuban and I took eliminate the latter possibility."²⁷  There is also a point that needs no cores.  The three-toed outlines appeared on the Ryals Trail, which had been exposed for sixty years, and on prints that nobody had ever called human, including a trail of more than twenty metatarsal tracks that the colour revealed for the first time.⁵  A hoaxer would have had to paint dinosaur toes onto tracks that were already dinosaur tracks and that nobody was arguing about.

Why the colour settled it.  The Taylor site "man tracks" had always been defended on the ground that only freshly exposed prints should be judged, and that the originals existed only in Taylor's film and casts.  Morris wrote in 1986 that the only way the claim could be invalidated was "for (1) features of the prints not visible beforehand to be exposed by erosion and (2) for the testimonies of the "old timers" to be discredited.  As unlikely as this may seem, just such a scenario may be taking place today."²  That is exactly what happened, and ICR said so.

Part 5: The 1986 withdrawal and what followed

In October 1985 Kuban invited the people responsible for the claim to come and look.  Morris records who came:  "At the invitation of Kuban, Paul Taylor, Marian Taylor, and Marvin Herrmann (all associated with the production of Footprints in Stone), Tom Henderson, early footprint investigator, and this author, returned to Paluxy in October 1985, to see the new evidence."²  Within two months Films for Christ issued a notice dated 4 December 1985 and took Footprints in Stone out of circulation.⁹  Kuban's own note on the film is plain:  "For many years the film promoted the "man track" claims, but was withdrawn from circulation shortly after John Morris and representatives of FFC met with me at the site in late 1985 to discuss the evidence."²⁸

ICR's statement came on 1 January 1986, as Impact No. 151, "The Paluxy River Mystery," by John Morris.  Its findings, trail by trail:  "In view of these developments, none of the four trails at the Taylor site can today be regarded as unquestionably of human origin.  The Taylor Trail appears, obviously, dinosaurian, as do two prints thought to be in the Turnage Trail."²  Its conclusion is one sentence, and the sentence should be read whole because the first clause alone overstates it:  "Even though it would now be improper for creationists to continue to use the Paluxy data as evidence against evolution, in the light of these questions, there is still much that is not known about the tracks and continued research is in order.  We stand committed to truth, and will gladly modify or abandon our previous interpretation of the Paluxy data as the facts dictate."²

What sits beside it.  The "questions" are six "mysterious points" listed just above the withdrawal.  The fourth is:  "Applying a reddish stain to a rock surface can easily be accomplished by the application of certain readily available chemical agents."²  That is an insinuation of tampering, made without a name and without evidence, on the same page as the retraction.  Morris does not assert it;  he lists it.  Part 4 gives the answer, including ICR's own chemistry.  An article that quoted the retraction and hid the sentence beside it would be doing the thing this series exists to catch, so both are printed here.  Morris's 1986 article also credits Kuban correctly and describes him as someone "who claims neutrality on the creation-evolution question";²  Hastings's abstract in the Journal of Geological Education the next year called the creationist statements "guarded and circuitous retractions, without, however, citing the extensive dinosaurian evidence seen."²⁹  Both descriptions are fair.

The book, the drift, and the 2013 statement.  Hastings reported in 1988 that "very little has been done by the ICR to rectify the conclusions of John Morris' book TTID.  Sometimes John Morris' Impact article on the mantracks (J. Morris, 1986) is inserted as a disclaimer, and sometimes not.  There has been no announcement that printing TTID will be discontinued," and that "The actions of Paul Taylor of Films for Christ in removing "Footprints in Stone" seem more responsible than those of ICR."⁷  Morris's 2013 account is that "ICR responded with integrity and pulled my book off the market, as did Films for Christ with their documentary film."⁸  Both can be true in sequence;  the book is out of print now.

In between, ICR drifted.  In 1987 an ICR report on new depressions at a Baugh site said they "do show evidence of human toe marks which seem to support a human interpretation."²⁷  In December 1988 Morris reported in Acts & Facts on Baugh and Don Patton's new model, in which the Taylor Trail is a dinosaur's but a human walked in its steps, leaving a print inside each track.  Kuban's summary of that article, which could not be obtained for this piece, is that Morris said the model "may sound bizarre" and that ICR did not advocate it, and then called it "supported by the existence of somewhat human-like impressions, each rather consistent in length" with "toe-like impressions … in the proper location.  Some are best denoted by an accentuated discoloration."²⁸  That is the discolouration that had just shown the tracks to be dinosaurian, re-read as human toes.

