DINOSAURS pt. 1

Moral pain. Conspiracy. And crazy. Examine the whole thing. With eyelashes and the floor. Creationists also take the story of Noah and the flood literally. No matter how old you are, I bet you can still name your favorite dinosaur. The Stegosaurus was mine, the armored vegetarian with those punk rock plates lining its back, its spiked tail like a chain mace swinging around and stabbing predators right in the face.

I had a plastic version I played with all the time, until I generously gifted it, along with a teenage mutant ninja turtle toy that could do a backflip, to my beloved pet box turtle, Barney. no relation to the dearly saccharin singing purple dinosaur, the final neutered form of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which was once known as the Tyrant Lizard King. There, the 90s toy Stegosaurus sat in a smelly terrarium with its distant relative 165 million years removed.

Stretching its wrinkled neck toward a fragment of banana. Of course, alongside Barney and friends. I had been watching the 1993 adventure thriller Jurassic Park religiously, announcing, like so many other millennials, that I would one day become a paleontologist. Siblingless at the time, I would hang out by myself in the backyard hunting for fossils, breaking open rocks with bigger rocks, and smashing my fingers over and over again.

Once I even discovered a shape protruding from a slab of stone that looked like it could be a skull, at least in my imagination. I chipped away at it for hours using a screwdriver and a hammer made of yet another rock. And that, my young friends, was childhood before the internet. Anybody hear that? It's a um it's an impact harm is what it is. I'm fairly alarmed here. Come on, come on, come on, come on. We gotta get out of here. Gotta get out of here. Now, now, right now. Go go, Bill, let's go.

Must go faster. It was indeed the cinematic universe of Jurassic Park that really lit the 90s dinosaur craze on fire, as well as the otherworldly Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios.

For your own safety while on the ride, sit upright and face forward all times while holding on to the lap arm. Store your belongings securely and remembered hats as they will fly off. Again, face forward and hold on to the lap. Floating on a raft through a beautiful pre- Prehistoric world reborn in the modern day, we saw two little dinosaurs, tug of warring with a popcorn box. A bigger dinosaur with its terrifying neck frill spitting venom right at us. And of course.

The enormous roaring T-Rex breaking through the ceiling, its jaws almost snatching our raft, before an 85-foot drop. that would leave us soaking wet and smiling in ecstatic fear. Milder pop culture versions of these frightful creatures helped the craze along too, like the land before time. It whispers. So listen closely Barney and Franz Did you know that laughing is good for you?

And of course, the way ahead of its time Jim Henson Productions brainchild called simply Dinosaurs. Hi, I'm the baby, brand new, just out, gotta love me, come on!

Although it can feel like dinosaurs belong to the Gen X and millennial generations, the American pop culture mass obsession with these wonderful beasts actually stretches back more than a hundred years when they became stars of the screen, of the stage, and of theme park esque exhibits at the widely attended world's fairs. For this two-part series, we'll see that dinosaurs are very American monsters, or at least they were for a long period in the emerging field of paleontology back in the 1800s.

For much of the discipline's history. The greatest number of prehistoric fossils and the largest fossilized bones were found right here in the United States, and the biggest celebrity dinosaurs were ours as well. The triceratops, the bronosaurus, the stegosaurus, and of course, the tyrannosaurus rack. In part one, we're gonna look at dinosaurs' explosive entrance into the popular culture of the early part of the 20th century.

through silent movies, quirky exhibits, goofy fossil fuel campaigns, and eventually into pop fundamentalism and their new creationist theories. We'll also look at the concept of what is referred to as deep time. The shocking realization that the world was billions of years old, when for millennia, Western culture had relied on a strictly biblical timeline.

For part two, we'll look at the Wild West History of early paleontology, how scientists battled tooth and nail for undiscovered fossils, and how the mega-rich and their corporations. Shaped the early conception of dinosaurs to support the rise of industrial capitalism and the supremacy of the United States. But before said capitalism ruins everything we love yet again, we are going to look at the wonder that dinosaurs have long provided to kids and adults alike.

These baffling creatures that are simultaneously real and imaginary. Something we can believe in but never truly know. simultaneously scientific creatures and fairy tale beings that we have always been determined to bring back to life.

On June 2, 1922, a gala was held for the illustrious Society of American Magicians, including Chairman Harry Houdini. One of the presenters of the evening was the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the famous author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. When it was his turn to speak, the eccentric Scotsman bounded onto the stage in front of a movie screen and made a very strange speech to the famously skeptical lot of magicians.

