From:    Scott Faust
To:      Dr Pepper      93-05-16 22:32:00
Subject: "Mantracks"

DR PEPPER to ALL, 05-12-93, re: "Wilder-Smith"

> The last two days the radio show "The Bible Answer Man" has feature
> one A. E. Wilder-Smith. [...]

> WS [...] still promotes Paluxy. A caller on the show [...] tried to
> tell his father about Paluxy and his father had said he had friends
> who had gone there and taken ir photos of the prints, and the claws
> were clearly visible. [...]

> WS responded that just recently the tracks had shown changes, a result
> of iron in the rock changing state from ferrous to ferric. In situ?
> Wow! Anyway he said that that yes, claw marks were now showing, but
> what do you expect? Clearly the best way for a human to cross a muddy
> marsh was to step in the dinosaur prints so the human prints would be
> superimposed. And there was plenty of analysis done that clearly
> distinguished between the human and dinosaur prints, including showing
> all five toes.
>
> Anyone know anything bout this person?

 I know that his claims about the Paluxy are bovine excrement.
 Although its been several years now since I have bothered to go
 back, I've visited the Paluxy sites many times (its about a 2 hour
 drive from where I live, in Denton, Tx, north of Dallas and Fort
 Worth).

 The tracks that were being referred to in your radio show were
 clearly those of the Taylor Trail, which is actually in the stream
 bed and can only be exposed for close study by sandbagging or
 during a drought.  I had the good fortune to visit the site several
 times in the company of Ronnie Hastings and Glen Kuban during a
 drought in 1988 when the stream bed ran completely dry at the site.

 Hastings and Kuban are both amateurs, but have done quality work on
 the dinosaurs trackways of the Paluxy.  They eventually convinced
 most informed creationists that none of them can be positively
 identified as human.  Hastings is a math and physics teacher from
 Waxahachie, Texas who got tired of hearing about Paluxy "mantrack"
 claims from Mel and Norma Gabler and other anti-evolutionists, and
 decided (about 1982, I believe) to go down and have a look for
 himself.  Kuban is a computer programmer from Ohio.  Kuban is
 actually an evangelical christian, and first went down to the
 Paluxy about 1980 hoping to verify that human tracks were present!

 Kuban's examination of the tracks and trackways described in the
 creationist literature he had read soon convinced him, however,
 that the tracks were dinosaurian.  The tracks of the Taylor Trail,
 though, were of an unusual type.  In contrast to the typical short
 and wide birdlike tridactyle prints, these were elongate and
 vaguely oblong (and thus their identification as those of "giant"
 humans).  Kuban hypothesized that the dinosaur that made them had
 been walking plantigrade (flat footed), such that the heels of the
 prints were made by the dinosaur's metatarsals.  Dinosaurs normally
 walk digitigrade, with only the "balls" of their feet and toes in
 contact with the ground.

 By 1984, when there was another drought, Kuban had introduced
 himself to Hastings and the two were working together.  When the
 Taylor Trail was exposed that year a coloration phenomena was first
 noticed.  The dinosaur that made the trail was walking upstream,
 and the erosion and spalling of the tracks' infilling material had
 apparently been greater toward their posterior.  Repeated exposure
 was apparently causing a change in the color of the remaining
 infilling material (possibly due, indeed, to a higher iron content,
 though I am not up on the geochemistry) such that the "giant human"
 prints were now sprouting clear, tridactyle, dinosaurian toes.
 This phenomena has apparently continued, and the reddish brown
 infilling stood out very clearly and sharply against the white
 dolomitic limestone when I saw the site exposed in 1988.

 Kuban tried to get prominent creationists who had touted the
 mantrack claims to view the site while it was still dry, but did
 not succeed.  A year or two later, however, (I don't recall exactly
 when) he was able to get John Morris, whose book _Tracking Those
 Incredible Dinosaurs and the People Who Knew Them_ was the source
 that originally inspired Kuban to go to the Paluxy, and Paul Taylor
 of "Films for Christ", who discovered the trial and featured it his
 film _Footprints In Stone_, to visit the site.

 The tracks were viewed through the bottom of an empty aquarium
 pressed into the water.  Kuban then spent several hours in a nearby
 hotel room with the mantrackers -- the "heathen" Hastings having
 discretely absented himself -- answering their objections one by
 one (and doubtless over and over), showing them photographs and
 other evidence he had collected, and repeatedly forcing them to
 confront the evidence they had seen.  It took a lot more effort
 than should have been required, but eventually Morris and Taylor
 would retract their claims (for the most part, and not without some
 fussing and backsliding particularly from Morris) and agree to
 withdraw the book and movie.

