The Acambaro Figurines—An Artistic Tribute to a Lost Zoo of Surviving Fauna— or to a Forgotten Portal Through Which Long Extinct Creatures Fell Out from Time?
Report Topics:
- In 1944 the first of over 33,000 artifacts were discovered in Acambaro, Mexico that depict saurians from the Mesozoic era, Pleistocene animals from the Ice Age, and humans representing all the ancient cultures of the world. Where did they all come from?
Full Report:
On a warm summer day in July, 1944, a German-born hardware salesman named Waldemar Julrud, who had emigrated to Mexico at the end of the First World War, was horseback riding in the foothills of the Sierra Madres. He was traveling in a ravine at the base of El Toro Mountain, located near his hometown of Acambaro in the State of Guanajuanto, about one hundred miles northwest of Mexico City.
Acccompanying him was a hired hand and friend, a local farmer named Odilon Tinajero. Both were suddenly drawn to a reddish object protruding from the soil that had recently been partially washed away by a rainstorm. Clearing off the mud, the object proved to be a small baked pottery figurine. Julrud, an amateur archaeologist, had never seen anything like it before.
Previous to this, Julrud had gained world-wide attention by being the co-discoverer with a local pastor of an archaeological site situated eight miles away. It had brought to light the remains of a previously unidentified Precolumbian people that became known as the Chupicauro culture, dating between 500 B.C.E. and A.D. 500.
But what Julrud found in the El Toro ravine he immediately saw was unique. With his background in personal archaeological studies, he recognized that the small sculpture was not Tarascan, Maya, Toltec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Chupicauran or representative of any other Central or South American cultures ever excavated.
Suspecting there may be other pieces buried here, Julrud made an agreement with Tinajero that if he and his two sons would excavate the area, he would pay them one peso (then about thirteen cents) for each unbroken pottery piece they could bring him. To Julrud’s great surprise, the very next day Tinajero arrived at his hacienda with a wheel barrel full of 39 more figurines. Over the next seven years, the ten-acre El Toro site—and an equally sized second site found at Chivo Mountain on the other side of Acambaro—produced an amazing 33,500 individual sculptures made from fired pottery, carved stone, ceramic, jade and obsidian, and ranging from a few inches in size to others three feet high and five feet in length. What is equally amazing is that, among the myriad of figurines, no two are exactly alike.
Through his continued excavation work, Tinajero reported, he unearthed the specimens always at a depth from four to six feet. They were found grouped together in pits of twenty or forty figurines each. None of them were broken as if discarded, nor did they accompany any form of funerary burial. Instead, the objects had been packed in dirt in their respective pits with great care and utmost reverence, which is the reason why so many of the figurines were able to be removed whole and intact. One speculation is that the collection had been in the possession of a late period local indigenous culture, who regarded it as a sacred trust that had been handed down and cared for from generation to generation. It was deliberately hidden away, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the invading Spanish.
What makes the Acambaro collection so unique is that the overall theme of the unknown artisans was one of zoology and anthropology, covering a vast period of time and covering far-reaching global territories.
The most controversial portion of the animal portraits include several thousand which are accurate representations of Mesozoic fauna—long-necked, three-toed Plesiosaurs, Megasaurs, Stegasaurs, Brontosaurs, duck-billed Trachodons, Gorgosaurs, horned Monoclonius, Ankylosaurs, Pelicosaurs, Corinthosaurs, Ornitholestes, Titanosaurs, Maiasaurs, Rhamphorynchus, Iguanodons, Pterodons, Dimetrodons, Ichthyornis, Tyrannosaurs, and Brachiosaurs—all of which were supposed to have been extinct from 65 to 275 million years ago. Most significantly, these include some profiles of dinosaur forms which have only been discovered by paleontologists in the 1970’s and 1980’s, as well as species just recently found, that would have been unknown to Julrud or Tinajero at the time of their excavations.