ICR's settled position is Morris's 2013 Impact, "Paluxy River: The Tale of the Trails."  He dates his own change of mind to 1984:  "in 1984 I concluded we had most likely made an error.  It was erroneous to claim the human-like prints were probably human."⁸  He states ICR's view:  "ICR holds rigorously to the view that dinosaurs lived at the same time as man, but feels that the Paluxy may not provide useful evidence for this."⁸  And he keeps a door open, suggesting from a 2013 re-study of Lark Quarry that a central pad inside three-toed prints might explain the human-like shapes, which is a mechanism for dinosaur tracks and concedes the point.⁸

The rest of the movement.  Creation Ministries International lists the Paluxy tracks under arguments that are "doubtful, hence inadvisable to use":  "Some prominent creationist promoters of these tracks have long since withdrawn their support.  Some of the allegedly human tracks may be artefacts of erosion of dinosaur tracks obscuring the claw marks.  There is a need for properly documented research on the tracks before we would use them to argue the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs.  Research to date has not been promising about the tracks, however."¹⁰  Answers in Genesis wrote in 2012:  "Given the ambiguity of the evidence and the fact that much of what may have once been present is no longer available for study, we do not believe those claims of coexisting human and dinosaur prints are wholly supportable," and added that its certainty that humans and dinosaurs lived together "comes not from the fossil record—where we actually do not expect to find it (see next paragraph)—but from the biblical record."³⁰  In 1996 AiG's sister organisation published a page on Baugh's teaching that opened, "It is with heavy heart that we criticise others who are presenting themselves as spokesman for creationism, but who are doing damage to the cause of Christ through ill-founded claims";  it was taken down at the request of a film company that shared its web space and survives on Kuban's site with AiG's permission.³¹

A note on the lists:  the "arguments not to use" list began at AiG in 2001 and has been maintained by CMI since the two organisations separated;  "AiG says do not use Paluxy" was true then and is CMI's page now.  Of the classic out-of-order fossil claims the list retires only Paluxy, as the order article records.

Part 6: The later claims

Three bodies of material were put forward after the withdrawal, and each has to be judged on its own.

Baugh's McFall ledge and museum.  Baugh's excavations on the McFall property began in March 1982 on a limestone ledge above the river, where fresh surfaces could be exposed from under overburden, which is why, as Hastings noted, he "avoided the carving critique."⁷  The claims from that ledge, in the 1987 book, are a sixteen-inch print "called the Humanus Bauanthropus (named after the royal "Bau" tribe of the Fiji Islands)," a "Sir George series" of six twelve-inch prints named for the Governor-General of Fiji, and prints excavated from "under twelve inches of solid limestone and four inches of marl."²⁰  Kuban examined the ledge and published his reading in 1989:  the alleged human tracks there "involved several phenomena.  Some were posterior extensions on definite dinosaur tracks, which Baugh interpreted as human tracks overlapping dinosaur tracks … The extensions were interpreted by the C/E team as hallux marks, but the blunt ends and direct posterior positions suggest they are more likely partial metatarsal impressions."⁵  Of the type specimen of the new "humanoid":  "Creationist excavator Carl Baugh named this mark "Humanus bauanthropus," for the supposed humanoid that made it; but it shows no clear human features, and is not in a striding sequence.  It may be an impression of the dinosaur's tail, toe, manus, or snout."⁵

The museum, opened beside the river in 1984, displayed the Burdick print, casts of other loose-slab prints, and, in Kuban's inventory, "the "London Hammer," a "fossil finger," "hand print", and "human tooth", none of which were valid.  The human tooth, for example, was demonstrated to be from a Cretaceous fish called a pycnodont."¹⁸  The "fossil finger" is described in Baugh's book as "totally replaced into limestone" with "the specific form of a human finger from the medial joint forward," sectioned by the same lapidarist who cut the Burdick print.²⁰  It has never been examined outside the museum.  The hammer belongs to another article.  ICR's verdict on the Baugh prints in 1986 was quoted in Part 1;  Andrew Snelling of AiG said in 2012 that "What Baugh presents there [at his Glen Rose Museum] is sometimes speculative—provocative, for want of a better term.  That doesn't mean he shouldn't have those things, but people should realize it's not the mainstream of the creation movement."³⁰  Baugh himself conceded in 1987 that the Taylor Trail colour had divided "even creation scholars" and that "some have suggested that "foul play" might have been involved."²⁰

The Taylor Trail overprinting model, 1988.  Baugh and Patton's answer to the colour was that the Taylor Trail is dinosaurian and that a human walked in it.  Kuban's objection is the one Morris's 1976 pamphlet would have made:  the "human" shapes are the same oblong heel-and-ball hollows the colour has just explained, there is no toe anatomy in them, and a person stepping in each of fifteen dinosaur tracks across a mudflat is not a hypothesis anyone would offer for any other trackway.²⁸  No creationist organisation has adopted it.

