First, Stephenville folks were seeing spaceships.
Now, two Stephenville retirees — one a lay preacher — have found a mighty weird rock.
Preachers nationwide want the rock to unlock the secret of Biblical creation. The two Stephenville men, both in their 70s, claim they found a fossilized dinosaur track near Glen Rose eight years ago. Last spring, they polished it and discovered a deeper human footprint.
But a granddaughter from the family that discovered the famous Glen Rose Trackway of fossilized dinosaur footprints says to hold the sermons: It’s probably a fake.
"My grandfather was a very good sculptor," said Zana Douglas, from the Adams family that found many of Glen Rose’s real dinosaur tracks about a century ago.
During the 1930s and the Depression, Glen Rose residents made money by distilling moonshine and selling dinosaur fossils. Each fossil brought $15 to $30. When the supply ran low, George Adams just carved more, some with human footprints thrown in.
Since at least 1950, preachers have walked the earth in Glen Rose claiming that the fake footprints refute the scientific theory of evolution. The plentiful supply of footprints — both real and fake — has stirred endless confusion and one entire ministry, the Creation Evidence Museum.
Flash-forward to this summer, when fossil collector and Pentecostal lay preacher Alvis Delk, 72, of Stephenville decided to sell off some artifacts to pay medical bills.
Delk and friend James H. Bishop, 70, of Stephenville, an ex-con with a 1969 murder conviction in Eastland, were using a stubby brush to clean up a 2-foot-wide dinosaur footprint that they found on a 2000 hike along a branch of the Paluxy River.
The brush dug deep and found a deeper print of what looks like a human big toe.
Delk sold the fossil to the Rev. Carl Baugh of the Creation Evidence Museum, founded in Glen Rose in 1984 to promote the literal biblical model of creation as an alternative to the theory of evolution.
If you found a fossil with a footprint that might rewrite science books, where would you take it first?
Baugh took it to a clinic for a CT scan.
The scan showed that the fossil had limestone layers, according to the ministry’s Web site at www.creationevidence.org. But since no scientists were involved, about all we really know so far is that the museum has a new rock.
David Lines, whose family has run a Christian school in Fannin County, is the museum photographer.
He said he can’t figure out how the footprint might have been faked.
"My feeling right now is that it’s genuine," he said Friday. But he also said that he has never seen a footprint that looked fake.
He said that he believes that scientists aren’t rushing to see the fossil because of a "wall of silence" in the academic community: "They can’t argue against it, so they just hope it’ll go away."
Zana Douglas, the Adamses’ granddaughter, laughed.
"My dad [Weldon Eakin] and my grandfather decided one day — I don’t know if it was to make money, or what — to start carving man tracks alongside the dinosaur tracks," said Douglas, 67 and now living near Houston.
They poured acid to make the fossils look like aged limestone, she said. They showed one "all over town" until they heard that a researcher from the Smithsonian Institution wanted to see the track.
"That worried my grandfather because he didn’t want anybody ever passing it off as real," she said. "So he and Daddy took it out and buried it."
She was a little girl at the time. They never saw it again, she said.
"I don’t know where they buried it."
I think we know.
(Original headline: Human footprints along with dinosaur tracks? )
