A superstition is a relic of a religion that has survived (Latin supersteterit) the death of its religious framework.

The Case of S T Nikos

Oddities in the Rocks

Nikos must have now turned to his shoeboxes filled with palaeontological Forteana to describe some of the strange discoveries that have allegedly been made in very old strata. He was at his favourite interface�between the unnatural and the natural; between fantasy and science; between nightmare and reality.

"An apparently human molar was found in coal deposits described as laid down in the Eocene epoch but apparently bearing many dinosaur fossils as well as sharks’ teeth and fish scales. Although the enamel had carbonised and the roots had mineralised into an iron compound, local dentists felt sure it was a human second lower molar.

"Labourers discovered a fossil shoe print in solid rock. The imprint was that of a shoe with a high narrow heel and a broad flat sole. It was so clear, in the fine grained shale in which it was found, that it looked as though it was only a couple of days old. In Nevada a fossilised shoe print impressed in limestone laid down at the time of the great reptiles was found. The double stitches in the seams were distinct, microphotographs showing them very clearly. �At one place it was double stitched and the twist of the thread could be clearly seen.� Minute crystalline deposits of mercuric sulphide long ago deposited by leaching action in the impression and which can not realistically be imitated prove that the imprint was not faked. Sandal or moccasin prints have been seen in the gypsum of the White Sands in New Mexico. The White Sands were laid down as an ancient inland sea gradually dried up around the time of the demise of the dinosaurs.

"Oil workers have recovered carved bones and decorated coins from deep rocks brought up during well drilling. A gold necklace was found in a piece of coal. What appeared to be an iron tool was found in a Scottish coal seam. Two workmen signed affidavits to their amazing discovery in 1912 of an iron pot inside a large piece of coal that they were breaking up to be used in the furnace of a power plant. The pot left a clear fossil impression in the remaining pieces of coal.

"Coal miners noticed a curious slab in an Iowa coal mine. Found 130 feet below ground just below the sandstone which capped the seam, it was approximately two feet long by one foot wide and was four inches deep. Its surface was inscribed with diamond shapes having the face of what seemed to be an old man in the middle of each. The features of the faces were said to be all similar, inclined to the right except for two of them, and, interestingly, all had a strange dent in the middle of their forehead. Was this the third eye (our pineal gland) which is most pronounced in some types of modern lizard�and possibly some dinosaurs too? Was the slab deliberately buried by a later race? Does it carries a message meant to be decipherable by future beings?

"While shot blasting a seam two miles below ground, the miner in 1928 found, among the dislodged coal, blocks of concrete about a foot across. Although the broken edges showed that they were made of what passed as an ordinary sand and cement mixture, the faces of the blocks were highly polished. The remainder of the wall disappeared into the coal seam. Another miner working a coal face about 100 yards away struck what seemed to be the same wall. Mysteriously the coal owners pulled the men out of the coal faces and ordered them to keep quiet about their discoveries. The same gang, a few years earlier, had found a similar wall in a nearby pit. They had also found a cylinder of silver with staves imprinted on it, and a large bone �like an elephant’s�. Wouldn’t a layman mistake a dinosaur bone for an elephant’s?

"Coal miners in West Virginia found a well constructed concrete building, and a perfectly formed human leg made of coal. Though the leg could not have been human, it was human-like, implying that human-like creatures existed millions of years ago.

"Workmen excavating in Dorchester, Massachusetts blasted a metallic object out of solid rock. The object consisted of a bell-shaped vessel, 4.5 inches high, 6.5 inches at the base, 2.5 inches at the top, and an eighth of an inch in thickness. There is no doubt that this curiosity was blown out of the rock. Though reported as made of a silver alloy the colour of zinc, more recently it has been described as made of an alloy of copper, zinc, iron and lead. It was inlaid in pure silver with six flowers and the base was also inlaid with what looks like a vine. The chasing, carving and inlaying was exquisite. Yet the vessel had been blown out of solid pudding stone fifteen feet below the surface. The origins of the vessel remain a mystery but man-made objects do not get embedded in rock so solid that dynamite is needed to shatter it.

"Animal remains are rarely found in coal deposits because the conditions in the steamy jungles that gave rise to them promoted rapid decomposition. An apparently human skull was found in the coal collection of the Mining Academy in Freiberg. He does not mention the age of the coal deposits but says the skull is composed of brown coal and manganiferous and phosphatic limonite. Brown coal is usually young coal from the Mesozoic era or the Tertiary period, the former of which covered the age of the reptiles!

