Anomalies are strange and unexpected finds such as frogs in rocks, giant skulls and impossible fossils. You will find here many of the famous anomalies throughout history.
1)
In Hadley, Massachusetts, USA, a highly detailed fossil of a young boy’s footprint was found in clay stone on the banks of the Connecticut River. Also found preserved in the clay were bird, four-footed animals and snail tracks and even raindrops were preserved. Alongside the footprints were the tracks of a crow. The strange thing is that this fossil was found 20 feet below the alluvial sand until it was exposed by stream currents.
2)
In Jackson County, Kentucky, USA, in the 1880’s, a series of fossilized tracks were discovered in a carboniferous layer of rock. There were imprints of a bear, something resembling a horse and two tracks of a human being. The prints were examined and declared genuine, although the layer of rock that they came from was about 300 million years old, well before any of the animals that could have made these tracks existed.
3)
In Rockcastle County, Kentucky, USA, in 1938, a piece of carboniferous sandstone was found with 10 fossilized human footprints on them. After all tests they were declared genuine although the rock they came from was estimated to be over 250 million years old. In recent years the prints were destroyed by vandals.
4)
In Braystown, North Carolina, USA, during the 19th century, some strange human tracks were found next to the Tennessee river, fossilized in solid rock. When examined it was found that the footprints had six toes and included one of a giant, 16 inches long, 13 inches wide and 5 inches wide at the ball of the heel.
5)
In St. Louis, USA, in 1816, a slab of limestone rock was found on the banks of the Mississippi containing fossilized footprints, 10 inches long and 4 inches wide. The limestone hardened about 270 million years ago although the rock and the footprints appear to show the same evidence of wear and ageing.
Sketch of fossilized feet in limestone (Left) and the limestone block itself (Right)
6)
In South Dakota, USA, in the 1880’s, a white rock of magnesium limestone was found to have the fossilized prints of moccasined feet. The size and step of the feet appeared to have been made by a woman or adolescent who had been running at the time. All three prints clearly showed the instep and faint toe marks and all show the same degree of weathering as the rock itself. The fossils have been dated to around 100 million years old.
For many years the local indians viewed the rock as a ‘medicine rock’.
7)
In Utah, USA, in 1968, a piece of rock was opened revealing a fossil of a sandaled shoe which seemed to have crushed a trilobite, a sea creature which died out about 280 million years ago. The sandal that seems to have crushed a living trilobite is 10.5 inches long by 3.5 inches wide with the heel being slightly more indented than the sole. Humans are thought to have been on the planet for between 1 and 2 million years, and well shaped footwear only in the last few thousand years. The fossil may be up to 600 million years old. There are those who think the prints may have been made by biped extraterrestrial beings visiting our planet 600 million years ago.
The fossilized sandaled foot with a crushed trilobite in the heel.
8)
In Pershing County, Nevada, USA, in 1927, the fossilized imprint of a leather shoe was found in Triassic limestone. After microscopic examination it was found that hand stitching could be seen, using a thread that was finer than the threads used in 1927. The limestone was dated at between 180 and 225 million years old.
9)
In Bradford County, Pennsylvania, USA, in the 1880’s, human skeletons were found, which seemed to have been buried about 1200 AD. The strange thing about these skeletons were that the skulls had horns two inches above the eyebrows and were all about seven feet tall, well above the average height.
10)
In Coshocton, Ohio, USA, in 1837, several skeletons were found buried in wooden coffins. All the skeletons were adults, but their height was only between 3 to 4.5 feet long. There were no artefacts buried with the bodies, but the number of graves made it clear that they came from a large sized town or city.
11)
In Brewersville, Indiana, USA, in 1891, a skeleton was found in a large burial mound. The skeleton was 9 feet 7 inches tall and was buried with many artefacts. Also buried with him was a woman. The remains were lost after a huge flood.
12)
In Clearwater, Minnesota, USA, in 1888, seven skeletons were found, buried in a sitting position, facing a lake. They all had double rows of teeth in the upper and lower jaws and their foreheads were unusually low and sloping with prominent brows.
13)
In Casper, Wyoming, USA, in 1932, a mummy was discovered in a small cave by gold prospectors. The mummy was an adult male, only 14 inches tall, his hands had been folded onto his lap and he was found sitting in a cross-legged position. He appeared to be middle age, his skin brown and wrinkled, flat nose, low forehead with a broad mouth and thin lips. The mummy eventually disappeared after being shown in side-shows for many years.
The Tiny mummy found in Wyoming
14)
In Plymouth, England, in the early 19th century, three fossilized rhinoceroses were found 70 feet below the surface, in a cave. The cave was only 15 feet by 45 feet wide, contained no stalactites, nothing at all except the skeletal remains of the rhinoceros. In fact it looked like the animals had been hermetically sealed, and no one has yet solved the riddle of how they got there.
