In July 1944, in the Mexican city of Acámbaro, Guanajuato, a German immigrant and hardware merchant named Waldemar Julsrud was offered something extraordinary. Local diggers were bringing him small ceramic figurines — thousands of them, eventually more than 32,000 — and among them were creatures that looked like dinosaurs. If the figures were genuine, they would overturn the history of life on Earth: dinosaurs and humans, side by side, in ancient Mexico. Some young-Earth creationists still cite them as proof. The archaeologists who examined them reached a simpler conclusion: the figures were made to order, for a peso apiece.
A Horse Ride and a Fortune in Clay
According to the account given by Dennis Swift, a young-Earth creationist and the figures’ major proponent, Julsrud stumbled upon the figures while riding his horse outside Acámbaro. He hired a local farmer to dig up the remaining figures, paying him for each one he brought back. The farmer and his assistants eventually delivered over 32,000 figures, representing everything from the supposed dinosaurs to peoples from all over the world — Egyptians, Sumerians and “bearded Caucasians” among them.
The collection was strange in ways that went beyond the dinosaurs. The figures depicted animals and peoples from every continent and every era, jumbled together in a single deposit. A genuine ancient deposit does not contain Roman soldiers beside stegosaurs beside Egyptian priests. It contains the things one culture made, in one place, in one period. The Acámbaro figures contained everything.
Di Peso’s Examination
The archaeologist Charles C. Di Peso, working for the Amerind Foundation, an organisation dedicated to preserving Native American culture, examined the figures and determined that they were not authentic. His evidence was physical, and it was damning.
The figurines’ surfaces displayed no signs of age. No dirt was packed into their crevices — as it would have been if they had lain buried for centuries. Some figurines were broken, but no pieces were missing and no broken surfaces were worn, as if they had been broken recently and carefully. And the excavation’s stratigraphy told the story plainly: the artefacts had been placed in a recently dug hole, filled with a mixture of the surrounding archaeological layers. They had been buried, but not long ago, and not by nature.
Di Peso also learned the rest of the story. A local family had been making and selling the figurines to Julsrud for a peso apiece since 1944. Their inspiration, he found, was close at hand: films shown at Acámbaro’s cinema, locally available comic books and newspapers, and day trips to Mexico City’s Museo Nacional, where the family could study the real thing and copy it in clay.
The Dating
Attempts were made to date the figures using thermoluminescence, a technique that measures the radiation accumulated in fired clay. The earliest results, from tests done when thermoluminescence dating was in its infancy, suggested a date around 2500 BC. Later tests contradicted those findings.
In 1976, Gary W. Carriveau and Mark C. Han attempted to date twenty Acámbaro figures using thermoluminescence. They found that the figures had been fired at temperatures between 450 and 650 °C. But all of the samples failed the “plateau test”, which meant that dates obtained for the figures using standard high-temperature thermoluminescence techniques were unreliable and lacked any chronological significance. Based on the degree of signal regeneration found in remeasured samples, they estimated that the figures tested had been fired only a few decades earlier — not thousands of years ago. The date estimate, and the notion that the artefacts were made by some undiscovered culture, was rejected by archaeologists and palaeontologists.
The Believers
The figures have never lacked supporters. Charles Hapgood, the pioneer of pole-shift theory, became one of their most high-profile and devout defenders. Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, published a travel book in 1970, Host with the Big Hat, with a chapter on the collection; his biographer Dorothy B. Hughes wrote that “the story of Acámbaro may be the crowning achievement of his archaeological investigations”. The creationist Don Patton has proposed new lines of evidence, including the figures’ resemblance to the dinosaurs depicted in Robert Bakker’s book Dinosaur Heresies. The figures continue to be cited in pseudoscientific books, including Atlantis Rising by David Lewis.
The persistence of the Acámbaro figures is a study in how evidence works. The figures are real objects, and they really do depict dinosaurs. What they do not do is depict dinosaurs seen by the people who made them. They depict dinosaurs seen at the cinema, in comic books and in a museum in Mexico City — by a family that found a German hardware merchant willing to pay a peso apiece for them, and kept the workshop running for years.
What Is Documented, and What Is Not
Documented: About 33,000 small ceramic figurines were allegedly found by Waldemar Julsrud from July 1944 in Acámbaro, Guanajuato, Mexico; some resemble dinosaurs. Archaeologist Charles C. Di Peso examined the figures and concluded they were modern fakes: their surfaces showed no signs of age, no dirt was packed into their crevices, broken pieces showed no wear, and the stratigraphy showed they had been placed in a recently dug hole. A local family had been making and selling the figurines to Julsrud for a peso apiece since 1944. Thermoluminescence tests in 1976 (Carriveau and Han) found all samples failed the plateau test, making the dates unreliable, and estimated the figures had been fired only a few decades earlier.
Unverified or disputed: That the figures are ancient artefacts or evidence that humans and dinosaurs coexisted; that early thermoluminescence dates of around 2500 BC were valid (later tests contradicted them). The claim that the figures depict dinosaurs accurately is itself disputed — many of the “dinosaurs” resemble movie monsters and comic-book creatures more than any real animal.