The Meister Print: Footprints on top of Trilobite Fossil

The Meister Print: Footprints on top of Trilobite Fossil

"What may be the oldest fossil footprint yet found was discovered in June 1968 by William J. Meister, an amateur fossil collector, and reportedy, an evolutionist. If the print is what it appears to be-the impression of a sandaled shoe crushing a trilobite-it would have been made 300 to 600 million years ago and would be sufficient either to overturn all conventionally accepted ideas of human and geological evolution or to prove that a shoe-wearing biped from another world had once visited the planet.

Meister made his potentially disturbing find during a rock-and fossil-hunting expedition to Antelope Spring, 43 miles west of Delta, Utah. He was accompanied by his wife and two daughters, and by Mr. And Mrs. Francis Shape and their two daughters.

The party had already discovered several fossils of trilobites when Meister split open a two-inch-thick slab of rock with his hammer and discovered the outrageous print. The rock fell open 'like a book,' revealing:

on one side the footprint of a human with trilobites right in the footprint itself. The other half of the rock slab showed an almost perfect mold of the footprint and fossils. Amazingly the human was wearing a sandal!

Trilobites were small marine invertebrates, the relatives of crabs and shrimps, that flourished for some 320 million years before becoming extinct 280 million years ago(according to science).

Humans are currently thought to have emerged between 1 and 2 million years ago and to have been wearing well-shaped footwear for no more than a few thousand years.

The sandal that seems to have crushed a living trilobite was 101/4inches long and 31/2inches wide; the heel is indented slightly more than the sole, as a human shoe print would be.

Meister took the rock to Melvin Cook, a professor of metallurgy at the University of Utah, who advised him to show the specimen to the university geologists. When Meister was unable to find a geologist willing to examine the print, he went to a local newspaper, The Deseret News. Before long, the find received national publicity.

In a subsequent news conference, the curator of the Museum of Earth Science at the University of Utah, James Madsen, said:

There were no men 600 million years ago. Neither were there monkeys or bears or ground sloths to make pseudo human tracks. What man-thing could possibly have been walking about on this planet before vertebrates even evolved?

Madsen then went on to say that the fossil must have been formed by a natural process, though of what kind he was unable to suggest. Dr. Jesse Jennings, of the university's anthropology department, guessed (rather boldly, considering the absence of any supporting visual evidence) that the print might have been made by one large trilobite coming to rest on three smaller ones.

On July 20, 1968, the Antelope Spring site was examined by Dr.Clifford Burdick, a consulting geologist from Tucson, Arizona, who soon found the impression of a child's foot in a bed of shale. 'The impression,' he said, 'was about six inches in length, with the toes spreading, as if the child had never yet worn shoes, which compress the toes.

There does not appear to be much of an arch, and the big toe is not prominent.' The print was shown to two geologists and a paleontologist. One of the geologist agreed that it appeared to be that of a human being, but the paleontologist's opinion was that no biological agent had been involved. Dr.Burdick stuck to his guns:

The rock chanced to fracture along the front of the toes before the fossil footprint was found. On cross section the fabric of the rock stands out in fine laminations, or bedding planes. Where the toes pressed into the soft material, the laminations were bowed downward from the horizontal, indicating a weight that had been pressed into the mud.

In August 1968 Mr. Dean Bitter, and educator in the Salt Lake City public school system, claimed to have discovered two more prints of shoes or sandals in the Antelope Spring area.

According to Professor Cook, no trilobites were injured by these footfalls, but a small trilobite was found near the prints in the same rock, indicating that the small sea creature and the sandaled wanderer might have been contemporaries.

Reference 
Mysteries of the Unexplained, pp.37-38, 1985

Historical Articles

Human Footprints in Stone

Fort Wayne Daily Gazette (Newspaper) - August 31, 1883, Fort Wayne,...

An exchange says: ''Human foot- prints, thirty inches In length, have been found In a solid rock on Kirby's Creek, in Alabama. Not much is known about the human footprints but all rock supposedly formed millions of years before humans and other mammals evolved.

These 1883 prints in solid rock were measured at 30 inches. For comparison purposes, this writer�s size 13 shoes are approximately 13.25 inches long�and my bare feet are approximately 12 inches long, less than � length of the Alabama prints.

Holds Indians Cut Footprints in Rock

Published: November 28, 1938
Copyright � The New York Times

David Bushnell, ethnologist for the Smithsonian, attributed the human footprints occasionally found in limestone rock and which had confused scientists for a number of years to Indian sculptures.

Limestone was thought at that time to be 300,000 years old but today is thought to be hundreds of millions of years old. Then and now, human footprints in stone would be a huge blow to the theory of evolution.

In desperation, some evolutionists had speculated that the prints might have been made by giant primordial toads.

�Mr. Bushnell reported, however that he had traced the occurrence of these footprints from the falls of the James River in Virginia to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and that every one that he examined was unquestionably an Indian Carving. 