Loose slabs elsewhere.  Patton's "Zapata track," a sharply outlined human print on a block said to be Permian rock from New Mexico, has the same defect as the Burdick print:  Kuban notes that it "occurs on a loose block of rock whose origin and geologic context has not been thoroughly described or confirmed.  Indeed, without being reliably associated with any host formation, the print is of little anti-evolutionary value even if it were genuine, which also has not been established.  To date no major creationist group has endorsed the print as genuine or even likely so."³²

The Delk slab, 2008.  This is the claim a reader is most likely to meet today, because its photograph is striking.  The museum's page describes "Dinosaur footprint (Acrocanthosaurus) and an eleven-inch human footprint intruded by the dinosaur print," found "In early July, 2000" when Alvis Delk "was working in the Cretaceous limestone on the McFall property," and states:  "The fossil was transported to a professional laboratory where 800 X-rays were performed in a CT Scan procedure.  Laboratory technicians verified compression and distribution features clearly seen in both prints, human and dinosaur.  This removes any possibility that the prints were carved or altered."³³  The fuller account on a promoter's site concedes what the museum page omits:  "Mr. Delk found the loose slab against the bank of the Paluxy River, about one mile north of Dinosaur Valley State Park.  He flipped over the rock and saw an excellent dinosaur track, so he took it home where it sat in his living room for years, with hundreds of other fossils."  After a fall in 2008 he decided to sell it to Baugh, and "He began to clean the rock, and that was when he discovered the fossil human footprint underneath the dried clay!"¹¹  The first newspaper account, as Kuban reports it, said the two men found the slab loose in a pile of rocks along a creek and thought it held only a dinosaur track.³⁴

The strongest defence is Ian Juby's, and it should be heard in his words.  On carving:  "I find it very difficult to believe that a rock this friable could be carved without disintegrating."  On the scans:  "These X-rays show distinct high-density areas in the rock immediately surrounding and underneath the tracks.  Carving the tracks would have cut through the harder surface layer, and would be visible in the X-rays."³⁵  On the print's odd shape:  "Human footprints take on a remarkable and strange variety of shapes and forms," and "it appears that the big toe got hooked during forward locomotion.  Why would a carver carve a track in an "unnatural" position?"³⁵  On beam hardening, the scanner artefact that brightens every edge:  the density "is not visible around some of the cavities – like the outer toes of the dinosaur track.  It is also completely absent from the heels of both tracks," and the hospital's scanner "incorporates the anti-beam-hardening algorithms."³⁵  He also records the condition of access:  "If there are some scientists who wish to legitimately examine it, I'm sure that can be arranged – but only under very strict control of CEM."³⁵

Against it, Kuban, who has not handled the slab and says so:  "the lack of in situ documentation, which leaves uncertain the exact location of the original track bed, and whether both prints and all their details were originally part of it.  To date it has not even been clearly established that the rock is Cretaceous, let alone that it was part of a specific track bed near Glen Rose."³⁴  On the anatomy:  "the hallux (big toe) of the "human" print is exceedingly deep compared to the rest of the print.  The lesser toe depressions are on a plane considerably higher than the rest of the print, and jut out at an unnatural angle.  The middle three toe marks are also unusually long (or overly separated from the ball area)," and "the margin of the print lacks the "mud up-push" and other evidence of deformation usually seen on distinct prints."³⁴  On the dinosaur print, whose middle toe extends beyond the side toes by a ratio of "only about 0.18 for the Delk print, but 0.53" for a real juvenile Acrocanthosaurus track.³⁴  On the scans:  "Medical scans are calibrated for tissue and bone--which are much less dense than rocks.  Were they recalibrated in this case?  On what standard or basis?" and, of a scan image published by Patton, "one can see that a light band extends around most of the slab, even the top and bottom surfaces where no print depression occurs, again refuting the notion that the light areas must indicate greater density or compression."³⁴  And on the carving history:  George Adams "usually did start with existing (but not human) depressions.  George's granddaughter recently confirmed this, as well as her grandfather's use of acid to blur chisel marks."³⁴  The CT images were hosted by a supporter until 2010 and then removed;  the museum page shows none.³⁴

The scan argument has one fatal gap that both sides' descriptions leave open.  Nobody has scanned a known George Adams carving and a known genuine Glen Rose track in the same limestone under the same machine.  Without those two controls, "density under the print" is a number with nothing to compare it to, and the slab's owner controls who may run the comparison.

