Dinosaur figurines found in Mexico. Collection of Waldemar Julsrud. Clay figurines from Acambaro, Mexico

June 27th, 2015

In the very center of Mexico, between two low hills El Cibo and El Toro, is located the small town of Acambaro. Here, in 2000, the Waldemar Julsrud Museum was opened, presenting an incredible collection of ceramic figurines. The collection shows various household items - dishes, musical instruments, figurines of people, as well as figurines of dinosaurs and other animals.

Waldemar Julsrud began collecting this collection back in 1944, conducting thorough excavations. At the moment there are 37 thousand artifacts in his collection! It's amazing, but there is not a single duplicate in it, and 2,500 of them are dinosaur figurines. The diversity of their types is truly amazing: there are species known to us, and those that modern scientists cannot identify. Among them you can easily recognize representatives of sauropods - diplodocus. Also here you will see stegosaurs, such as polycanthus, and there are figurines of sea lizards - ichthyosaurs.

It is absolutely unknown who could have made all these figures. Let's find out more about this collection.

These are truisms, a reinforced concrete system of knowledge about the ancient world. But it had to happen that two people, a poor mason and a greedy buyer of junk, almost turned this scientific splendor upside down! A thunderstorm occurred in 1944 in the Mexican city of Acambaro. A businessman with a dark past and present, Waldemar Julsrud hired a man named Tinajero, a grave robber or, as they are called in Latin America, huaqueros. Tinajero was a mason by profession and before meeting Julsrud, he worked on the estate of the police chief of Acambar. One day he needed to collect quarry sand, and he disturbed the slope of one of the hills located on the indicated estate. It was then that figures of strange animals began to fall from the ground, as if from a cornucopia.

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Under the cover of darkness, Tinajero entered the estate of the city's chief lawman and dug out valuable exhibits from the ground. The next morning he sold the spoils to Julsrud, receiving the minimum payment possible. One peso per piece. Little by little, a collection accumulated sufficient for the exhibitions of several large museums.

As soon as Julsrud boasted about it to archaeologists, it was as if a bomb exploded in the world of science. The fact is that the figurines depicted animals that became extinct from 30 thousand to 70 million years ago! These were dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, hairy rhinoceroses, fossil camels and other animals that lived before man or at a time when man only drooled at the sight of four-legged animals. With all this, the animals were presented in motion. The ancient artist tried to give them maximum resemblance to the prototypes.

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The venerable scientists immediately went berserk. To recognize the findings as genuine meant to cancel the theory of the origin of species, which, as we know, is the sacred cow of modern science. They rushed to tell the owner of the collection: you were deceived, your man made the figurines himself.

Next, the serious men decided to go to the wonderful hill themselves. Professors Hapgood and Sanderson conducted excavations and, to their horror, found 43 more artifacts. “Maybe someone planted them in advance?” - the professors thought. If so, then the attacker acted a long time ago, because tree roots had grown into several of the figurines. For reliability, the finds were sent for radiocarbon analysis to several laboratories in the United States, the result of which stunned the entire scientific world. The age of the “fakes” turned out to be 3500 years!

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Five years after the start of excavations, a journalist from the Los Angeles Times came to Acambaro, and two years later another press representative visited Julsrud. Both of them were present at the excavations themselves and saw how artifacts were taken out of the ground. In the articles they wrote, they assure readers of the authenticity of the collection, since they themselves saw from what depth these objects were taken out, and some of them also turned out to be entwined with the root system of plants. Therefore, there can be no doubt: the finds are historically real. It was these two publications that finally drew the attention of the scientific community to the discovery of Dzhulsrud. Although the reaction turned out to be completely different.

Interestingly, many sauropod dinosaurs stand on their hind legs and have plates on their backs. This, at one time, served as one of the arguments in favor of the fact that the collection of Waldemar Dzhulsrud cannot be genuine. It was believed that only stegosaurs had such plates. However, 40 years after the discovery of these figurines, new paleontological discoveries were made. Modern designs already depict ancient diplodocus with spines on its back and rising on its hind legs to feast on the upper shoots of trees. There is another reason why the entire collection of Woldemar Dzhulsrud was declared a falsification. The collection combines things that are impossible from the point of view of history and science - people and dinosaurs of various forms in everyday communication. But people and dinosaurs could not exist together; they are separated by tens of millions of years. It turns out that if we recognize the authenticity of Dzhulsrud’s collection, a revision of all theories about the development of humanity and the living world of the planet should automatically follow.

