The Meister Print (also known as the Meister Footprint) refers to two

trilobite Trilobites (; meaning "three-lobed entities") are extinction, extinct marine arthropods that form the class (biology), class Trilobita. One of the earliest groups of arthropods to appear in the fossil record, trilobites were among the most succ ...

s in slate that appeared to be crushed in a human shoe print. The print was cited by

creationists Creationism is the religious belief that nature, and aspects such as the universe, Earth, life, and humans, originated with supernatural acts of divine creation, and is often pseudoscientific. Gunn 2004, p. 9, "The ''Concise Oxford Dictionary ...

and other pseudoscience advocates as an

out-of-place artifact An out-of-place artifact (OOPArt or oopart) is an artifact of historical, archaeological, or paleontological interest to someone that is claimed to have been found in an unusual context, which someone claims to challenge conventional historica ...

, but was debunked by palaeontologists as the result of a natural geologic process known as

spall formation Spall are fragments of a material that are broken off a larger solid physical object, body. It can be produced by a variety of mechanisms, including as a result of projectile impact, corrosion, weathering, cavitation, or excessive rolling pressu ...

. In 1968, William Meister was searching for trilobite fossils in 500-million-year-old strata known as the Cambrian

Wheeler Formation The Wheeler Shale (named by Charles Doolittle Walcott, Charles Walcott) is a Cambrian ( 507 Annum, Ma) fossil locality world-famous for prolific agnostid and ''Elrathia kingii'' trilobite remains (even though many areas are barren of fo ...

near Antelope Springs, Utah.Regal, Brian (2009). ''Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia''. Greenwood. p. 22. "The "Meister Print" An Alleged Human Sandal Print from Utah"
TalkOrigins. Retrieved 4 May 2019. He discovered what looked like a human shoe print with a trilobite under its heel after breaking open a slab. The supposed footprint was used by Melvin A. Cook as evidence against evolution in an article he wrote in 1970. Cook was not a paleontologist and his conclusion was criticized by experts. Upon investigation the print showed none of the criteria by which genuine prints can be recognized, and the shape could best be explained by natural geological processes.The Antelope Springs ‘footprint’
Bad Archaeology. Retrieved 4 May 2019. According to Brian Regal "several studies showed the print was, in reality, an example of a common geologic occurrence known as

spalling Spall are fragments of a material that are broken off a larger solid body. It can be produced by a variety of mechanisms, including as a result of projectile impact, corrosion, weathering, cavitation, or excessive rolling pressure (as in a ball ...

, in which slabs of rock break away from each other in distinctive patterns. This particular case of spalling had created a simulacrum vaguely suggestive of a shoe print."

References

Creationism Pseudoarchaeology 1968 archaeological discoveries {{trilobite-stub

See also

References