In 1955, when crypto-zoologist and author Ivan T. Sanderson personally examined the Acambaro collection, he was particularly taken by one example that accurately pictured an American form of the Brachiosaur that was totally unknown to the general public in that period. He commented:
“This figurine is a very fine, jet-black, polished-looking ware. It is about a foot tall. The point is it is an absolutely perfect representation of Brachiosaurus, known only from East Africa and North America. There are a number of outlines of the skeletons in the standard literature but only one fleshed out reconstruction that I have ever seen. This is exactly like it.”
What is more, the Acambaro version is shown rearing up on its hind legs, as if reaching up to feed off of leaves in a high tree branch. The fact is, only recently has it been demonstrated that this saurian had the muscular capacity and agility to be able to perform such a maneuver. What this once looked like —mirroring the Acambaro figure—was portrayed in scenes toward the beginning of the classic movie, “Jurassic Park.”
Adding further to the enigma of the overall Acambaro collection, mixed in with these saurian figurines is another portion composed of several thousands of Pleistocene examples of Ice Age horses, sloths, rhinos, tapirs, armadillos, camels, mastodons and extinct three-toed llamas.
Then there are numerous examples of modern crocodiles, snakes, birds, crabs, anteaters, modern horses and camels, apes, monkeys and other present-day fauna—only most of which are not indigenous to the Acambaro region, but are from Africa and Asia.
Besides these, there is too a category of creatures that are stranger yet—figures of what appear to be sasquatch or yetis, goblin-like or devilish beings, half-human and half-animal combinations, and a multitude of other phantasmagoric animals that come from the more secretive dimensions of myth, legends and nightmares.
Still another classification of sculptures are of human subjects depicted that are equally as diverse as the animals, having not only Native American but also markedly Polynesian, Mongolian, Negroid, Eskimo, Semitic and bearded Caucasian features. They are depicted as either nude, or wear aprons, skirts, tunics, jewelry, laced sandals, chain mail, jackets, headdresses and helmets, sometimes carrying baskets, or shields and spears. Many of these are shown possessing recognizable cultural elements that are decidedly Sumerian or Egyptian in origin, or from a dozen other ancient yet non-Mesoamerican civilizations.
It is as if all time barriers and physical boundaries have been suddenly lifted, with creatures and people from eras spanning millions of years and from all around the globe, somehow coming together for a group portrait.
As researcher-author Brad Steiger commented:
“Do we have in Acambaro a cache of artifacts from some museum of natural history? And were these artifacts fashioned by prehistoric artisans from some lost race on the North American continent?”
What has struck investigators most about the Acambaro collection is that—very unlike the stiff, formalized and static portraits of local Tarascan and other recognized indigenous pre-Columbian pottery—Julrud’s portraits are very much alive, caught in dramatic and expressive poses. The animals yawn, stretch, run, drink water, sleep, fight. The people likewise are captured in almost snapshot images. In particular, very moving are those sculptures which show interaction between the creatures and humans. While a few are of hunting scenes, most depict a very loving and sensitive relationship, as if the people are zookeepers of a vast menagerie, continually feeding and caring for their pets.
This is perhaps the most striking aspect about the artifacts, which is the major reason why most conservative scholars reject the whole collection as a hoax—humans and animals portrayed as interacting with one another, who supposedly were separated by millions of years of when they were actually alive and flourished.
In 1955 and again in 1968, anthropologist and history professor Charles H. Hapgood of Keene State College and the University of New Hampshire, spent several months inspecting the figurines, and with archaeologist Margaret Regler observed several of the pieces being excavated out of the El Toro site, verifying the authenticity of their source. Later, scientists such as minerologist Dr. Raymond C. Barber of the Los Angeles County Museum, and Dr. Eduardo Noguera, Director of the pre-Hispanic Monuments in Mexico, were on hand to witness the unearthing of several more of the pieces. Both Hapgood and Sanderson noted that many of the objects they examined had incrustations of dirt, root marks and cavities filled with hardened dirt and sand—all indicating burial for a long period of time.