First, what I'm going to show you is not a cult, but it is psychic, because it emanates from the human brain. Everything is psychic. What you will see is not supernatural. It is preternatural, because it is not in accord with the natural laws as we know them. It has been produced by a combination of imagination and materializing power. I will answer no questions regarding them, either for the press or the others present.

At his flamboyant signal, a projector began whirring, and the crowd sat wrapped with confused attention. What they were seeing on the screen seemed to be. beasts of yore unveiled to the nation only decades prior, no longer just dusty bones perched in a museum or illustrated in dull textbook pages. In this film, the massive creatures ambled through the foliage of their ancient landscape, brutally fighting one another with horns and jaws.

The Bronosaurus, the Triceratops, the Tyrannosaurus, they were all there, roaring silently for a sea of magic men. Who Doyle hoped might truly believe, even for a moment, that what they were seeing was real footage, somehow transported psychically from millions of years before. But these magicians were already accustomed to the paranormal antics of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a man who had an extreme public obsession with spiritualism.

the belief that it was possible to communicate with the dead through mediums, something that Houdini and the Society of American Magicians had spent much of their time successfully debunking. Doyle had also introduced the world just a few years before to the story of the Cottingley Fairies. A series of photographs taken by a teenage girl and her younger sister that showed what appeared to be living fairies.

Leading to the widespread mockery of Doyle's gullibility when it became immediately apparent that it was all a child's hoax. What the esteemed magicians had actually seen that night. Stop-motion silent picture that brought to life Doyle's 1912 novel, The Lost World, a story about the hunt for a secluded area still secretly inhabited by prehistoric creatures. Yes, would inspire Michael Crichton's book and Steven Spielberg's movie of the same name Eighty Years Later.

A former guide for fossil hunting paleontologists, Willis O'Brien was the artist behind the meticulous micro adjustments that created a pretty convincing optical illusion of movement. Not only that, but the film stitched together famous actors of the time with these moving sculptures, a shocking bit of new movie technology. And though the papers liked to report that the magicians had indeed been tricked into believing the footage was somehow real.

I highly doubt that some of the most skeptical men in America were tricked by their favorite, credulous nemesis. In an article wired to outlets all over the country, reporters reprinted the open letter that Doyle wrote to the chairman of the society after that sneak preview of The Lost World. My dear Houdini, My cinema interlude upon the occasion of the magician's dinner should, I think, be explained, now that its purpose was fulfilled.

The purpose was, simply, to provide a little mystification to those who have so often and so successfully mystified others. I was emphatic that it was not a cult and only psychic, insofar as all things human come from a man's spirit. It was pre natural, in the sense that it was not nature as we know it. All my others were, as I think you will agree, within the actual fact.

The dinosaurs and other monsters have been constructed by pure cinema. I could not resist the temptation to surprise your associates and guests. And now, Mr Chairman, confidence begets confidence, and I want to know how you got out of that trunk. Very cute, Arthur.

When the movie premiered to the public in 1925, papers printed rumors about viewers who, unlike the magicians, indeed believed that what they were seeing was somehow beyond the realm of the possible. It would prove to be a monumental moment in the history of cinema. A smash hit that almost caused riots at theaters, chock full of frenzied patrons trying to get inside the screening. People were so amazed, so horrified, and so in love with these frightening beasts.

that more and more major stop motion dinosaur films were produced. Including the nineteen thirty three horror masterpiece. King Kong, which contains such scenes as a Stegosaurus getting gas bombed and then shot to death with rifles, a T Rex getting its jaw broken in half by the massive prehistoric giant ape, And a brontosaurus ragging a man with its teeth like a dog with a toy. What do you call this thing? Why, something from the dinosaur family.

Dinosaur, eh? Yes, Jack. A prehistoric beast. Say, just look at the length of that brute. If I could only bring back one of these alive. Dr. Rand, come on. King Kong is widely considered to be the movie that saved RKO pictures. and possibly Hollywood at large during the Great Depression, thanks in no small part to the real stars of the film, the dinosaurs. Who would become a favorite feature of thriller films for the century to come?

Prior to the feature-length movie The Lost World, dinosaurs had been presented in short films mainly as comedic mechanisms. This is best demonstrated by Gertie the Dinosaur, an animated brontosaurus who got her start on the stage. When vaudeville performer and newspaper cartoonist Windsor McKay drew 10,000 meticulous frames to bring a brand new character to life. Inspired by the flip books, his son was so fond of. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Gertie the dinosaur.