They are always found near water, he said, expressing the opinion that the human foot was a symbol which some prehistoric Indian people associated with a watering place�

Perhaps Mr. Bushnell�s carved footprints associated by Indians with water theory makes more sense than the giant primordial toad leaving human footprints theory, but it's a close call.

It would clearly be logical and expected for human footprints to be more abundant near sources of water both because the earth might be softer there and because more people might tend to congregate near such water.

The article goes on to note that the first report to the Smithsonian about human footprints in limestone had been made 100 years prior, in 1837 by Henry Schoolcraft to the American Philosophical Society. The story goes on to say that French pioneers had reported the prints as far back as 1822 near St. Louis.

Dr. Schoolcraft, a student of Indian Antiquities told the Philosophical society that there was no question in his mind that the human footprints in limestone were genuine and could not have been carved by the Indians.

Footprints Found in Ages-Old Stone

Published: January 20, 1938
Copyright � The New York Times

Associated Press, Berea Ky. 1938

�Discovery of footprints in sandstone, so human in appearance that they might have been made by one of the earliest ancestors of man, was announced here today by Dr. Wilbur G. Burroughs, head of the Department of Geology at Berea College. 

The tracks, ten in all, Dr. Burroughs said, are about 150 feet above the bottom of the Pottsville formation of the upper carboniferous system�.

The Upper Carboniferous, or Pennsylvanian, extended from about 310 to 290 million years ago, the beginning of the Permian Period, according to current scientific thinking.

Dr. Burroughs went on to say that this evidence would extend by millions of years the origin of man set by any scientist. He was also certain he said, that the sandstone was not of a later date. The tracks had been found on the farm of O. Finnell, in Rockcastle County.

Burroughs further described the prints as being in a left to right pattern, indicating the presence of five, distinct toes on arched feet, the toes being spread well apart. Further the width across the toes was measured at six inches and the tracks 9.5 inches long.

According to the article, Dr. Burroughs was born in Shortsville, N.Y. and was a graduate of Cornell where he received his doctoral degree. He was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain and a former President of the Kentucky Academy of Science.

He had reported the discovery in 1925 of stone-age fortifications near Berea, K.Y. covering 320 acres. He believed that those fortifications would have withstood all but the most modern artillery. He reported that there were remnants of a stone wall there some 1.250 feet long.

Mysterious Tracks in Stone
The Footprints of a Mastodon and a Human Being Believed Imprinted in the Same Rock

Published: August 13, 1882
Copyright � The New York Times
The San Francisco Call

Hundreds of footprints of man and animals were discovered in the quarry of the State prison in Carson, Nevada. Scientists came to Carson to make plaster of Paris copies of the tracks of a mastodon and that of an apparently giant individual.

After much examination, and after ruling out animals such as the giant sloth and the bear, it was the opinion of Professor Le Conte of the State University of California that the giant tracks were those of a man.

Another article (by H.W. Harkness, M.D, Proceedings of the California Academy of Science, Aug. 1882) on the discovery mentions that there are six sets of human tracks, each with from 1 to 17 footprints of apparently sandaled feet.

The tracks were apparently made by more than one very tall individual. It is also mentioned that experienced trackers had noted such tracks for years and had little doubt that they were made by men.

The tracks were approximately 20 inches long and eight inches wide. A size thirteen foot is approximately 12 inches long. A puzzle concerning the footprints besides their great size was the straddle, the distance between the left and right tracks, which was 18 inches, fully three times that of an average sized man.

The stride however was close to that of a normal sized man, approximately two feet but sometimes as much as three feet. It is admitted that the size of the foot and of the straddle are those of a giant.

The professor opined that the tracks might have been from the Pliocene period, 5.332 million to 1.806 million years ago.

Dr. Harkness, in his analysis of the tracks pre-argues against human track naysayers of our time:

�He remarks, very acutely that if the impressions were those of any unshod animal, be it mammalian, biped, quadruped, or bird, they might differ in size, but would all be of the same pattern, which is not the case. Such a difference in shape becomes, however, quite intelligible if we suppose the footprints made by men wearing rudely-fashioned sandals.�

Footprints in the Rocks

Published: April 21, 1888
Copyright � The New York Times

Philadelphia Inquirer�.�At the last meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences Prof. Heilprin called attention to a human footprint in a slab of volcanic tufa from Lake Managua, Nicaragua, received from Dr. D.G. Brinton.

The local geologist regarded the specimen as belonging to the early tertiary (47�65 million years ago) and, therefore, as indicating the remote antiquity of man.

It had been overlaid by a deposit of more than 20 feet in thickness, and the bones of the mastodon were said to have been found in the same deposits.�

A specimen of Triassic (248 to 206 Million Years Ago) sandstone bearing the print of a sandaled foot was also exhibited. In the article scientists described the alleged sandaled footprint in sandstone as a �freak of nature� and went on to suggest various ways that nature might contrive to make such footprints, such as the movement of grasses in the wind.