The scientists had no choice but to start talking seriously. Doctor of zoology Romer did the best job here. He said that the Indians could well have caught some animals, like a giant sloth or a fossil camel. And even though they were never found in Mexico, the Indians could see them on other continents, where they went (or from where they came) to the New World through Berengia, which connected the Asian continent with the North American one.

The final blow to the poor rag-picker Dzhulsrud was the scientists’ assertion that his collection had been collected in an unscientific way, and therefore was entirely a “fake”. After all, archeology involves many subtleties when conducting excavations. Here it is necessary, for example, to date each cultural layer of soil and record the conditions of occurrence of exhibits.

Julsrud himself suggests that his collection was once brought from the legendary Atlantis and was kept in the Aztec museum of Tenochtitlan. With the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, the Indians buried the museum's treasures in the ground. And then, having lost their culture, they forgot about the collection. The connection between generations has been broken.

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Woldemar Julsrud's collection numbers about 35,000 items, but only about 300 items are on display in the museum. There simply isn't enough space for the rest of the collection. But what is visible is simply amazing. Most of the figurines in the collection are species of animals completely unknown to us, which evoke surprise and admiration for their complete value. Many figures resemble fairy tale dragons. A distinctive feature of the Dzhulsrud collection is that there is not a single identical sculpture in it. They are all unique. Here you can see an ordinary horse, a saber-toothed tiger and a giant anteater, as well as other, very unusual species of mammals.

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In addition, in the collections of Waldemar Dzhulsrud there are many figurines depicting people of various racial types. There is another surprising thing in Dzhulsrud’s collection - the presence of figurines of creatures with six fingers. For example, a six-fingered monkey. And this is not the artist's fault. Six fingers are carefully drawn on both the hands and feet. Moreover, there is even a dinosaur with six toes. In addition, the animals are shown in motion, as if they were sculpted directly from life.

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The figurines are made from a wide variety of clays. They also differ in artistic styles, execution techniques and the level of skill of ancient artists. Real sculptural masterpieces stand out against the background of simple clay crafts. Many dinosaur figures have a detailed surface that imitates the skin factor of ancient lizards.

From his phenomenal collection, Julsrud did not sell a single figurine. After the death of Waldemar Julsrud, his collection remained ownerless. The largest and most exquisite figurines were slowly stolen and given away. Thus, about 10,000 items were lost. To date, only one large dinosaur statue, 1.5 meters long, has been preserved in the museum. The rest can be judged only from surviving photographs.

The huge collection of Woldemar Julsrud requires careful and comprehensive study. Many believe that many tribes lived here in Acámbaro and buried these items as gifts. Others believe that it was a clay library inside the hill. Julsrud himself assumed that all these figurines were hidden by local residents in order to protect the relics from the Spaniards.
Waldemar Dzhulsrud's collection reflects a mixture of cultures and peoples. Today no one can say for sure whether the plots of the Dzhulsrud figurines can be reality or not. Perhaps people who lived 6 - 8 thousand years BC. e., they simply presented knowledge about the era when dinosaurs lived.

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In 1952, the famous scientist Ch. Dipeso showed interest in the collection, and some samples were sent to him for study. The tests carried out in the laboratory did not allow us to give any definite answer, but from the very beginning Dipeso firmly defended the version of falsification of the finds. After a trip to Acambaro, he published an article in which he claimed that he had analyzed thirty-two thousand objects from the Julsrud collection and was convinced that they were fakes, since the eyes and lips of the figurines were allegedly depicted in a modern manner and technique. And this despite the fact that he actually spent only four hours on the entire collection! In addition, Depeso said that a certain illegal antiquities dealer admitted to him that the entire collection is the work of just one family from Acambaro, who makes such crafts in the winter in their free time from farming. They allegedly obtained information about dinosaurs from films and local library books.

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In response, Mexican authorities officially denied this possibility. Based on the results of special studies repeatedly carried out by different people in the Acambaro area (including a four-year study of archaeological excavations and the crafts of local residents), it was proven that there are no people engaged in such production and there have not been, at least for the last hundred years. Moreover, Dipeso's attacks are refuted even at the level of ordinary logic. First of all, even a professional sculptor is not capable of creating about thirty-five thousand ceramic and stone figurines in ten to twenty years (since the collection began to take shape seven years before Dipeso’s criticism), giving them a touch of antiquity and, moreover, secretly burying them in ground one and a half meters. And bury it so that no one discovers the freshly dug tracks.

