Defeat for Strict Creationists

By Michael B. Lemonick.

The strictest creationists, who take the biblical story of creation literally, believe that the earth was created only several thousand years ago, complete with all the animal species that have ever lived. In their vision, some species perished in Noah's flood but until then dinosaurs and people walked the earth together.

Paleontologists do not argue with those who accept this account on faith. But they take strong issue with practition-ers of "creation science," who purport to offer scientific evidence that this Fred Flintstone version of prehistory is correct. For decades a strong piece of that "evidence" has been a cluster of fossilized tracks in the seasonally dry bed of the Paluxy Creek, near Glen Rose, Texas. One track of three-toed footprints was obviously made by a dinosaur. The feet that made another track, crossing the first at an angle, lacked the giant toes and looked human to some. The fact that the two varieties of tracks were made at about the same time, creation scientists have long claimed, shows that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. But thanks to the efforts of investigators like Glen J. Kuban, a computer programmer and amateur track expert--who also happens to believe in the Creator--creation scientists have conceded that the second set of tracks was not human after all.

According to Kuban, whose conclusions were presented last month at a New Mexico symposium on dinosaur tracks and traces and printed in the current issue of the journal Creation/Evolution, the Paluxy tracks have been known to local folk since being uncovered by a 1908 flash flood. The world learned of them in the 1930s, when residents set up roadside stands to sell both real and fake samples of the footprints. When paleontologists went to investigate the source, they saw dinosaur tracks but found the man tracks too indistinct to identify.

In the early 1960s pictures of the site appeared in a creationist book called The Genesis Flood, and the creationist camp seized on them to prove their contention that all species had once coexisted. The arguments were precariously based on the widely held belief that bipedal dinosaurs stepped toe first when walking, a conclusion bolstered by the fact that their tracks usually include only the front part of the foot and the three toes, with the heel generally faint or missing. At Paluxy, some prints are oblong and toeless. True, they are 15 to 20 in. long, but, argue creationists, they could conceivably have been made by biblical giants.

Enter Glen Kuban. "I decided that if it really was true, somebody ought to go down and document it better," he says. "If it wasn't true, then that ought to be demonstrated better too." He found that shallow grooves at the front of the tracks were typical of dinosaurs, not humans, and that the tracks widened at the front more than human prints would. It was not until later, Kuban recalls, that he noticed toeprints, outlined in the same bluish-gray material that helps distinguish the tracks from the tan-ivory surrounding rock. Further study revealed similar tracks, but with distinct toeprints.

"In other words," says Kuban, "there was no question that a dinosaur was capable of making these elongated prints." He offers several explanations for the toelessness, all acceptable to paleontologists: soft mud might have filled the narrow toe marks soon after the dinosaur walked by. Then, too, some other material may have sifted into the toe marks long after the prints hardened. Or perhaps, for some reason, erosion distorted the prints. Even before Kuban's findings, mainstream scientists did not lose much sleep over the Paluxy footprints. Says Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who has visited the site: "Everyone knows that they are dinosaur tracks. It's been a non-issue in the field for a long time." The question of whether some dinosaurs stepped heel first, however, remains. Kuban's contention that they came down on their metatarsals "fundamentally reorganizes what we know about the foot anatomy of bipedal dinosaurs," says David Gillette, curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and organizer of the symposium. University of Texas Paleontologist Wann Langston is not so sure. Since Kuban is not an anatomy expert, Langston maintains, " the jury is still out."

But even creation scientists concede that the verdict about the "man prints" has been convincingly handed down. "As a scientist, I am willing to be wrong if I am wrong," says John D. Morris, associate professor of geology at the Institute for Creation Research in El Cajon, Calif. His book Tracking Those Incredible Dinosaurs and the People Who Knew Them and a creationist movie on the same subject have been withdrawn from circulation.

With reporting by Cristina Garcia/San Francisco and Jack E. White/Chicago