Scientists went on to describe various past apparent prints of animals and humans that might have fooled even the scientists themselves had they not been so vigilant and aware of nature�s wiles.

Clearly, there could not have been humans in existence over 248 million years ago and clearly there is no reason to doubt either the theory of evolution or the evolutionary dating system.

Fossil Footprints
Some Remarkable Specimens in Yates County

Published: October 22, 1877
Copyright � The New York Times

Correspondence of the Rochester Democrat�

�It is not generally known that the glen at Bellona, Yates County, contains a remarkable curiosity. In the bed of the stream just above the village of Bellona, is a rock about 50 feet square, uncovered at low water. 

It is entirely covered with foot-prints, deep in the rock, of men and birds and extinct animals. They are as clearly defined as the foot-prints of the children who had played on the damp bank the morning I visited the glen. 

Some of these human foot-prints are very small and delicate; others are large�shockingly large, yet retain their symmetry. The distinctness of these tracks, and their relative position precludes any doubt of their character, even to an unscientific observer.�

The writer goes on to express mock outrage at the stories he had read as a child of the �Indian� and other great trackers including �Leather Stocking�.

�You know how those fellows used to crouch down and follow the trail by examining every leaf. Well, you can imagine my feelings of resentment at the deception practiced by these historians, as I followed that deep trail over the rocks in the Ballona glen.

Why here are foot-prints in the rocks, deep enough and distinct enough to have existed since the flood, and to still exist for decades and centuries; and large enough to envelope a Bullymore ham!�

The writer states that there is a footprint there so large and distinct that it nearly shames that of a mastodon ten feet away. He made a cast of that giant footprint which he had on his desk. The footprints are on a two foot thick slab of limestone which he describes as a favorite haunt of geologists.

The writer also passes along the news that many years ago a petrified head and face of a man had been blown out of the limestone by workers looking for building stone.

Large Shoe Print in Rock

This photo was taken in northern Washington state and was reportedly found with another partial imprint. It appears to be the shoeprint of a large individual (see man's shoe in lower right of photo for comparison) approximately 16 inches long from heel to toe.

The rock itself is judged by geologists in "evolutionary time" (as opposed to actual time) to be between 10 and 20 million years old. The point is, according to evolutionary theory, no one should have been around early enough to leave a shoe imprint in what is now solid rock. No one should have been around to draw one either.

There remains the possibilty of course that someone painstakingly chiseled out two convincing shoeprints in recent times and left them on a mountain.

Very Large Foot Print in Solid Granite

It's one heck of a climb to see the footprint; more than a thousand feet up a rugged mountain in the Cleveland National Forest.

And James Snyder's house sits right at the bottom. "I go out of my way to make a slip trail where nobody else has been and I was actually looking for gold," said Snyder (the discoverer).

That was back in February 2002. But instead of finding gold on Gowers Mountain, Snyder found a giant fossilized footprint, at least it looks like one, embedded in solid granite.

The footprint was found in what becomes a creek bed during the rainy season. It looks as though something big crossed the creek a long time ago leaving its footprint behind. What made it and when? Who knows....Granite is supposed to have formed over 1 billion years ago.

No doubt scientists will try to argue that it just looks like a footprint as they do for every one of these types of anomalies. For science, if not fraud it's the only acceptable answer.

HUMAN FOOTPRINTS
Creation/Evolution Encyclopedia

The Glen Rose tracks.

A remarkable number of human tracks have been found in a Cretaceous limestone formation near Glen Rose, Texas. Many are of giant men. The prints have been found in the bed of Paluxy River, when it is dry in the summer. Some are next to, on top of, or under dinosaur tracks.

The Glen Rose tracks are 15 inches long [38.1 cm], and were probably made by people 8.3 feet [25,38 dm] tall. Some, 21� inches [54.6 cm] long, would have been made by people 11.8 feet [25.38 dm] tall.

*R.T. Bird, a paleontologist with the American Museum of Natural History, also found a trail of Brontosaurus tracks which were shipped to the museum. That means people were alive when the dinosaurs were! Some human tracks overlaid the dinosaur tracks, and some were found in layers below the dinosaurs.�pp. 31-32.

The Paluxy Branch.

In August 1978, Fred Beierie spent the afternoon searching for tracks in the Paluxy riverbed. He found a tree branch encased in Cretaceous stone, with only the upper part showing. So it was as old as the tracks.

Beierie sent a sample of the wood to *Reisner Berg of UCLA, who tested it by radiodating at 12,800 years. Corrected, it would yield a date agreeing with the Flood. (Carbon 14 dating tends to skew toward greater age on older dates, because of atmospheric differences back then. See Dating of Time in Evolution for details.)

That would date both the giants and the dinosaurs as being recent.�p. 32.

The Alamogordo tracks.Near Alamogordo, New Mexico, 13 giant tracks, each about 22 inches [55.8 cm] long were found. The stride is from four to five feet [121.9-152.4 cm].�p. 33.