Forget Vasco da Gama’s sunken ship. One Texas man believes he made the discovery of a lifetime right in his aunt’s front yard.
Wayne Propst claims to have found a fossil from Noah’s flood, the biblical tale in which it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, covering the entire Earth in water. He was helping his aunt lay dirt outside her home with he found the fossilized snail, KYTXreports. "From Noah’s flood to my front yard, how much better can it get," he said. "What's really interesting to me is we're talking about the largest catastrophe known to man, the flood that engulfed the entire world."
With such a claim, he would need some back up to verify the finding. Propst hit up self-proclaimed fossil expert Joe Taylor. "I've never heard of anything about that from over there, I'm surprised he found it there," Taylor said. The totally legitimate vetting process consisted of Propst spending days, with the help of his aunt and a few kids from the neighborhood, digging up the fossils. He then sent the pictures to Taylor via Gmail.
"To think that like he says that we have something in our yard that dated back to when God destroyed the earth. I mean, how much better could anything be?" Propst ‘s aunt Sharon Givan said.
An expert from the University of Texas at Austin, however, thinks otherwise. "The rocks there are about 35 million to 40 million years old, and these little turret snails are commonly found in marine rocks of that age," James Sagebiel, Collections Manager of the Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections, said according to UPROXX. "It’s not unusual."
He added that Texas coastlines extended miles further inland than they would today, and that those "rare" fossils are actually pretty common. So, maybe not the biggest discovery in history.