I will speak to Gertie, and she will do everything that I ask. Come on out and take a pretty bow. That's a good girl. This was one of the very first screen animations, and because of this, it still had a little bit of the theater in the act. On the vaudeville stage, the whip wielding Windsor McKay would actually interact with the cartoon dinosaur on the screen, giving the adorable but often ill-behaved Gertie commands like a trained elephant.

All predetermined by what he knew the animation would do next. Out of the audience, Gurdy. Stop that nonsense. Let's get on with the act. Raise your right hand. That's good. Now raise your left foot. Your left foot. Never mind that sea monster. Your left foot. It's honestly really funny. Gertie swallows huge rocks and chokes down a full tree, drinks an entire lake, throws a mammoth named Jumbo toward the horizon with her mouth.

Dances and bows after much goading and cries mellow dramatically when McKay is stern with her. Come on, Gertie. Now stop acting like a dim witted dinosaur. Take it easy, Gertie. Bad girl. All right. Now stop that crying. Here. Here's a nice pumpkin for you. The cartoonist performer had designed the animation so when he tossed a pumpkin behind the screen, it appeared falling into Gertie's mouth as small as a grape.

He also walked behind the screen and appeared in cartoon form, climbing onto her back as a teeny tiny man. The stage show was so popular that it was made into a film in 1914, starring Windsor McKay and Gertie, which became a smash hit with children and adults alike. Gertie, coming years before the first Disney animations, was a massive inspiration to Walt himself. and a large statue of the Bronosaurus still exists at an ice cream stand at Disney's Hollywood Studios.

He also paid homage to the beloved cartoon by using it as a springboard for the Rite of Spring dinosaur section of nineteen forties Fantasia. Gertie the Dinosaur, as well as the other thrilling horror flicks to come, proved especially popular with children and teenagers. Cementing dinosaurs as both wondrous and terrifying in the popular imagination, the exact combination kids like me were always looking for.

But really, what would these proto-Jurassic Park movies be without their own version of the Jurassic Park ride? More after this. And now back to the show.

In the early 1900s, a child of a vaudeville family named George Mesmore moved to New York City to work as a prop master at the Metropolitan Opera. While creating his sets, he became proficient in an evolving art form. One of my personal favorites, animatronics. Mesmore soon found his other half in a former butcher's assistant named Joseph Damon, who had become familiar with the anatomy of animals through well, you get it.

He left that life behind when he was accepted to the Arts Student League in New York City, and a chance meeting at a soda fountain counter would change the course of their lives forever. The duo, who went by Messmore and Damon, began their career together in the parade business, which had really begun taking off in the 1910s and 1920s, as told in our Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade episode.

Right as animatronics was becoming a hot new pop technology, they became known for crafting huge, grotesque heads from Grimm's fairy tales. Big mechanical clowns, and eventually a much beloved pack of realistic elephants. And, like all dangerously energized startups, the Mesmore and Damon Company wanted to go bigger. But what animatronic animal could they create that was bigger than an elephant?

Well, a full sized version of the Brontosaurus, of course, the skeleton of which had only been discovered some sixty years before. They constructed a 47-foot animatron that made its debut during a New Jersey Christmas parade in 1924, and it awed the almost half a million spectators that came in large part to see the Bronosaurus. and then at the unspoken encouragement of the beast to shop till they dropped.

While at the department store, kids could then enter essay writing competitions for prizes, just like we did in the 1990s, by answering questions like: What would a live dino do if it came down the street to? Mesmore and Damon's prehistoric spectacle had been made of bamboo and shellact felt, and was controlled partially by a human hidden within the beast.

Witnesses saw the dinosaur open its mouth, move its eyes, flare its nostrils, breathe in and out, and sweep its head and long neck over the gasping crowd. The Bronosaurus could also perform some tricks. Using its mouth, it would grab hats right off of spectators' heads, snatch newspapers from their hands, and even take a lit cigarette from the lips of an audience member to have a smoke itself.

Using a hidden phonograph and an amplifier inside its jaws, the creature would let out a massive roar that according to an employee was made from a recording of a thunderstorm played backwards. Which would sound something like this. Mesmore, Damon, and the animatron that they call the amphibious dinosaurus brontosaurus. Went on a tour of the United States and Canada, becoming pop culture royalty in every town they visited.