"In 1971 bulldozers moving earth for mine exploration revealed traces of human remains in soft sandstone said to be 100 million years old. The remains were 15 feet down beneath five or six feet of solid rock and yet there appeared to be no caves or crevices in the overlying strata. Bits of bone and teeth were first found but then the excavators noted a more significant bone embedded in the rock. Local experts from the University of Utah were brought in and under their direction parts of two skeletons and a mixture of teeth and bone shards were uncovered. They described the skeletons as Homo sapiens. One of the bodies seemed to conform with the burial pattern of some Indian tribes. Oddly, the academics lost interest and never wrote up the find formally. Some reports said the bones were the same age as the rock matrix. If the remains really had fossilised and were of an age comparable with the surrounding rocks then this find would have been highly valuable in placing man-like beings in distant geological times. One wonders whether a close examination was made of the remains to determine whether the description of them as Homo sapiens would have held up. Or were the fossils assumed to be Homo sapiens because they looked human. Had the local experts only made a cursory examination, lost interest and moved on before rigorous anatomical studies had been carried out?

"In 1898 in Death Valley two brothers, making a living selling fossils, found the fossilised remains of a seven and a half feet tall female in the same stratum as fossils of prehistoric camels, and an elephant-like creature with four tusks. Fossils of palm trees, ferns and fish were also found. The curious thing (besides her height) about these human remains was that she had a tail, having several extra vertebrae at the end of her spine. The spot where the fossils had been found had once been on the continental shelf of the Pacific Ocean, and the fossilised bones had been laid down then. Death Valley, like White Sands, lies in the Rocky mountains which were thrust up in a series of gigantic pulses through the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic eras, the very time when the earth was roamed by dinosaurs�until their extinction marked the boundary between the two geological ages. Could the large female with the tail be the best described specimen yet found of the man-like super-dinosaurs?

"What though of the camels and four tusked elephant found with her? It is unlikely that any single specimen was complete, the remains were 65 million years old and, although fossil hunters, the finders were not professional paleontologists. Bones of small dinosaurs could be mistaken for those of camels and bones of larger dinosaurs with horns or tusks could be mistaken for the more familiar elephants. The thumb spike of the iguanodon was thought even by professionals to be a horn like a rhinoceros’s. The evidence may be better explained by the thesis of the intelligent dinosaur.

"A fragment of bone, probably belonging to a dinotherium and engraved with a picture of a horned quadruped and traces of several other figures, was discovered in apparently miocene strata. This implies the existence of an intelligent creature capable of art work some 25 million years ago. Clearly, there must have been some misdating here. It is far too old to be done by men and far too young to be done by Anthroposaurs. If a dinotherium bone, the artwork was of a rhinoceros and was by early man but it would require the find to have been in recent strata not Miocene. The alternative would be that the artwork was of a horned dinosaur and the relic was from the late Cretaceous rather than the Miocene. The bone cannot then have been that of a dinotherium. If the latter explanation prevailed, who could have been the artist in the age of dinosaurs other than our anthroposaur?

"Independent minded researchers in the last couple of decades have put together sufficient to begin to challenge the paleontological dogmatists. Unorthodox proposals deserve attention if only to provoke the experts to justify their conventional arguments and thus periodically to force them into an honest reappraisal. My speculations might stimulate a more open-minded look at past events. Anomalies in old rock strata might be taken seriously and accurately dated rather than ignored. Curious artefacts and impressions in very ancient rocks, of the Cretaceous Period particularly, might be studied systematically to see whether an adequate theory can be constructed to explain them.

"More importantly we should examine the parallels between the present time and mass extinctions of the Cretaceous. Tens of millions of years hence, geologists will simply see a sudden reduction in diversity terminating the Tertiary epoch. Will they notice that a couple of inches of sediment contain traces of one species of ape which briefly exploded in numbers prior to the mass extinction? It is doubtful. Is the mass extinction of species the only legacy we wish to leave, as our sapient dinosaurian antecedents did? If my probe into time’s vaults motivates enough people to disown our dinosaur heritage and to stop our assault on the planet, we might yet, unlike the dinosaurs, survive. I am not optimistic!"

Michaela Magi Griffiths, Bloomsbury, September, 1993
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