Did Giant Reptiles Share the Earth with Giant Humans?

by Brad Steiger

The notion that early humans might have been contemporaneous with the giant reptiles has stoked the creative fires of many a fantasy and science fiction novelist. In Worlds Before Our Own (Anomalist Books, 2007), I pose a two-pronged question: Did a race of early humans exist during the Age of Reptiles, something like 70 million years ago; or did a certain number of the giant reptiles survive until a few thousand years ago?

Early in January, 1970, the London Express Service carried an item relating the discovery of a set of cave paintings which had been found in the Gorozamzi Hills, twenty-five miles from Salisbury in Rhodesia. According to the news story, the paintings included an accurate representation of a brontosaurus, the 67-foot, 30-ton behemoth that scientists insist became extinct millions of years before man achieved his earthly advent.

Experts agree that the paintings were done by bushmen who ruled Rhodesia from about 1500 B.C.E. until a few hundred years ago. The experts also agree that the bushmen only painted from life. This belief is borne out by the other Gorozamzi Hills cave paintings, which represent elephants, hippos, deer, and giraffe.

The November, 1968, issue of Science Digest carried the startling thoughts of Mexican archaeologist-journalist Jose Diaz-Bolio concerning his discovery of an ancient Mayan relief sculpture of a peculiar serpent-bird found in the ruins of Tajin, located in Totonacapan in the northeastern section of Veracruz, Mexico. Diaz- Bolio suggested that the serpent-bird was not merely the product of Mayan flights of fancy, but a realistic representation of an animal that lived during the period of the ancient Mayans -- 1,000 to 5,000 years ago.

A startling evolutionary oddity would have been manifested if such serpent-birds were contemporary with the ancient Mayan culture, for creatures with such characteristics are believed to have disappeared 130 million years ago. The archaeornis and archaeopteryx, to which the sculpture bears a resemblance, were flying reptiles that became extinct during the Mesozoic age.

William Meister, an amateur rockhound, found what appears to be a fossilized human sandal print with a trilobite, an extinct marine animal, imbedded in the impression made by the heel. Meister discovered the print in July, 1968, while searching for fossils at Antelope Springs, near Delta, Utah. Since the impression was made on what once may have been a sandy beach of the Cambrian period of the Paelozoic Era, the sandal print would have to be an incredible 500 million years old.

Dr. Clifford Burdick personally investigated William Meister's find, and while digging in the same area where the rockhound had found the remarkable sandal print, he himself found a human track similar to the first one Meister discovered, evidently made by shoes or moccasins. Professors of the geological department of a leading university conceded that the tracks definitely looked human, but they could not accept their biological origins.

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