Are stones depicting dinosaurs and humans coexisting real? No, that's not true: These stones were found to be hoaxes. A Smithsonian article reported that a 20th-century farmer and his wife were the creators of these stones, not an ancient people. The couple confessed to forging the stones using depictions of dinosaurs from comic books.
The claim appeared in a post on Facebook on May 11, 2024. It opened:
Recently, they just found unfossilized soft dinosaur tissue. Soft dinosaur tissue?
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue May 14 14:02:57 2024 UTC)
The video asks how art pieces with humans on the backs of dinosaurs, or man-made drawings with details only found on fossils, exist if scientists claim that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist.
The narrator in the video mentions eight such stones in Pensacola, Florida, calling it "the largest collection in America." Lead Stories did a search using a caption seen in the video on Google, visible here (archived here), that found a 2012 Smithsonian article on "Ica stones." The article calls the stones "famous fakes" that were created by a Peruvian farmer, Basilio Uschuya, and his wife. In 1975, Uchuya and his wife confessed to forging the stones using "images of dinosaurs from comic books." Despite the farmers' confession, creationists continue to use the stones as proof, the Smithsonian article said.
The U.S. Geological Survey website denies the underlying claim that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time:
After the dinosaurs died out, nearly 65 million years passed before people appeared on Earth.
Other Lead Stories articles on dinosaurs are here, here and here.