15)
In New Mexico, in 1853, a horned lizard was found alive in a solid block of stone. The lizard was sent to the Smithsonian Institute and lived for two days after it’s release.
16)
In Durham, England, in 1865, excavators found a living toad in solid magnesian limestone, 25 feet below the ground level. The cavity that the frog came from was about the same size as it’s body, it was full of life when released and it’s eyes shone with an unusual brilliance. The frog made a strange ‘barking’ noise and it had unusually long hind legs. It was estimated that the frog was at least 6,000 years old.
17)
In Derby, England, in 1852, workmen found a large lump of ore at a depth of 12 feet and began to break it apart. Suddenly, to their surprise a frog emerged from the crystal lined interior of the ore lump. The toad died very soon after it’s release.
18)
In England, in 1818, a geologist was searching for fossils in a quarry, at a depth of 270 feet when he came across some fossilized sea urchins and newts. He dug them out of the rock and placed them on a sheet of paper in the sun. To his surprise, the newts began to move but within a short time two of three newts died. The third one he placed in his pond which soon escaped and was never seen again.
19)
In Rugby, England, in 1900, a certain Mr. Clarke was stoking his fire, but, as he broke open one of the coals, he saw something move and snatched it out of the fireplace. It turned out to be a living toad, with no mouth and almost totally transparent. The toad lived for 5 weeks.
The toad found in a piece of coal in the fireplace
20)
In Meudon, France, in the late 16th century, Ambroise Pare, who was King Henry III’s personal surgeon witnessed a huge toad, that was full of life, emerge from a large stone just split by workmen.
21)
In Blois, France, in 1851, a flint nodule was opened revealing a live frog, which instantly began to breathe and then jumped away to escape. The workmen, however, managed to catch it and put it back into the nodule and sent it to the Society of Sciences.
When the frog was studied, it was found that it liked to be in the dark and would just stay still, but when the room was lighted it would try and run away. When the frog was placed on the edge of the flint nodule, it would always crawl back into the hole of its own accord. It was also noticed that the frog took particular care of of its foot that had been injured during the opening of the nodule. It was found that the cavity fitted the frog like a glove and the frog’s mouth had a permanent indentation in the jaw, caused by resting on a small ledge in the nodule.
22)
In St. Dizier, France, in 1856, French workers were digging a railway tunnel when something monstrous stumbled towards them, emerging from a large boulder from the Jurassic period, that they had just split open. It flapped it’s wings, croaked and then died on the spot.
It was later taken to the nearby town of Gray, where it was examined by a palaeontologist, and identified as a Pterodactyl, a flying reptile from the days of the dinosaurs, which died out about 100 million years ago.
The creature’s wingspan was 10ft 7 inches and had four legs joined by a membrane. The limestone that it emerged from was consistent with the period that these creatures lived in, and the limestone boulder which imprisoned the dinosaur was found to contain the perfect mould of the creature.
23)
In Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1851, blasting works revealed two broken halves of a bell shaped vessel. It was 4.5 inches high and was made from an unknown material but decorated with floral inlays of silver. This was found to have come from solid rock, millions of years old. It’s whereabouts are unknown.
The bell shaped vessel found in a bed of rock in 1851
24)
In Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, in 1851, Mr. Hiram de Witt accidentally dropped a fist sized lump of gold bearing quartz which he had brought back from California. When the rock was broken open, de Witt found a two inch iron nail inside, which was slightly corroded.
25)
In Morrisonville, Illinois, USA, in 1891, Mrs S. Culp was breaking coal into smaller pieces in her scuttle when she noticed a chain in the midst of the coal. When she picked up the chain she found that it was embedded in two separate pieces of coal, that had been a single piece only moments before.
26)
In Bearcreek, Montana, USA, in 1926, a lump of coal was found in the Bearcreek coal mine which had a fossilized tooth on it. The tooth looked remarkably similar to a modern human tooth and was so old that the tooth enamel had turned to carbon and the roots had turned to iron. The estimated age of the coal deposits are 10 million years old.
This fossilized tooth in a lump of coal belonged to a primitive man
27)
In the Cosa mountains, California, USA, in 1961, a geode (crystal enriched stone), was found to contain what appeared to be a spark plug. In the centre of the geode was a metal core, enclosed by what appeared to be a ceramic collar that was in itself enclosed by an hexagonal sleeve made out of wood, which had become petrified. A small amount of copper found between the ceramic and the petrified wood suggested that the two had been separated by a copper sleeve. After X-ray photographs were taken, it was noticed how remarkably similar the object was to a modern day spark plug. The age of the geode is estimated at about 500,000 years old.
The geode containing what appears to be a fossilized spark plug
28)
In Rutherford, Scotland, UK, in 1844, quarrymen working stone near the river Tweed found a piece of gold thread in rock, eight feet below the surface.
