Did Humans Walk With Dinosaurs? A Look at the Paluxy Tracks

Giant humans, or fakes?  These human tracks were claimed by locals to have
 been found at Paluxy and sold during the Depression.

A few months ago I stumbled on a little Creationist classic at a used bookstore - John Morris' Tracking Those Incredible Dinosaurs and the People Who Knew Them (1980).   It is about the discovery and filming of a famous set of fossilized footprints found along the Paluxy River in Texas.  Although fossilized footprints are not rare, this particular finding sparked the early years of scientific creationism in the United States.  Because here, preserved in the hardened mud along the shore of the mighty Paluxy, in a layer of ancient limestone dating back to the Cretaceous, were dinosaur footprints co-existing with those of man.

Welcome to Jurassic Park

When I was a child, I was really into dinosaurs.  (Alright, let’s admit it, I’m still really into dinosaurs).  I had stacks of books about them, both fiction and non-fiction.  I spent literally hundreds of hours among the crushed-up gravel of our driveway, finding the remains of ancient sea life embedded in the limestone.  I even found two large, complete, perfectly fossilized snail shells along the shore of Lake Erie, and to this day they number among my most prized possessions (not dinosaurs, I know, but I’ll take what I can get).  There was something about dinosaurs that sparked my imagination, that opened up undreamed-of possibilities, that showed me that I was a bit player in a story far larger than anything I could conceive.