The creationist organisations have said no.  Kuban's own statement is that "to my knowledge, none to date have endorsed the Delk specimen."³⁴  CMI's Tas Walker, answering a reader in 2019, gave the reasons in the order a geologist would:  "The first problem is that the rock with the tracks was not observed, photographed, and documented in situ.  This is referred to as the fossil's provenance. … The second problem is that only single prints are present, which is a major weakness in the claim.  Any footprint claim needs to locate the print within a trackway.  A third problem is the long period between allegedly finding the rock with the dinosaur print and observing the 'human' print."  Then the anatomy:  "It is hard to envisage how a person could leave a track that is so straight from big toe to heel, even if they turned their leg inwards.  Then their other toes would not leave such an impression.  Also, the print appears to lack an arch, and it looks like the dino stomped in the human track but just pressed inwards without disturbing the human track in any other way."  His verdict:  "This means that the artefact has no real apologetic value."¹²  Morris's 2013 ICR article, written five years after the slab was announced, does not mention it.

Part 7: What a genuine human track in Cretaceous rock would have to show

A human footprint in the Glen Rose Formation would be the most important fossil ever found, and that is the reason to state the test exactly.  The test below is built from four sources:  ICR's 1976 criteria, an anatomist's 1985 criteria, the documentation standard that vertebrate ichnology now uses, and the hominin track sites that are accepted, which show what passing looks like.  Then each Paluxy claim is scored against it.

1. A trackway, not a print.  ICR, 1976:  "Even if a perfect human footprint were found, it would not be very convincing unless it were found as one of a series, a right-left-right-left trail of prints, all conformable to one another in size and shape.  The prints should be separated by a relatively consistent length, representing the stride of the individual, and laterally by a few inches representing the natural straddle between the two feet."¹³  CMI, 2019:  "Any footprint claim needs to locate the print within a trackway."¹²  At Laetoli the new Site S trail of 2016 was followed for an estimated 32 m across four excavated pits;³⁶  at Ileret, body mass could be estimated from 23 separate trackways on one set of surfaces.³⁷  Single prints on loose slabs score zero here by the claimants' own rule.

2. Pressure features and displacement rims.  ICR, 1976:  walking in mud "invariably also produces a "mud up-push," a place where the surrounding mud has been pushed up higher than it was before," and "If the mud has any layers of discoloration or special composition, these laminations will deform beneath the print."¹³  These are the features Neufeld's saw tested in 1975 and the features Kuban and Walker both find missing on the Delk slab.

3. Human foot anatomy.  Laurie Godfrey's 1985 statement of the criteria has not been improved on:  "a human footprint assumes an hourglass shape because the foot bones that articulate with the heel and ankle bones are bound together by strong plantar ligaments to form an arch";  "contact is always made by the heel (which strikes the substrate first in normal walking), the outside of the foot, the ball of the foot (the pad under the far or "distal" ends of the bones called "metatarsals"), and the big toe or "hallux."";  "The ball will have made a distinct depression deeper on the inside than the outside — a record of the way pressure shifted just prior to push-off."¹⁹  The accepted sites show these marks.  Bennett and colleagues reported the Ileret prints as "providing the oldest evidence of an essentially modern human-like foot anatomy, with a relatively adducted hallux, medial longitudinal arch, and medial weight transfer before push-off."³⁸  Hatala's team explains why the weight-transfer pattern is diagnostic:  "During human walking, forces are applied to the ground in a diagnostic pattern in which greater forces are concentrated beneath the medial forefoot while the foot acts as a rigid lever with a toe-off through the first and second digits at the end of each step.  This medial transfer of pressure differs from the pattern of foot function observed in non-human primates, and has been consistently recognized as a defining characteristic of human foot function."³⁷  At Laetoli, "the heel has an oval shape and is pressed deeply into the ground; the medial side of the arch is higher than the lateral one; … The adducted hallux extends more anteriorly than the other toes in all visible footprints."³⁶  A sixteen-inch oblong with no toes has none of this;  the Delk print has toes, and they are the wrong shape in the wrong plane.