In 1968, Hapgood found organic material that had been molded into one ceramic, and when it was sent to the laboratories of Teledyne Isotopes, Inc., at Westwood, New Jersey for radiocarbon dating, the material was found to be 3,590 years old, plus or minus 100 years. Other dated materials have pushed the time back even further—to 5930 B.C.E., plus or minus 170 years. This is as old as some of the earliest formative Mesoamerican habitation sites only recently excavated and verified.
Hapgood also submitted carbon deposits taken from another artifact and obtained an origin point of circa 4530 B.C.E.
In 1972, Arthur Young, who had sponsored Hapgood’s expeditions to Acambaro, sent additional samples to a thermo-luminescent lab operated by the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Froelich Rainy determined that the pieces had been produced between 6,400 and 3,500 years ago.
Other thermo-luminescent tests performed on baked pottery samples gave their earliest date of circa 2500 B.C.E. Later such testing, done in the early 1990’s, offered figures in a range between 2000 and 4000 B.C.E.
When Hapgood first began examining the still growing Julrud collection, he made the assumption that the majority of animal figures were images of presently-existing local fauna, and right along with this concept regarded the more lizard-like forms to be portraits of indigenous reptiles. But the closer he looked, the more he realized that certain specific features instead indicated that nothing else more precisely paralleled the reptilian sculptures than saurian physiology from the Mesozoic era.
He pinpointed may examples of combinations of reptile and bird traits, reptile and marsupial traits, three- and four-toed feet, beaked reptiles, spoon-billed reptiles, and horned reptiles—all identifiable species of dinosaurs that were long extinct. He wrote, “A number of observations gradually persuaded me that some great reptiles may have survived to a very late time in the Acambaro region.”
Hapgood, toward the end of his investigative work at Acambaro, likewise gave this revealing assessment of his overall feelings about the collection:
“The richness of the imagery displayed by the creators of the objects is incredible, uncanny, with almost a touch of the supernatural to it. All observers have agreed that there is no precedent for it in the annals of archaeology.
“An especially important point relates to the different styles of decoration in the collection. The collection has no unity. There are many different styles of design, but each style is consistently carried out on hundreds or thousands of pieces.
“In a few cases, one obtains from the collection itself a sense of the dark forces within the human psyche, an emphasis on the negative power of fear, and even a suggestion of witchcraft in an elementary state of development. Yet for the most part there is exhibited true, positive rapport with nature which our society does not understand.
“We see them petting their dogs, riding wild horses or llamas without saddle or bridle, embracing larger monkeys and apes, and having loving relationships with reptiles. They are all shown in friendly relationships.”
Despite the corroborating opinion of a number of experts, there were many attempts to declare the Acambaro figures to be fake, the claim being that the objects were really the product of Julrud’s friend,Tinajero, and his two sons. The problem is, besides the independent evidence from the dating and the verifaction of the dig site, there is the serious question of how three people with little or no education could have created over 33,000 individualized pieces of sculpture in just seven years’ time—averaging 13 figures per day, or one sculpture every daylight working hour.
There is also the fact that the vast majority of the figurines were made out of baked clay. Local authorities confirmed that: a) neither Tinajero nor his neighbors owned any ovens, b) none of them could have afforded the huge amount of money needed to purchase the otherwise sparsely available wood that would have been necessary to harden so many thousands of objects using fire, c) no prevailing cloud of resulting smoke was ever observed continually rising for seven years’ time from out of the Acambaro township or its surrounding countryside, and d) receiving only one peso or thirteen cents per intact sculpture, Tinajero could not have had near enough return capital to pay for himself or anyone else to dig up so much clay material, expertly shape it, and then individually fire that many objects.
Besides, among Tinajero and his family, or among the other local farmers and their families, did they possess even a complete secondary school education, or were barely able to read and write. Neither did they exhibit any extraordinary artistic talents whatsoever. And in those times, over half a century ago, they certainly were too poor and socially disadvantaged as a regional class to have had access to any sophisticated scientific books or pictures of fossils or dinosaur reconstructions.
Above and beyond the sheer numbers of baked pottery pieces are those that were carved out of stone, jade and obsidian. The intricate shaping of such materials, which number several hundred, would have involved special tools and skills, not to mention tremendous amounts of time, which in those days of hard times, none of the local Acambaro agricultural community possessed.