The pair was soon inspired to create similar models of a mammoth using one of their old animatronic elephants and three hundred and fifty goatskins, as well as a triceratops made from the skeleton of an old rhino model. Newspapers love to describe their shows in horror-movie-esque terms. For example, the literary digest wrote.

Those who have seen the great amphibious Dinosaurus brontosaurus in action declare that the semblance of life is too real to be pleasant and confess an impulse to make sure of a ready exit in case of eventualities. A nineteen twenty six advertisement read Warning. Children that are inclined to be nervous or hysterical should be informed that these animals are harmless.

As to them, their size and appearance may prove terrifying. Now a national sensation, the animatron tried its luck, as many do on the stage. In nineteen thirty-one, the Bronnosaurus was the star of the final act of a vaudeville show called Fifty Million Years Ago, running out of New York City's Roxy Theater. Yeah. Just as a group of prehistoric priests were bringing a sacrificial virgin to their altar, the dinosaur burst through the back curtain, grabbed her with its mouth.

lifted her off the stage and carried her away into the wings. The height of Mesmore and Damon's animatronic fame would come when their proposed exhibit, The World a Million Years Ago, was approved for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Inside a massive dome constructed for the display, moving walkways shuttled spectators backward in time through different life-sized dioramas of prehistoric eras.

featuring animatrons of the pterodactyl, mammoth, triceratops, stegosaurus, tyrannosaurus, and of course their Brontosaurus. Spectators could then exit through the proverbial gift shop, where they could purchase some of the earliest Dino merch. We take you back 215 million years at the Chicago World's Fair, which brings to life terrifying features like the mammoth.

Boasting tusks no modern elephant can rival, it roamed Alaska and Siberia. The Triceratops of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado resembled a horned rhino. An ancestor of the armadillo called the Glyptodon.

And here's the world-famed dinosaur. You can get an idea of its size by comparing it with the little visitors who are fascinated by this giraffe-necked terror of the swamps with eyelashes like a movie queen. The Battle of a Century. 200 million years ago, a realistic reproduction of a fight to the death. When the Chicago World's Fair proved to be an unprecedented success, boasting some 39 million visitors.

it was extended into nineteen thirty four, and Messmore and Damon were welcomed back to reprise the popular, allegedly educational, exhibit. But they knew they needed to step it up to make sure attendance stayed high. So they really stretched out the meaning of educational. Placed beside a new display they also made called History of Torture, which showed mostly hoax medieval torture devices of dubious origin, they rebranded their prehistoric exhibit.

Down the Lost River, and replace the moving walkways with a new mode of transportation. It was advertised like this. pushed by a Neanderthal man, and float down a lost river through the prehistoric world of a million years ago. Into a seeping, crawling, mysterious jungle full of animated animals of a forgotten age. Moving, snarling, raging in prehistoric slime and confusion. And there you have it, folks, the very first Jurassic Park ride.

Of course, Messmore and Damon continued to amp up the publicity novelties. The press had a field day when two animatronic cave people, nicknamed Mr. and Mrs. Goo-Goo, were flown in to become a new part of the exhibit. Reporters wrote tongue-in-cheek stories on the disappointment of the prehistoric couple at their multiple flight delays, and printed amusing pictures of the Neanderthals finally boarding the plane.

Among other well-known people, celebrity aviator and future vanisher Amelia Earhart posed next to their Brontosaurus. Most noteworthy was the nudest wedding held inside the exhibit, which included the naked bride and groom attended by their nine naked guests. and a barefoot minister clad only in a leopard skin. The newspapers reported that the beautiful ceremony took place under the long neck of the Bronosaurus.

That is, until one of the animatronics malfunctioned and knocked a nudist right into the lost river. When the fair finally ended, Mesmore and Damon parted ways, but the story of the amphibious Dinosaurus Bronosaurus was not over yet. As the Great Depression ended and the German fascists rose to power, the formerly gentle giant, like every good American, would join the war effort by participating in demonstrations of patriotism.

In parades, the animatron was covered in elaborate armor and given a horn-helmeted, barbarian-like rider, and was accompanied by a jarring soundscape of Hitler's snapping speeches. blasted out from a loudspeaker. The amphibious Dinosaurus Bronosaurus was officially renamed the Axis War Monster. Back at the Chicago World's Fair, before its Antifa transformation, the robotic Brontosaurus was not the only Dino Diva demanding attention. There was another not far away, also vying for the spotlight.