4. Excavation in place, with the surface mapped.  The Laetoli Site S trail was found by a programme of "Sixty-two 2 × 2 m test pits … randomly positioned within a grid and were carefully excavated down to the Footprint Tuff."³⁶  The Happisburgh prints in England, which are only hollows, were accepted because "The surface was recorded using multi-image photogrammetry which showed that the hollows are distinctly elongated and the majority fall within the range of juvenile to adult hominin foot sizes.  In many cases the arch and front/back of the foot can be identified and in one case the impression of toes can be seen."³⁹  The White Sands prints were reported from "excavated surfaces … where multiple in situ human footprints are stratigraphically constrained."⁴⁰  Note what Happisburgh shows:  poorly preserved prints can pass, if the surface is recorded in place with its size distribution and context.  A loose slab cannot.

5. Three-dimensional data in an open format.  The 2018 standard protocol for ichnological data, agreed by a large international group of track specialists:  "Primarily, our aim is to make the 3D capture of ichnological data standard practice … We recommend capture of 3D data, and the presentation of said data in the form of photographs, false-colour images, and interpretive drawings.  Raw data (3D models of traces) should always be provided in a form usable by other researchers, i.e. in an open format."¹⁴  This is not a hurdle set for creationists;  it is what the Glen Rose dinosaur tracks themselves have received.  The type specimen of the Glen Rose theropod track, set into the town bandstand in the 1930s, was laser-scanned in 2010 to "create high-resolution, interactive models that can be digitally archived",⁴¹ and Bird's 1940 excavation was rebuilt from his photographs by photogrammetry in 2014.⁴²  No "human" print from the Paluxy has a 3D model anyone can download.

6. Examination by people who do not own the specimen.  When the White Sands ages were disputed, a second team dated pollen and quartz from the same horizons by two independent methods and published the result.⁴³  That is the procedure, whatever one thinks of the dates, and it is the procedure the Delk slab is closed to:  "only under very strict control of CEM."³⁵  The comparison that would settle the scan argument, the same machine on a known carving and a known track, has never been run.

7. Experimental controls.  Hatala's Laetoli study "conducted footprint formation experiments with habitually barefoot humans and with chimpanzees to quantitatively compare their footprints to those preserved at Laetoli."⁴⁴  Marty and colleagues walked on living microbial mats on tidal flats, the Glen Rose setting, and found that "a wide range of footprint morphologies was produced by the same trackmaker," which is a reason for caution in both directions, and why "systematic excavation of footprints combined with careful analysis of the encasing sediment" is required.⁴⁵  Nobody has walked a human across lime mud and compared the result with a Paluxy "man track."

Scoring the claims.

Every row fails the first column except the Taylor site, and the Taylor site fails the third.  Nothing from the Paluxy passes the 1976 test, let alone the 2018 one.

Objections and responses

"Bird himself called them man tracks and never explained them."  Bird's 1939 article calls the Gallup prints fakes and the riverbed print the mark of "some hitherto unknown dinosaur or reptile";  it says "man tracks" in quotation marks, as the local name.¹  His 1976 letter explains the elongate print as a theropod pulling its foot out of deep mud with the toes together.¹⁶  Morris's own book says "Bird concluded that the prints were carvings, not true footprints."³  The claim that Bird quietly admitted human tracks begins with Burdick in 1950 and is contradicted by everything Bird wrote.

"The retraction was forced by the river staining the prints; the stain could have been applied."  Answered in Part 4:  the colour continues several centimetres below the surface in the 1986 cores and in the cores Farlow's team describes, Morris's staining recipe produces only a surface film, ICR's own analysis found more iron inside than outside and no foreign chemical, and the colour appeared on tracks nobody was arguing about.  Morris in 2013:  "no direct evidence of evolutionary fraud has been uncovered."⁸

"The tracks were excavated from under undisturbed rock, so they cannot be fakes."  True of the Taylor site trails, and nobody since 1985 has said they were faked.  They are dinosaur tracks.  The carving explanation applies only to loose slabs.

