Carved in Stone Across the World

• M. Nailor

  Author

Scattered across the world, in places whose builders had no demonstrated contact with one another, are works of human art that resemble long necked, long tailed quadrupedal animals of the kind paleontologists call sauropods, along with many other dinosaur-like forms. This paper does three things. First, it assembles just some of these depictions, specifically focusing on sauropod themed artwork into a single catalog with their verifiable locations, the case made by those who read them as dinosaurs, and the case made by those who do not. Second, it takes a look at the statistical probability that such a catalog of similar art naturally arises. Across human cultures, art overwhelmingly depicts animals the artists had actually seen, so what is the prior probability that widely separated peoples independently produced anatomically specific images of a creature none of them ever encountered? I express this as a Bayesian relation, identify the single term on which the whole inference turns, and show honestly which of the cataloged examples strengthen the case and which, including two known forgeries, do not. The conclusion of this catalog is deliberately cautious. It does not rely on weak examples, modern forgeries, or vague animal shapes. Rather, the argument is that when those weaker cases are removed, a smaller but more significant residue remains: depictions from widely separated parts of the world that appear to show a recurring and specific anatomy. Where these images cannot be easily explained by simple shape coincidence, fossil-inspired imagination, or fraud, the probability of pure coincidence is lowered enough that the evidence deserves a serious answer. The difficulty is that such an answer is rarely given, because the dominant secular framework does not allow the possibility that humans may have actually witnessed animals now classified as dinosaurs. As a result, even when physical evidence appears to sit directly in front of us, the explanation is often forced into categories such as myth, mistake, coincidence, or fraud before the evidence is allowed to speak on its own terms. This catalog challenges that approach by asking a simple question: after the weak examples are filtered out, do the strongest remaining depictions still deserve to be dismissed, or do they point to something the standard framework is unwilling to consider?

1. M. Nailor

   A sindonologist and gerontologist specializing in the biology of aging and disease, Matt Nailor holds a Doctor of Divinity. His research focuses on the evolutionary theory of aging, which accounts for senescence through mutation accumulation, antagonistic pleiotropy, and disposable soma theory. This work engages origins science, with particular attention to molecular aging, mutation rates and accumulation, biological evolution, genetic variation, and historical linguistics.

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