28)
At Kingoodie quarry, Scotland, UK, in 1845, a partially embedded nail was found in a block of stone. About an inch of the nail was embedded in the rock, the rest of which was lying along the stone and into some gravel. The depth from which the rock came from wasn’t on record, but it had taken over 20 years of digging to get to that point.
29)
In Scotland, in 1852, a lump of coal taken from an excavation was found to contain what appeared to be an iron drill bit. The surface of the piece of coal was unbroken, showed no signs of drilling and no evidence of any openings whatsoever. Somehow the coal had been formed around the drill bit.
30)
In Aix-en-Provence, France, in 1787, workmen at a quarry dug 50 feet below the ground level to obtain limestone. Eventually they came to some sand and began to remove it to get to the stone underneath. In the sand they found the stumps of stone pillars, fragments of half worked rock, petrified wooden handles and other pieces of wooden tools and a large petrified wooden board.
The stone surrounding these fossilized artefacts was about 300 million years old.
31)
In Lepenski Vir, Yugoslavia, in 1965, a village was discovered on the banks of the river Danube. It seemed to be a model community, with a fanlike arrangement of buildings and streets, a central marketplace, and an area with statues and sculptures. This culture had risen quite rapidly without any influence whatsoever from any other European cultures. The village has been dated at about 5800 BC.
A stone figure found at Lepenski Vir in 1965
32)
In Paita, The Isle of Pines, New Caledonia, in the early 1960’s, 8 foot mounds made of sand and gravel were excavated and found to contain cement pillars. They were made from a lime mortar mixed with shells and have been dated to 10,950 BC. The strange thing is that cement mortar was not heard of until about 2000 BC. It is still a mystery why the pillars were built in the first place.
33)
In the Ituri forest, Central Africa, in 1957, anthropologist Jean Pierre Hallet lived with an African pygmy tribe called the Efe. Whilst with them he was told that their name for the planet Saturn was called ‘The star of the nine moons’.
The ninth moon of Saturn was only discovered in 1899. There was a tenth moon discovered by the voyager space probe in 1981. The strange thing is that all the moons of Saturn are not visible by the human eye and the Efe tribe have known about these moons for generations.
34)
In Mali, West Africa, in the 1930’s, a French anthropologist researching the Dogon tribe was told by them that the star ‘Sirius B’ had been described to them by visitors from another star system. The ‘Dog Star’ as it is commonly known was only photographed in the 1970’s although astronomers theorised that it may exist in the late 19th century.
The Dogon name for Sirius B means ‘the smallest thing there is, all earthly things cannot lift it and the colour is white.’ The three principle qualities of Sirius B, which is a white dwarf star, are it’s smallness, heaviness and whiteness. How did the Dogon tribe know this without any access to telescopes, hundreds of years ago?
A Dogon drawing of Sirius B compared to a diagram of the orbit (Left) Sirius B (Right)
35)
In Pennsylvania, USA, during the 19th century, 14 year old Eddy Marsh was stoking a fire when suddenly a lump of coal that he hit exploded, with a number of pieces flying out of the fireplace.
When he picked one of the pieces up he found that it was nothing less than a mummified frog. It was in almost perfect condition and was found in a piece of coal mined at a depth of 541 feet. It was not fossilized, but instead mummified. A mould of the frog was found inside the broken piece of coal.
The mummified frog found by Eddy Marsh.
36)
In France, in 1719, it was reported that a living frog was found in the centre of an elm tree. The report said, “In the foot of the elm, of the bigness of a pretty corpulent man, 3 or 4 foot above the root and exactly in the centre, has been found a live toad, middle sized but lean and filling up the whole vacant space.” The frog scuttled away as soon as the trunk was cracked open.
37)
An artefact found in the sunken wreck of a 2,000 year old greek ship, was found to be a mechanical calculator, probably used for astronomical purposes, and predating the original mechanical calculator by about 1500 years. It is thought that it was used to work out and exhibit the motions of the sun, moon and planets. A total of thirty gears were found, in the encrusted blob.
The encrusted mechanical calculator
38)
In Veracruz, Mexico, a naturally magnetic metal bar was found in an Olmec mound and points 35.5 degrees west of the magnetic north. It is thought that the Olmecs used the bar as a compass by placing it on a mat in water. It is thought to be the worlds first compass and predates any other compasses by over a 1,000 years.
The magnetic metal fragment found in an Olmec mound
39)
In Iraq, German archeoligist Wilhelm Konig, was excavating a 2,000 year old Parthian town, when he discovered an earthenware vase containing an iron rod set inside a copper cylinder and the discovery of rods apparently corroded by acid. This arrangement looked remarkably like a dry cell battery and Konig’s conclusion was that the Parthians had generated electricity 1,600 years before 1800, the date of the first battery.