Back, back to the age of dinosaurs, when oil was forming in the earth. From this great age of power comes the great new name in premium gasoline. Sinclair, Dino Supreme. Now from the age of power through Up until recently, I, without any real thought behind the matter, believed crude fossil fuels were partially made of the ancient dead bodies of dinosaurs.

This is a very common and pretty goofy misconception, one that some of you have probably believed too. There's a reason why this idea was cemented in the American consciousness. Taking precedence over the far less fun fact that our oil is actually the decomposed remains of prehistoric plankton and algae that were under extreme heat and pressure for millions of years. Now think for a second. Can you recall the mascot of the Sinclair Oil Corporation?

It's that green Brontosaurus known as Dino that not only graces their logo, but also appears in the form of large statues outside some of their gas stations. Dino has a history almost as old as the company itself, first made famous by their competing prehistoric exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair. The Sinclair oil display had a mechanical Bronosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, Hydrosaur, and Protoceratops.

each made by paper mache movie artist PJ Allen, alongside his huge ferns and jagged rocks that decorated the outdoor diorama. Whereas Mesmore and Damon's The World a Million Years Ago existed as a form of entertainment and an attempt at education, Sinclair's display had an ulterior motive. Along the winding path, there were explanations of how the company's very special oil was deeply intertwined with the oldest prehistoric eras. How exciting!

Their stated mission was to explain some of the most interesting features connected with the manufacture and sale of Sinclair Opaline Motor Oil. And to impress on the mind of the public the vast age of the crude oils. oils from which the Sinclair motor oils are made. They were using the fairgoers' hunger for dinosaurs in order to become the top predator of the industry by getting customers to believe that better oil came from older rocks.

Somewhat surprisingly, Sinclair Oil's exhibit was praised for being far more scientifically accurate than Mesmore and Damon's. which, though awe-inspiring, was referred to by some natural history aficionados as humbug.

The scientific edge went to Sinclair because there was already an established relationship between the crude oil producer and the world of serious paleontology and geology. You see, in the post. Civil War era, the United States economy was swinging toward a focus on extraction, whether that be of oil, metals, minerals, or other valuable treasures that lay in the mountains of the West.

This meant that more and more potentially valuable fossils were being found by miners while they were on the job, leading to a symbiotic relationship between big business and the academic field of natural history. And so, Sinclair did not just use prehistoric paper-mache pageantry to bolster their brand. They actually sponsored the work of one of the most important paleontologists of the 20th century, Barnum Brown.

In 1902 and then 1908, Brown, who was the curator of fossil reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History, uncovered the bones of the most famous dinosaur of all, the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The public was, of course, Thrilled by the massive new predator, which had been located in Hell Creek, Montana, when Barnum Brown blasted a sandstone dig site with a few sticks of Dino Mite. Subsequently, his fame became enormous. and the eccentric fossil hunter certainly leaned in.

often wearing lavish fur coats to dig sites all over the world, indulging in hard drinking, chain smoking, risky gambling, and of course, beautiful women. Alongside the promotional rubber brontosaurus toys given out at their stations, Barnum Brown made collectible stamps and dinosaur books for Sinclair's customers, which reached more than six hundred and fifty thousand copies in circulation.

In return, Sinclair Oyle bestowed a whole lot of money on Barnum so he could continue his work through the Great Depression. All in all, the Sinclair funding would allow Barnum Brown to excavate. four thousand bones, around twenty dinosaurs worth, which amounted to a whole lot of good, adventurous PR for the oil company.

But that's not all. Sinclair, along with other big petroleum and mining companies that funded paleontologists, asked them to scout out potential oil wells as they surveyed the landscape for prehistoric dig sites. Barnum Brown would even have a stint as a spy for American big oil, looking for possible petroleum extraction sites abroad under the guise of innocent geological exploration.

Decades later, the eighty-nine-year-old paleontologist would also help design nine new fiberglass. Sinclair dinosaurs for the nineteen sixty four New York World's Fair in an exhibit called Dinosaurs. These are a few of the millions of car-owning traveling Americans who will be telling their friends about the fair and about Sinclair Dinoland for years to come.

Sinclair Dinoland, in a prime location, surrounded by titans of American industry, one of the most popular exhibits of the New York World's Fair. A world of wonders that flourished 200 million years ago. A vanished world, recreated by Sinclair. Youngsters and adults alike stand in awe of a world that was.