"Dinosaurs do not walk on their heels; the metatarsal explanation is special pleading."  Metatarsal theropod trackways are now described from Texas, Queensland, Greenland and British Columbia, and a CMI geologist used the same explanation for the Tumbler Ridge prints in 2004.²⁵  At the Alfred West site the elongate tracks outnumber the normal ones and grade into them within single trails.⁵  Gatesy's Greenland trackways preserve the foot movement in three dimensions.²⁴

"The Delk slab's CT scans show compression under both prints, which no carving could produce."  The scans have never been published in a form anyone can check, were taken offline in 2010, were made on a medical scanner with no stated recalibration for rock, and were never compared with a scan of a known carving or a known track in the same limestone.  Juby's answer on beam hardening is a real argument and is quoted in Part 6;  it does not supply the missing controls, and the slab is closed to anyone who would.  CMI, which would like the slab to be genuine, judged that the questions "can't be answered because the contextual evidence of the rock's provenance no longer exists."¹²

"Even if the Paluxy prints fail, humans and dinosaurs did coexist, so the failure proves nothing."  Correct, and every creationist organisation now says exactly this:  AiG's certainty "comes not from the fossil record … but from the biblical record," and ICR "holds rigorously to the view that dinosaurs lived at the same time as man, but feels that the Paluxy may not provide useful evidence for this."³⁰  This article argues only about the evidence.  Whether the absence of human remains below the Neogene is a problem for the young-earth model is the order article's question, not this one's.

"Skeptics would call a perfect print 'too perfect' and an imperfect one 'unnatural', so no print could satisfy them."  Kuban's reply is on the record:  "to my knowledge no scientist has claimed that any alleged human print there was "too perfect" in the sense of being both distinct and natural looking."³⁴  The Burdick and Gallup prints were rejected for specific anatomical errors and for sawn sections, not for perfection.  Part 7 states what would satisfy the test;  Happisburgh shows that even poor prints pass it when the context is recorded.

"This article relies on Kuban, who is an anti-creationist."  Kuban was raised a young-earth creationist, came to the Paluxy hoping to confirm the tracks, and Morris described him in 1986 as claiming neutrality.  More to the point, every load-bearing fact above is confirmed by someone else:  the carvings by Bird, Neufeld and Morris;  the dinosaur toes by Neufeld in 1975 and ICR in 1986;  the cores by Hastings, Farlow's team and ICR's own chemistry;  the Delk slab's defects by CMI.  Kuban is cited because he did the fieldwork, and the creationist sources are quoted from their own pages.

Issues and unanswered questions

• Burdick's 1950 article was not obtained. Its claims reach this article through Bird's 1976 letter, Godfrey's quotation of Wilder-Smith, Hastings and Kuban. A copy of Signs of the Times for 25 July 1950 would let it be quoted directly.
• ICR's December 1988 Acts & Facts and Morris's 1986 letter to Nature were not obtained; both are characterised here through Kuban and Hastings. The 1988 piece would show exactly how far ICR went toward the overprinting model.
• Baugh's sections of the Burdick print have never been examined independently. They exist. A request to the museum to let a sedimentologist look at them would cost nothing.
• The Delk CT images are offline. Juby's Hounsfield readings (487 to 3048) are the only numbers in public. A scan of a known carving and a known Glen Rose track on the same machine is the experiment that would settle it, and only the museum can allow it.
• The film's date. Morris 1986 and Kuban 1989 say 1973; Kuban's later pages and Farlow 2012 say 1970; it was filmed from 1968 to 1972. This article uses 1973 for the release.
• The 1986 cores. ICR's were reported as inconclusive and never shown; Kuban and Hastings's were sent to Farlow's laboratory and are described in Farlow 2012 and 2015, but no stand-alone core report has been published. The conclusion rests on three teams' field descriptions, which agree.
• Wording trap for future writers. Morris 1986's withdrawal sentence begins "Even though"; the first clause alone is routinely quoted as a flat retraction, which overstates it, and the "chemical agents" line four lines earlier is routinely omitted, which understates what ICR left open. Quote both.

Verdict

The Paluxy "man tracks" were three things:  carvings sold to tourists in the 1930s, erosion marks on a tourist ledge, and elongated dinosaur tracks whose toes had been filled and whose fill the river later exposed in colour.  The first was recognised by Bird in 1938 and proved by saw in 1975;  the second and third were recognised by creationists at Loma Linda in 1975, mapped by Kuban from 1980, and conceded by ICR in January 1986 in the words of the man who had written the book.  ICR's own later chemistry removed the one doubt its 1986 statement left standing.  Nothing offered since has met the test ICR itself wrote in 1976, and the best-known new specimen, the Delk slab, has been declined by every creationist organisation with a research staff.  The claim is dead, and it was the movement's own people who killed it:  that is the one thing about the Paluxy that a young-earth apologist can still use.

Sources