One of the obvious points of consistency among the Acambaro figurines is the accurate attitudes with which the animals were portrayed. As a good example, when the remains of extinct species of Iguanodon were first discovered and identified world-wide in the early 1800’s, its earliest reconstructions wrongly depicted it as crawling on all fours. By the late 1800’s, it began to be more accurately pictured as standing upright, but with its tail still dragged behind it on the ground. It was not until the 1980’s, with the finding of fossilized anterior supporting tendons, that Iguanodons and similar upright saurian were finally rendered with tails sticking straight out, serving as an important counterweight that provided necessary balance as they ran at high speeds. With Julrud’s initial finds of sculptures in the 1940’s and 1950’s, if they had been nothing more than hoaxes, then we would have expected to see images with Iguanodon features depicted with their tails drooping after them, which was the wrong position assumed by fossil reconstructions at that time. Instead, the Acambaro portraits show the tails extending straight out, as we now know them to have actually been. How could the so-called artistic fakers have anticipated this more accurate tail position forty years before the fact?
After Julrud’s death, his collection for several decades remained in storage vaults, abandoned and neglected. As late as 1999, when a group of American investigators tried to view the collection, they at first were denied access. But when the group appealed to the mayor of Acambaro and to the local secretary of tourism, they gained permission to enter the storage areas. Sadly, they found most of the objects were wrapped in old newspapers and buried in crumbling cardboard boxes gathering dust. More tragic still, only 5,000 to 6,000 of the objects could be accounted for.
Fortunately, the surge of interest in the collection that started at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and the resulting upswing in the number of tourists to Acambaro, led the Guanajuanto State government to offer a healthy grant for building a place to house the figurines and regather all the specimens that had been lost. In March, 2002 the new Waldemar Julsrud Museum was officially opened, with about 20,000 of the pieces put on permanent exhibit. Today, they are being successfully maintained by its present curator, Daniel Lepere.
If we assume that the artifacts are indeed genuine, then the real question that remains unanswered is, how did the unknown Acambaro sculptors over five millennia ago acquire their familiarity with fauna which date back along a spectrum of time from millions to tens of millions to even hundreds of millions of years old?
One idea is that all these creatures managed to somehow survive into relatively modern times and were intensely cared for. Their sculpturing was done in an attempt to memorialize their final passing into extinction when a climate change threatened their survival. As Hapgood noted, the region around Acambaro, though today arid, was up until the end of the last Ice Age a forested lake area, as determined by local geology and paleo-climatology. Could this have been a “lost world,” a long-enduring ecologically stable area where the last remnants of life from bygone periods actually thrived against all odds? Were they cared for by many generations of human keepers until their last days arrived, faithfully recorded in their sculpturing?
In one excavation at the El Toro site, teeth were unearthed alongside certain ceramics which Dr. George Gaylord Simpson of the American Museum of Natural History identified as belonging to Equus Conversidans Owen, an extinct Ice Age horse usually dated at over twelve thousand years old. Yet what were they doing, in situ, in a layer from only seven thousand years ago? Bones of other Ice Age and even pre-Ice Age fauna have also been located nearby, which show a remarkable degree of lack of fossilization, possibly demonstrating a more recent time of death.
The Acambaro figurines may thus have been the final tragic testimony—a Hall of Records of sculptures created in tribute—to the last surviving examples of creatures now long vanished from the world.
While this proposed scenario appears to be satisfactory at first glance, it fails to explain three important points.
First, the Acambaro collection not only portrays a wide variety of creatures, but also an equally wide spectrum of human beings, representative of practically all the ancient races and cultures of the world. Why did this odd assortment of people travel so far and wind up in Acambaro? Unless we are to imagine that this region was subject to an inordinate number of migrations coming from all parts of the globe over a very long period of time—members of whom subsequently decided to settle down and take care of the creatures they discovered here—then the presence of such diverse kinds of humans and their cultural characteristics has major historical difficulties that are certainly not easy to account for.