And of course, there's that face so familiar to all of us. Our own Dino. On formal occasions, he's called Bratosaurus. 70 feet long, tips the scales at a substantial 35 tons, which makes him about the right size for a company like ours. As a result of being featured as the Sinclair trademark, Brontosaurus is world famous. Partly for transportation, partly for the spectacle, these dinosaurs would actually be floated down the Hudson River on a large barge.

And it was such an extraordinary event that traffic came to a stop, and many children were allowed to skip school to watch the prehistoric aquatic procession. Stranger cargo has ever embarked since the days of Noah comes. A floating preview of a World's Fair exhibit. The eight assorted dinosaurs are life-size and will be placed in a setting to remind the world of tomorrow of the world. Yesterday's ago. If their fiberglass eyes could see, they would no doubt find the Manhattan sky.

as startling as it does them. The harbor fireboats. Once the world's fair began, Dino Land would attract a record fifty-one million people. Who would get a chance to experience a new generation of commercial dinosaurs? In addition, a futuristic machine made plastic dinosaurs for the kids right before their eyes, the most popular souvenir of the fair, and the adults were offered a coupon for a free tank of Sinclair gasoline.

Once the fair ended, the Dino Land crew toured the nation to different shopping malls, like aspiring girl bands and boy bands in the nineteen nineties. From there, the fiberglass statues were split up and shipped away to different forever homes, with the Bronosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex landing at Dinosaur Valley State Park in Texas.

Right near the Paloxi River, where a very different kind of Was coming together, a direct fundamentalist pushback against the discovery of prehistoric life that challenged the authority of the Bible's earthly timeline. More after this. And now back to the show. The past history of this planet and how life originated upon it have always been subjects of great interest. Basically there are two major views. One, origin by evolution.

Two, origin by special creation. Thoroughgoing evolutionists believe this universe and life within it came into existence by time and chance through a process of natural selection and survival of the fittest. A literal interpretation of the biblical account would indicate an immediate Full-grown creation, having the appearance of age, with man designated as Lord of the planet.

The creationists believe this original paradise was brought to an end by man's rebellion against his creator. Now you're probably asking, what has all this to do with a river down in Texas or man and dinosaur? I think it's important to consider how baffling the revelation of deep time was to Christian Western culture. the sudden understanding that the earth was not an easy biblical six thousand years old, but instead millions or billions.

I feel like that could be as astonishing to us today as the discovery of life on another planet. It kind of ripped reality in two. If dinosaurs indeed lived eons before people, had God not created every animal alongside man on the fourth and fifth days of creation as described in Genesis? had Noah not, in fact, saved a pair from each living animal species? To the majority of people in the Christian United States. something like extinction, was unimaginable prior to paleontology.

me that our animals, crafted by the perfect hands of a perfect Abrahamic God, could have died off completely from the face of God's perfect earth. As confounding as this new understanding of time must have been, it seems that most Christians of the country were eventually willing and able to reinterpret what they read in the Bible as a little more symbolic. imagining the Genesis days of creation more like eras of time.

But as the movement of Christian fundamentalism rose in the mid 1900s, Bringing their very literal, very narrow interpretations of scripture into the religious mainstream, deep time became an enemy.

In the early 1900s, a young boy known for skipping school was walking along the Paloxi River in Glen Rose, Texas, when he noticed something strange imprinted in the bedrock. When little George Adams returned to school, sheepishly, I have to imagine, he told his teacher about what he had seen. When the boy took him there, both were amazed, as his teacher told George that these were the three-toed footprints of dinosaurs. These timeless tracks became a kind of legend confined to the small town.

That is, until the mid-1930s, when a fossil collector named Roland T. Byrd came to see these dinosaur prints himself. On the way, he stopped at a nearby trading post, where he was surprised to see some very odd souvenirs for sale. Imprinted in stone were dinosaur footprints, alongside what looked like large human footprints, or man tracks, as they would come to be known. Each, allegedly, chiseled out of the Piloxi Riverbed in Glenrose, Texas. The implication behind the oddities was clear.

Instead of the tall tales scientists were telling about things like evolution and extinction, the actual spiritual truth was that humans and dinosaurs had in fact coexisted. but not just any humans, the Nephilim biblical giants of the Bible that had been killed off by God in the Great Flood. Now, Roland Bird knew right away that the souvenirs were fake as fuck.

During the Great Depression, selling real fossils found along the river had become a mini indie industry for the town, alongside what else but a healthy production of illegal moonshine. But eventually, those real fossils ran out, so folks took to producing their own sloppy reproductions, some of which included these supposed man tracks.

