Who was the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum?
The picture features the seal of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum. This was a creationist museum in Texas, USA run by Joe Taylor. It closed in 2023 with Mr. Taylor's passing. From the museum's About page...
I’m Joe Taylor, the director and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum. If you like fossils, dinosaur digs and other old things you have come to the right place. Check the news reports. We want to show you why we do not believe that the evolution theory or the millions of years concept is good science.
Ad copy for Mr. Taylor's book Giants Against Evolution claims "There were indeed giant men and women all over earth. Joe Taylor’s book proves it." There is no evidence Mr. Taylor had any formal training in archeology, paleontology, biology, nor human anatomy.
A bit of a biased source.
These are attempts to find archeological evidence for the giants mentioned in religious texts, such as the Nephilim, or myths, or second hand accounts. The discovery and misidentification of giant dinosaur and mammoth bones fueled, and continues to fuel, these attempts to match myth with history.
Many of these claims come from ancient history, and ancient historians were not always known to be particularly concerned with accuracy. Then as in now, just because it was written down doesn't make it true.
From Hark, a vagrant #30
The pictures of intact human skeletons lend the claims more authority than they have. Let's look at some of the individual claims and piece together what evidence there may be for the claims.
15' S/E Turkey late 1950s
According to the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum...
In the late 1950’s, during road construction in the Euphrates Valley of southeast Turkey, fossilized human remains were uncovered. At the site, an engineer measured a femur (the long leg bone) and reported in a newsletter that it measured to be 120 cm (47.24 in.). Joe Taylor, Director of Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, was commissioned to sculpt the human femur. This giant would have stood about 14 ft tall (left).
However, in the museum's FAQ...
It is true that I sculpted a femur 47-1/2 (120 cm) based on a report in a newsletter where it was reported on by the construction engineer who found it and other skeletons the same height. I was commissioned to sculpt the femur so a college professor could show his students how large it was. I molded it and sent him a cast. I then cast one for my museum and mounted it over a drawing of a skeleton the same size. A femur of a an ancient human was used as the guide for the sculpture. In every instance, I have told others that it is JUST A SCULPTURE. The real bone was not available.
Mr. Taylor freely admits he never saw the bone. He never spoke with the people who found it. He was commissioned to sculpt a very large femur by a third-party.
Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, and Septuagint manuscripts all give a height of "four cubits and a span" or about 2 meters. Certainly tall, but not a giant. It's the later Masoretic Texts which give a height of "six cubits and a span" or about 3 meters. "Six cubits and a span" is what the modern King James Bible repeats and that's likely where the claim comes from.
They cherry picked their source.
The claim likely comes from Historia Augusta. The authorship and date of writing of this work are disputed, but consensus is it was written about 200 years after Maximinus's death, so it is not a contemporary source. It is known to be extremely flawed full of fabrications and exaggerations; while other writers report that Maximinus was quite tall, he was not eight foot tall.
They cherry picked their source.
12' OG King of Bashan('s bed)
The source given is Deuteronomy 3:11. We don't consider the Bible to be a reliable source, but let's look anyway. Here's the NIV translation.
Og king of Bashan was the last of the Rephaites. His bed was decorated with iron and was more than nine cubits long and four cubits wide. It is still in Rabbah of the Ammonites.
He had a gigantic iron bed frame, about 4 meters by 1.8 meters. I suppose Mt. Blanco concluded that a giant bed must be for a giant person. We have some very big beds today, the biggest was 26m x 16m; no giants have yet been seen sleeping in one.
25'6" 1613 AD France, near the Castle of Chaumont
Described as "nearly a complete skeleton". Contemporary and later scientists instead said they were an elephant, perhaps a Deinotherium. How could the skeleton of an elephant be confused with a "nearly complete skeleton" of a human? Well... by "nearly complete" they meant a few pieces.
The earliest reference I could find was in the 1657 work The Life of Peireskius Book III p 160 by Pierre Gassendi. I've taken the liberty of updating the spelling for modern understanding.
About the same time there was a great rumor spread abroad touching the bones of certain Giants, which being found in Dauphine, the King commanded that they should be sent to him : for the report went, that there was found in a certain feigned place, not far from the stream which rusn between Rhodanus and Isara, a sepulcher made of bricks, thirty feet long, twelve foot broad, and eight foot high, with a stone upon it, wherein was this inscription THEUTOROCHUS REX. Also, that when the sepulcher was opened, there appeared the Skeleton of a man, twenty five foot and a half long; ten foot broad between the shoulders, and five foot deep upon the chest. That the skull was observed to be five foot long, and then foot in compass. Which prodigious spectacle being viewed an whole day together,
Wow, a whole giant skeleton! But wait...
...the rest of the bones turned to ashes; there remaining only those which were carried to Paris, and see by every body viz a part of the lower jaw-bone, two vertebra of the back-bone, some pieces of a rib, shoulder-blade and a thigh-bone; the other thigh-bone, the shank, an ankle-bone, a heel; besides bone fragments which were not sent to Paris, as namely of a thigh-bone, and likewise two teeth.
They claimed to have seen a full skeleton, but it turned to ashes and they only have fragments.
The text goes on to question why Theutobochus, legendary king of the Germanic Teutons, defeated by the Romans in 105 BC, would have a fancy tomb with a Latin inscription?
Even in 1889 The Inter Ocean was skeptical, noting that the finder of the bones, Pierre Mazurier, used a reconstruction as a commercial attraction.
Nor can we credit the genuineness of the wonderful relics of an immense giant which were found in 1613 near the ruins of a castle on the Rhone, in a field which had long been called "the giant's field". These remains were discovered in a brick tomb, eighteen feet underground, on which were inscribed the words "Teutobochus Rex". They were declared by the finder, one [Pierre] Mazurier, a surgeon, to be the bones of a giant king, and by actual measurement were found to be over twenty-six feet in length and eighteen feet wide across the shoulders. This ingenious surgeon was evidently the Barnum of his day, since he was soon advertising his attraction in Paris, where the people rushed in crowds to see the immense skeleton, which, with his knowledge of anatomy, he had doubtless put together with the bones of animals for that purpose.
Galerie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie comparée still holds those claimed bones. In The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times ends the mystery...
The notorious case of King Teutobochus was thoroughly investigated by French paleontologist Léonard Ginsburg in 1984... Ginsburg examined "Teutobochus's" tooth and determined that the giant's remains actually belonged to an extinct elephant, the Deinotherium, one of the largest mammals that ever lived.
They never had a "nearly complete" skeleton, but fragments of an extinct elephant. Likely the story of the tomb was fabricated to add to the commercial value of the bones.
Whew, that's all the digging I have time for.
