Everytime I see ID'ers use these goofy examples as proof I hear circus music in the background and the voice of PT Barnum saying something about suckers being born every minute. Do ID'ers actually believe this stuff or are they just trying to pass off ANYTHING that maybe someone will be too intellectually lazy to figure out.
You are certain that it is a fraud. Let's stipulate that it is not properly documented, at least as far as we know. How might that rock have been artificially created?
How about this?
"The fossil tracks that MacDonald has collected include a number of what paleontologists like to call problematica. On one trackway, for example, a three-toed creature apparently took a few steps, then disappeared--as though it took off and flew. 'We don't know of any three-toed animals in the Permian,' MacDonald pointed out. And there aren't supposed to be any birds. He's got several tracks where creatures appear to be walking on their hind legs, others that look almost simian. On one pair of siltstone tablets, I notice some unusually large, deep and scary-looking footprints, each with five arched toe marks, like nails. I comment that they look just like bear tracks. Yeah, MacDonald says reluctantly, they sure do. Mammals evolved long after the Permian period, scientists agree, yet these tracks are clearly Permian."
("Petrified Footprints: A Puzzling Parade of Permian Beasts," The Smithsonian, Vol. 23, July 1992, p.70.)
And from FreeRepublic a poster purporting to be Jerry MacDonald posted that he thinks the footprint is a fraud (because of a lack of consecutives, etc) but the poster also posted this:
[excerpt]"...A second point. And a better one. The problematica that I discovered, one of the best of which can be pictured in the Smithsonian Magazine report (July 1992). Clearly mammalian in shape, with a style of locomotion similar to a bear -- the pidgeon-toed front feet, the universally depressed tracks, the appearance of nails, not claws. And five consecutives. I call them mammal-like, and the trackmaker is mysterious."
Curiously, what the poster says in the next sentence does not seem to agree regarding the number of different kinds of 'problem' tracks as MacDonald is quoted in the Smithsonian above:
"But, There is only one trackway like this out of the thousands of tracks and trails that I have excavated. [emphasis mine] Osteologically, the vast majority (99.9 percent) of these trails match all the animals believed to have existed in the Early Permian."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1498415/posts
Cordially,