And how are we to explain the most bizarre images—of “big foot” creatures and goblins and devils and half-human half-animals—why are they represented in the general mixture of figurines?
Then there is the problem of the time span of previous existences for the extinct creatures seen represented among all the Acambaro figurines, and how the living forms they modeled could have managed to survive for so long a vast period. The possibility that animal species from the last Ice Age somehow survived into the relative modern age—and in a remote and isolated location having consistently sustained favorable conditions—is not entirely inconceivable. But when we are dealing with other creatures that supposedly have been extinct world-wide for over 65 and even 275 million years, the possibility of survival of any fauna through a number of interim geological upheavals would seem to be very slim indeed. There are a number of crypto-zoologists—those who today hunt for still living examples of extinct forms—who believe that such animals do indeed exist in special places. But even they admit that any survival over hundreds of millions of years would certainly be a major fluke of nature.
However, there is another potential answer that may solve all these enigmas. In the case of the Acambaro figurines, they were found just south of a region of the northern Mexican desert country known for having a number of what are called Zonas Silencios—Zones of Silence, or specific areas where the laws of physics seem to break down. Radios and other forms of transmission do not operate in such places and remain “silent,” strange and often bizarre phenomena are reported within their confines, people report experiences of losing time and memories inside the zones, and—most significantly—they are inhabited by strange species of creatures not seen anywhere else.
Could such Zonas constitute some form of portal in space-time—a doorway that periodically opens and closes, through which a very few members of both fauna and humans from all over the world and from many different eras of time in the distant past, have on rare occasions fallen through into our present world?
Up until five thousand years ago, did such a space-time doorway exist in the area of Acambaro, and did its local ancient inhabitants choose to take care of both the animals and people who arrived unintentionally across its threshold? Was this same doorway also the source of bizarre creatures passing through from strange unknown dimensions of mind and the collective unconsciousness? Are all the figurines simply a testament to accidental visitors stumbling in from other parallel dimensions and locations in temporal and physical reality?
And if such a phenomenon once took place at Acambaro, has it happened in other locations around the globe as well? Are other out-of-place creatures—such as Nessie in Loch Ness, or Chessie in Chesapeake Bay, or the Native American Thunderbirds, or the Mbembe in the Congo, or the yetis of the Himalayas and the sasquatch of North America, or the “dragons” of the Orient and Celtic-Norse Europe, or dozens of other suspected “survivors” from other distant geologic eras—are they merely the victims of transient shifts in space-time, about which we today do not fully comprehend the physics involved?
Do certain specific locations on the Earth’s surface harbor naturally existing yet sporadically operating holes in space-time, around which the Ancients once built temples, pyramids and other sympathetic resonating structures to take advantage of the temporal shifting processes?
And, most importantly, are such doorways or holes presently still functioning, and if so, where are they? Will we one day have enough understanding to be able to recognize the existence of such portals, and avoid falling into them ourselves?
Today, there is potentially far more excavation work that could be done in the Acambaro area. Tinajero reported on numerous occasions that many of the excavation sites he explored had far more figurines than he could handle at one time, and therefore simply reburied them. These have yet to be found again. In addition, several of the sites also had heavy foundation stones, signs of the presence of buried large and sophisticated buildings constructed by an unidentified yet very ancient civilization.
Also, beginning with world-renowned psychic Peter Hurkos’ trip to Acambaro in the 1960’s, a long string of visionaries and channelers have likewise foreseen that the region has many more secrets ready to be given up. Hurkos himself indicated that inside El Toro Mountain—where the initial finding of the sculptures was made—”there is a cave, the entrance of which had been closed ages ago, and that this cave is filled with the relics of a vanished civilization.”
Others with similar occult insights foretell that the hidden cavern contains a Hall of Records that will one day be opened to reveal the deeper secrets inherent in the vast figurine collection. Does this lost repository possess the wisdom of how to work the mechanisms for operating the space-time doorway itself? Could it be one day actively turned on again? And if so, what or who will fall through this time around?
[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]
