Paluxy River Man Tracks
Roland T. Bird of the American Museum of Natural History came to Glen Rose in 1938 after seeing carved human footprints for sale in a New Mexico trading post. He found the dinosaur trackways that made the riverbed famous, and reported the human prints were carved. The claim outlived him by half a century, and the Institute for Creation Research retracted it in January 1986.
Field Guide Entry
What Bird came for
Bird was collecting for the American Museum of Natural History when he saw a pair of slabs in a trading post at Gallup, New Mexico, cut with what looked like giant human footprints. He traced them to Glen Rose, where men had been quarrying slabs out of the Paluxy riverbed through the Depression and carving prints into them to sell.
What he found in the river was better than what he had been chasing. The Paluxy holds theropod and sauropod trackways in Cretaceous limestone, and Bird lifted sections for the museum in New York, where they are still on display.
The prints people kept pointing at
Carved slabs were not the whole of it. Certain real impressions in the riverbed are elongated and blurred, and read to some eyes as bare human feet. These were argued through the 1970s as proof that people and dinosaurs walked the same ground, and a film, Footprints in Stone, put the case on church screens across the country.
Glen Kuban, who has been documenting the riverbed since 1980, showed what the elongated tracks are: dinosaur tracks in which the animal set its metatarsus down rather than walking on its toes. Rock color inside several of the tracks preserves the outline of digits the shape alone had hidden.
The retraction
In January 1986 the Institute for Creation Research published an article by John Morris in its Impact series stating that the tracks could not be used as evidence for human and dinosaur coexistence, and the organization withdrew its film. The retraction came from the group that had promoted the claim hardest.
The Creation Evidence Museum across the river still displays casts, and the tracks are still shown to visitors as human by people who are not employed by the state park.
Visiting Information
Entry is $8 per person aged 13 and older and free under 13. Day passes for summer weekends sell out, so buy one online before driving out.
The main track site is in the riverbed, which means the tracks come and go with the water. They read best in late summer and early fall when the Paluxy is low, and they disappear for weeks after heavy rain. Call 254-897-4588 the morning of a visit, or check the park's social feeds, which post river conditions.
Seeing the tracks means walking in the river. Shoes that can get soaked are the difference between a good visit and a short one, and the limestone is slick where algae sits on it. Track sites are marked along the water, and the park asks that nothing be cast, chalked, or scrubbed.
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