And guess what? It turns out that former little truant George Adams had grown into a talented sculptor and forgery artist, as well as a vehement Christian fundamentalist. When Roland Byrd arrived in Glen Rose, after leaving the little roadside attraction behind, locals excitedly showed him more fossil dinosaur tracks alongside more fossil human footprints.

things that had been found in the bedrock of the river. Despite what appeared to be a kind of scientific miracle, Rolandbird didn't seem too impressed. Funnily enough, he immediately thought of his buddy Harry Sinclair, CEO of Sinclair Oil, who he believed would get a kick out of the whole stupid Mantrax tall tale. His crew got to work, removing the bedrock that held the series of prints.

and that stone eventually landed at the Texas Science and Natural History Museum for display. Any mention of the human aspect of the footprints conveniently ignored.

But this sin of stealing from the godly and giving to the secular, along with the arrogant dismissal of the biblically meaningful mantract, outraged the locals of Glen Rose, who were part of a deeply religious fundamentalist community. Over the next couple decades, devout preachers used more of the alleged man track. still set in the bedrock to prove that the earth was only six thousand years old, and that giant humans had indeed once walked beside the dinosaurs.

They claimed that scientists had been wrong, cowardly, and even conspiratorial in their refusal to entertain this possibility. In nineteen fifty, creationist Clifford L. Burdick wrote an article about one of the Paloxi River hoax fossils he had seen in a museum, which he took as the real thing. It was published in the Seventh-day Adventist newspaper Sign of the Times, and it was titled When Giants Roamed the Earth, their fossil footprints still visible.

In nineteen sixty one, Clifford Burdick went to Glen Rose and photographed the real thing, and the pictures were printed in a collaborative book called The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications. which help cement these creationist ideas into a kind of orthodox fundamentalist belief, known as flood geology. The Genesis flood would become a religious bestseller for biblical literalists and their hopeful converts.

Though the authors of the book tried their best to make it sound scientific, it was, unsurprisingly, full of profound flaws, grave misunderstandings, and straight-up propaganda. To drive this point home, a decade later, one of the authors would publish another scientific book. claiming that it was a great battle between Satan and the armies of the archangel Michael that had left the craters on the moon. The dreadful changes that are said to have taken place on this planet are known as the fall.

Dying, thou shalt die, God had said. Creationists also take the story of Noah and the flood literally. Many attribute much of our earth's sedimentary and fossil bearing strata to this divine catastrophic judgment upon the inhabitants of the ancient world. One person inspired by the Genesis Flood was Reverend Stanley Taylor, who preached throughout the 1960s.

he set out to find even more man track evidence in Glen Rose for an upcoming documentary he hoped to produce for the Films of Christ Association. and by God, he found them, or rather, he found imprints that were good enough for him, and within a couple years the Reverend would return with a full documentary crew to film nineteen seventy three's Footprints in Stone, which claim to prove scientifically that humans and dinosaurs walked side by side in an appropriate biblical timeline.

The film would circulate all over the country to different churches and even in certain public school science classes for about a decade before it was challenged by skeptical dissenters. When actual paleontologists visited the site to analyze it, they were able to figure out that what appeared to be human and giant footprints were just eroded or partially collapsed. tracks from three-toed dinosaurs that held their weight at the heel, obscuring the front part of the foot.

The length between the strides also pointed to a bipedal dinosaur, not a giant human being. When the Mantrax tale was widely debunked, Many more sensible creationists caved, and the pressure they put on the Taylor family led to footprints in stone being removed from circulation by the mid-1980s.

The foundations of a new Christian faith Movement known as young Earth Creationism were already laid, and examples of the dinosaur man track fossils still reside in Glen Rose's Creation Evidence Museum of Texas. Not only that, but according to a 2025 poll from UGov, 40% of Americans today believe that humans definitely or probably lived at the same time as dinosaurs. Good man Incorrect I Oh river. Revealer.

Now, if we look way back in time to when the first mammoth teeth were discovered in the colonies in the early 1700s. It was indeed believed that these were the remains of those Nephilim giants killed in the Great Flood. These teeth were music to the ears of famous Puritan influencer Cotton Matherer, who just so happened to be working on a book that used science to present the biblical history of the Great Flood as an indisputable fact.