 At one point, in fact in his "retraction", Morris darkly hinted
 that evolutionists might have painted the colorations onto the
 tracks with acid.  This was refuted, however, by the fact that it
 was clearly not possible to paint sharp edged features onto the
 limestone in this manner, and by cores taken at the margins of the
 colorations and inside the tracks showing that the coloration was a
 phenomena of track infilling material.  (Morris let these claims
 drop after taking core samples, but never to my knowledge
 explicitly retracted them or said publicly what he had seen in his
 cores.)

 O.K.  With all that background we now coming, in a moment, to the
 claim that your Wilder-Smith was repeating, a "reinterpretation" of
 the Taylor Trail.  Associated with the new claim are Texas
 creationists Carl Baugh and his associate Don Patton.

 Carl Baugh owns and operates the "Creation Evidences Museum" near
 the Paluxy River.  "Dr." Baugh is a particularly unctuous charlatan
 who is always waving a batch of diploma mill degrees.  (Kuban, Glen
 J. 1989. "A Matter of Degree: Carl Baugh's Credentials." _National
 Center for Science Education Reports_. 9(6):15-20.)

 Baugh is also a boob who is known for making rather, ah, eccentric
 claims.  Just as one quick example among many: a neural spine in
 his museum which looks to have come from a large fish is
 identified as the horn of a dinosaur that Baugh has named
 "unicerisaurus" (or something like that, i.e., after "unicorn").
 Baugh interprets the surface where the base of the spine sits on
 top of the vertebral column as indicating a joint that allowed his
 dinosaur to fold this horn into the back of its head like a
 jackknife!

 Don Patton (not to be confused with the velikovskyite creationist
 Donald W. Patton) founded a Dallas/Fort Worth area group called the
 Metroplex Institute for Origin Science (MIOS) which has supported
 and promoted Baugh's "research" and claims.

 Patton seems to share Baugh's penchant for adding dubious letters
 to the end of his name.  When Patton appeared at the 1989 National
 Conference on Biblical Origins in Dayton, TN to present the new
 Taylor Trail claim, the printed program implied that he had at
 least four degrees from three different schools.  Patton made no
 attempt to correct this "mistake" publicly, but admitted to Kuban
 that he has -no- degrees, though he claims to have taken many
 undergraduate courses in geology.

 I haven't kept up with MIOS for several years, but for a long time
 he allowed its members and others to believe that he had a Ph.D.
 candidacy in geology from Queensland Christian University in
 Australia.  This school, however, is a diploma mill owned by the
 Australian creationist Clifford Wilson.  (See Kuban's article on
 Baugh's credentials.)

 Baugh and Patton now concede that the tracks of the Taylor Trail
 are dinosaurian, but have claimed since late 1988 that there are
 human tracks -inside- the dinosaur tracks.  They suggested the
 theory that Wilder-Smith repeats -- that the human was purposefully
 stepping inside the dinosaurs tracks to improve his traction in a
 slippery mud.  This is patently absurd.  If you are on a slippery
 surface you must take very small steps to keep from slipping.  You
 certainly don't take dinosaur sized strides!

 Furthermore, there are no accentuated heel strikes to indicate such
 behaviour.  Indeed there is little or nothing besides legerdemain
 and wishful thinking to indicate the presence of these supposed
 human tracks.  Kuban writes the following in an article refuting
 the claim.  (Kuban, Glen J. 1989. "Retracking Those Incredible
 Mantracks." _NCSE Reports_. 9(4):

    Having intensively studied the Taylor Site since 1980 (and as
    recently as August 1989), I can testify that none of the Taylor
    Trail tracks (or other tracks on the site) contain clear human
    features [...]  In fact, the new "man track" claims are not
    really new, but are simply variations on the old, thoroughly
    refuted claims.  What Baugh and Patton are now claiming as human
    prints are merely vague or ambiguous features within the largely
    infilled metatarsal segments (soles and heels) of the dinosaur
    prints -- essentially the same depressions previously
    misinterpreted by various creationists as human prints.

 It should also be emphasized, as Kuban notes in passing above, that
 the Taylor Site tracks are still partially infilled, and not
 just in the region of the toes (where most of them are still
 completely infilled).  In Other Words, the supposed human prints
 are not in the bottom of the dinosaurs prints, but are -in- the
 infilling material.  How these tracks were able to form without
 a difference in composition between the substrate and the infilling
 material is a mystery that Baugh and Patton don't seem to address.

 Kuban describes it in his article, but I was also at the 1989
 creationist convention in Dayton, Tennessee to hear Patton's
 presentation on this claim.  It seemed to me that it come off
 poorly even to this creationist audience.  Some of the most
 impressive -seeming- evidence that Patton offered was a series of
 photographs of the tracks with what looked like topographic lines
 imposed on them.  Patton showed how these indicated the outlines of
 the alleged human prints.  But only under determined questioning
 did it come out that the "topographic" lines were drawn -freehand-
 by an artist friend from -two dimensional- projections of the
 prints!

 There were also attempts to revive this "new" Taylor Trail claim at
 one or two other creationism conferences, but they seem to have
 fallen flat also.