Ancient Footprints What may be the oldest fossil
Footprint yet found was discovered in June 1968. If the print is what it
appears to be -the impression of a boot, sandal or 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, prove that a shoe-wearing biped from another world had once visited this planet or ... prove that time travelers have visited our distant past. The find happened during a rock and fossil-hunting expedition to Antelope Spring, 43 miles west of Delta, Utah. Several fossils of trilobites appeared when a split open two-inch-thick slab of rock was found and discovery of the outrageous print occured. The rock fell open "like a book," revealing "on one side the
footprint of a human with a trilobites right in t the footprint itself. The other half of the rock slab showed as 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. 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 10 1/4 inches long and 3 1/2 inches wide; the heel is indented slightly more than the sole, as a human shoe print would be. The rock was taken to Melvin Cook, a professor of metallurgy at the
University of Utah, who advised to show the specimen to the university geologists. In a subsequent news conference the curator of the Museum of Earth Science at the University of Utah, Jame Madsen, said: "There were no men 600 million years ago. Neither were there monkeys or bears or ground sloths to make pseudohuman tracks. What man-thing could possibly have been walking about on this planet before vertebrates even evolved? Madsen then went on to say that a natural process must have formed the fossil, 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 the 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 geologists 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, I indicating a weight that had been pressed into the mud. What a discovery to make, science is always looking for evidence to prove life existed back then, however there is always someone, somewhere that would like to contradict a finding that might prove someone, or something wrong, specially if it might touch on anything in the bible.