This belief in fossilized giants was not some rogue religious delusion. Even as early natural scientists Started to understand that these teeth belonged to long dead animals, the president of Yale continued to believe that the bones were evidence of giants and other buildings. The same thing was happening in England as well, where the discovery of a massive femur led one researcher to guess that it was actually the huge petrified testicles of a dead giant.

which was thusly given the Latin name Scrotum Humanum. But to some in the colonies, the answer was obvious. when the first mastodon and mammoth teeth were discovered, it was enslaved people who recognized them as similar to the molars of elephants they had known in Africa. but it took a very long time before any one would believe what they were saying.

In a similar vein, when it came to this concept of deep time, those who had already been living on the continent were not surprised by this new natural history revelation. For millennia, indigenous tribes had a close relationship to the ancient fossils and massive bones that they came across now and then. Their conceptualization, the specifics of which varied from community to community, turned out to be so much more scientifically accurate than the prevailing Christian mythos.

Many tribes, including the Zuni, Navajo, Apache, and Hopi, understood through oral tradition that there was a time before humans And in fact, there were long eras in which different types of creatures and plants appeared and disappeared, leaving behind evidence of their existence buried in the earth.

The concept of evolution was also understood by many tribes, that the animals they coexisted with had decreased in size over time, that their relatives had once been massive versions of the same kinds of beings. In the creation myths of the Zuni, oceans were full of giant lizards and other aquatic beasts, eventually killed off by volcanic lava, leading to a bevy of new giant mammals taking their place. But do we think that early paleontology took these ideas seriously? Not a chance.

Instead, a belief became widespread that America's biblical giants were a kind of lost race. Which meant that the colonists had a right to the land that their spiritual ancestors had once occupied. And for those who were learned enough to dismiss these religious delusions, well, they found a weird way to say the same thing, but smarter. According to one of our main sources,

How the New World Became Old by Caroline Winterer. It was believed that if indeed these great reptiles and these great mammals had inhabited the earth long before the indigenous peoples, Then they were in fact not the first Americans. That title went to the beasts that came before and proved that all the world's history was a cycle of power and prominence. And European colonists were just the next in line to rise to the top. It was science, after all.

And then these fossils, often considered sacred objects and even sites of vision quests, were removed from indigenous lands for study, display, and of course, our entertainment. Despite all the science that was proving to the contrary, it seems like most Americans have preferred to imagine the coexistence of dinosaurs and human beings, whether it be literally or just for fun. So in the Jurassic Parkian sense,

we brought them back to life in the modern era. 1925's The Lost World and 1933's King Kong with their dinosaurs hidden in the jungles of the present. the sentient Gertie and her whip-wielding vaudevillian trainer, Mesmore and Damon's state-of-the-art boat ride through the deep past. Sinclair oils, Jolly Fossil Extractions that power our modern lives, and the Glenrose, Texas Mantract. That rewrote natural history to prove a mythos that Christianity had relied on for thousands of years.

For a century and a half. We've wanted to see them living right now, to compress billions of years into a single moment to get a grasp on the incomprehensible reality of deep time. and to animate the remains of these almost paranormal beings that lived in a time that we will only ever glimpse through the sparse imprints they left behind. It's easy then to understand why dinosaurs have been so beloved by children. We can only ever truly know them as fairy tale creatures, but real.

Throughout this episode, we've seen how artists and paleontologists made dinosaurs into pop culture icons, the Hollywood movie stars of dusty old science.

And we've seen how the existence of dinosaurs was used very early on to promote a positive narrative of American Christianity and colonialism. Well, we're just getting started. For part two, we'll need to go back further in time to see how these fossils were uncovered, studied, and celebrated in the early days of paleontology, both in the United States and across the pond. We'll learn how fossil hunting and analysis became an obsession for both scientists and lay people alike.

How one bitchy feud between academic egomaniacs fueled American dino supremacy, and how, in the Sinclarian model, early corporate business moguls became obsessed with the potential that dinosaur bones presented. We'll see how these roaring titans of the deep past helped the titans of the present justify the rise of a predatory American capitalism. This was American Hysteria. Make sure you come back next week for part two of our series on dinosaurs.

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You can also leave us a message on the Urban Legends Hotline about a tale that you remember from growing up or one you've heard recently, and we might do an entire investigation about it. If you have a second to leave us a five-star, review on the app that you're using, that really helps us out. American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by me, Chelsea Weber Smith.

Our producer and editor is Miranda Zickler. Our associate producer and sound designer is Riley Swadelius Smith, and our voice actor is Will Rogers. Thanks as always for listening, and please keep your hands and arms inside the boat at all times, because you never know what long dead things might come back to life. Have a great week.