The second argument is the lack of a unified style in the assembled collection, which would not have happened if the figurines were made by one person or even an entire workshop. Instead, not a single figure is repeated, they are all created in different styles: some are masterful masterpieces, others are quite simple and primitive. In addition, the figurines are sculpted from different types of clay: some figurines are from local clay, others from Oaxacan. Moreover, between Oaxaca and Acambaro lie one and a half thousand kilometers. It is unlikely that for falsification in the 40s of the twentieth century it was worth complicating the situation so much by supplying clay for work from such a distance. And why?

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This story began in July 1944. Waldemar Julsrud was engaged in the hardware trade in Acambaro, a small town about 300 kilometers north of Mexico City. One early morning, while riding on horseback along the slopes of El Toro Hill, he saw several hewn stones and fragments of pottery protruding from the soil.

Julsrud was a native of Germany, but was seriously interested in Mexican archeology and at the beginning of the century took part in excavations in the vicinity of Acam-baro. Therefore, he was well versed in Mexican antiquities and immediately realized that the finds on the El Toro hill could not be attributed to any culture known at that time.

Dzhulsrud began his own research. True, not being a professional scientist, at first he acted very simply - he hired a local peasant named Odilon Tinajero, promising to pay him one peso (then equal to about 12 cents) for each complete artifact. Therefore, Tinajero was very careful during excavations, and accidentally glued broken objects together before taking them to Julsrud. This is how Julsrud’s collection began to take shape, the addition of which was continued by his son, Carlos Julsrud, and then by his grandson, Carlos II.

As a result, Dzhulsrud's collection amounted to several tens of thousands of artifacts - according to some sources, there were 33.5 thousand, according to others - about 30 thousand! The collection was very diverse; the most numerous were figurines made of various types of clay, made using hand-molding techniques and fired over an open fire. The second category is stone sculptures, and the third is ceramics. It is noteworthy that there was not a single duplicate item in the entire collection!

The sizes of the figures varied from ten centimeters to one meter in height and one and a half meters in length. In addition, the collection included musical instruments, masks, instruments made of obsidian and jade. Along with the artifacts, several human skulls, a mammoth skeleton, and the teeth of an Ice Age horse were discovered during excavations.

During Waldemar Dzhulsrud's lifetime, his entire collection, packed, occupied 12 rooms of his house. In Dzhulsrud's collection there were many anthropomorphic figurines representing almost the complete set of racial types of humanity - Mongoloids, Africanoids, Caucasoids (including those with beards), the Polynesian type and others.

But this is not what made the collection a sensation. Approximately 2600 figurines were images of dinosaurs! Moreover, the variety of types of dinosaurs is truly amazing. Among them there are easily recognizable and well-known species to paleontological science: brachiosaurus, iguanodon, tyrannosaurus rex, pteranodon, ankylosaur, plesiosaur. There are a huge number of figurines that modern scientists cannot identify, including winged “dragon dinosaurs.” But the most striking thing is that the collection contains a significant number of images of humans along with dinosaurs of various species.

The images suggest the only idea that humans and dinosaurs coexisted in close contact. Moreover, this coexistence included the entire spectrum of relationships - from the struggle of two such incompatible species of living beings to, possibly, the domestication of dinosaurs by humans.

In smaller quantities, the Dzhulsrud collection included now extinct mammals - the American camel and horse of the Ice Age, giant monkeys of the Pleistocene period. It was this component of Dzhulsrud’s collection that served as the reason for a long history of hushing up and discrediting his finds. This is understandable, since the fact of coexistence and close interaction between man and dinosaur not only refutes the linear evolutionism of the theory of the origin of species on Earth, but comes into irreconcilable contradiction with the entire modern worldview.

From the very beginning of his research, Waldemar Julsrud tried to attract the attention of the scientific community to his findings, but in the early years he was faced with the fact that his attempts were completely ignored. Only after several publications in American newspapers in the early 50s did professional archaeologists pay attention to the unusual collection. In 1954, an official commission from the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico arrived to Julsrud.

