Fred Flintstone was a Mexican?

Who knew?

The Museo Valdemar Juslrud in Acambaro, Guanajuanto holds the collection of local artifacts “discovered” by a local merchant and amatuer archeologist, Valdemar Juslrud, in the 1940s.

Juslrud paid local farmers to bring in ceramics they found, which the farmers were happy to do. Over the next several years, over 32,000 ceramic objects were uncovered.

Juslrud ended up spending a fortune for figurines showing a little of everything. Including, some say, dinosaurs. Oddly, the expected Tarascan artifacts, which are normally found around Acabaro, are all pretty well beaten up — as you’d expect things that have been in the ground a few centuries … let alone a few millenia — to be. The dinos and others were all intact.

If you’re a little dubious, rest assured. In 1955, the whole thing was investigated by none other than Earl Stanley Gardner. After all, he wrote the Perry Mason stories, so he had to know something about archaeology, ¿verdad?

Creationist websites in the U.S. (and home-school textbooks for the willfully uneducated future voters!) all use these figurines as evidence that humans and dinosaurs co-existed. It might not have been a peaceful co-existence (apparently the dinos are happily munching away on people) though it might have had its moments .. from the scant description I can find, it seems to show Bedrock’s equivalent of the Tijuana Donkey Show (which is a little dubious itself). Funny, the Creationist literature doesn’t talk about that particular figurine.

Isn’t Yabba-dabba-doo Purimpecha for “There’s a sucker born every minute”?