The researchers themselves chose a random location on the slopes of El Toro Hill to conduct control excavations, which took place in the presence of many witnesses. After several hours of excavation, a large number of figurines similar to the samples from the Dzhulsrud collection were found. According to the capital's archaeologists, examination of the found artifacts clearly demonstrated their antiquity. All members of the group congratulated Jul-srud on his outstanding discovery, and two of them promised to publish a report on their trip in scientific journals.

However, three weeks after returning to Mexico City, the head of the commission, Dr. Norkvera, presented a report claiming that the Julsrud collection was a modern falsification because it contained figurines depicting dinosaurs.

In other words, the universal argument was used: “This cannot be, because it can never happen.” Neither re-check New excavations in 1955, nor repeated studies by local authorities, which clearly confirmed the absence of such ceramic production in the area, were unable to destroy the wall of silence around the Dzhulsrud collection.

Ramon Rivera, a professor at the Faculty of History at the Acambaro High School, spent a month doing field research to determine the possibility of local production of the Julsrud collection. After numerous surveys of the population of Acambaro and the surrounding areas (Rivera especially carefully interviewed the elderly), the professor stated that over the past hundred years there had been nothing resembling large-scale ceramic production in this area.

Studies of figurines carried out in the 60-70s using radiocarbon analysis yielded varied results: some samples were dated to the second millennium BC, others to the fifth. In the 70-80s, public interest in the Dzhulsrud collection gradually subsided; the scientific community continued to ignore the fact of the collection’s existence. Some publications in popular publications reproduced the version about the false nature of the collection, based on the thesis that man could not coexist with dinosaurs.

At the end of the 90s the situation changed. The decisive turning point in the recognition of Julsrud's finds came as a result of the work of two American researchers - anthropologist Denis Swift and geologist Don Patton. During 1999 they visited Acámbaro five times. By this time, Julsrud's collection was "under lock and key" in the mayor's office and was inaccessible to the public. The collection ended up there after Dzhulsrud’s death, when his house was sold.

As a result of the active work of Swift and Patton and the information campaign they organized in the Mexican media, local authorities decided to open a special museum. At the end of the same 1999, part of the Dzhulsrud collection was exhibited as a permanent exhibition in a house specially designated for the museum.

However, today the museum is again closed to the public, and there are fears that the entire remaining part of the collection (and after Dzhulsrud’s death, most of his finds disappeared and no more than five thousand ended up in the museum) may simply disappear.

Andrey ZHUKOV, Candidate of Historical Sciences, Mexico, especially for “UFO” Photo by the author.

Dzhulsrud's collection could become the greatest scientific discovery. However, if it were recognized as such, it would have to announce the greatest scientific closure of Darwin's theory.

Neanderthals were uncultured people. The world around them interested them only for gastronomic reasons. That is why they did not leave behind images of the flora and fauna of those times. Another thing is the Cro-Magnons who replaced them. These tall, slender handsome men already had artistic taste and ambitions. It was they who created masterpieces of rock art, which depicted animals of the Ice Age. These are truisms, a reinforced concrete system of knowledge about the ancient world. But it had to happen that two people, a poor mason and a greedy buyer of junk, almost turned this scientific splendor upside down!

A thunderstorm occurred in 1944 in the Mexican city of Acambaro. A businessman with a dark past and present, Waldemar Julsrud hired a man named Tinajero, a grave robber or, as they are called in Latin America, huaqueros. Tinajero was a mason by profession and before meeting Julsrud, he worked on the estate of the police chief of Acambar. One day he needed to collect quarry sand, and he disturbed the slope of one of the hills located on the indicated estate. It was then that figures of strange animals began to fall from the ground, as if from a cornucopia.

Tinajero took several pieces to the junk buyer Julsrud. You never know, what if you manage to trade a bottle of tequila for them? Julsrud saw the figures and immediately lit up. His keen eye immediately caught signs that the gizmos were of ancient origin. And so began the pseudo-scientific collaboration between two dubious personalities. Under the cover of darkness, Tinajero entered the estate of the city's chief lawman and dug out valuable exhibits from the ground. The next morning he sold the spoils to Julsrud, receiving the minimum payment possible. One peso per piece. Little by little, a collection accumulated sufficient for the exhibitions of several large museums.

However, this version looked funny from the very beginning. It turned out that the illiterate mason sat all day long over illustrations of fossil animals and was engaged in artistic modeling, for which he later earned pennies. Next, the serious men decided to go to the wonderful hill themselves. Professors Hapgood and Sanderson conducted excavations and, to their horror, found 43 more artifacts. “Maybe someone planted them in advance?” - the professors thought. If so, then the attacker acted a long time ago, because tree roots had grown into several of the figurines. For reliability, the finds were sent for radiocarbon dating, the result of which stunned the entire scientific world. The age of the “fakes” turned out to be 3500 years!

As for the images of dinosaurs, they are not dinosaurs at all. And the reptiles that live in Latin America to this day. Romer explained the similarity with the monsters of the Mesozoic era by the fact that ancient artists naively focused on the sinister features of each animal. Thus, an ordinary lizard turned into a lizard. The final blow to the poor rag-picker Dzhulsrud was the scientists’ assertion that his collection had been collected in an unscientific way, and therefore was entirely a “fake”. After all, archeology involves many subtleties when conducting excavations. Here it is necessary, for example, to date each cultural layer of soil and record the conditions of occurrence of exhibits.

In short, archeology should be guided by the same principles as criminal procedure law. Physical evidence seized from the scene of an incident without proper paperwork is not considered physical evidence. Dot! The law is strong, but it's law. Julsrud himself suggests that his collection was once brought from the legendary Atlantis and was kept in the Aztec museum of Tenochtitlan. With the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, the Indians buried the museum's treasures in the ground. And then, having lost their culture, they forgot about the collection. The connection between generations has been broken.

Will there finally be an honest and thorough investigation of the mysterious figurines? For now we can only hope for this...

The city of Acambaro is located northwest of Mexico City. Since 1944, a huge number of grotesque clay figurines and household items have been found here. Of the 75 thousand artifacts, only about half have survived to this day. The origin of these figurines is controversial. These clay figurines depict representatives of many unknown human races and living creatures resembling dinosaurs. According to radiocarbon dating data, they were created in the prehistoric era. However, archaeologists are officially critical of this conclusion. After all, the conclusion that there was an unknown connection between humans and dinosaurs seems too fantastic.

However, there is a theory according to which the collection of clay figurines collected in Acambaro, consisting of approximately 32 thousand artifacts, may be the legacy of a single primitive Indian proto-culture, from which the highly developed classical cultures of the Mayans, Incas and Aztecs, now known to us, developed much later.

This collection was assembled by the German Waldemar Julsrud (more correctly, Julsrud) and is currently stored in his former home in Acámbaro. Radiocarbon dating of artifacts indicates that the culture that created them could have existed approximately 6400-3500 years ago. According to thermoluminescent studies, the age of some figurines is 4500 years.

Waldemar Julsrud was a hardware merchant by profession, and his hobby was archaeology. At the end of 1944, he accidentally discovered a completely unusual find: while riding on horseback along the slope of the El Toro hill on the outskirts of Acambaro, Julsrud noticed a strange object in the mud, half covered with earth. It was a small figurine made of baked clay. Its style was different from anything he had ever seen before. And although he was well acquainted with artifacts belonging to the cultures of the Tarascans (Purepecha), Aztecs, Toltecs, Mayans, Incas and other peoples of Mesoamerica, this figurine was completely different from the works of the cultures known to him.

A few days later, a peasant he hired named Tinajero rolled a wheelbarrow filled with small items to Yulsrud’s house. The German was amazed by the unusual style and variety of artifacts. He suggested that he may have discovered an unknown Indian culture.

The method by which the figurines were hidden in the ground was very unusual. They were neither simply thrown away nor deposited at someone else's burial site. Waldemar Julsrud put forward the theory that he had found a sacred collection that was hidden in the ground to protect it from the Spaniards. That is why they were buried safe and sound and placed in dug holes very carefully.

The collection included items of all sizes, from figurines just a few inches long to figurines 3 feet tall or 4-5 feet long. Clay of various types was used to make them. It is important that they were all burned over an open fire. The variety of options for these artifacts was incredible. All who have seen this collection agree that there are no similar precedents in the annals of archeology.

At the same time, the collection is heterogeneous in style. There are several of them, but each style is unique and includes several hundred or thousand items. It appears that this collection was brought together by several different Indian nations or by a single conquering people. True, cultural imperialism was alien to the Indians.

Julsrud wanted to attract the attention of archaeologists to his discovery. He showed the collection to everyone, gave interviews and, in the end, he managed to interest the young American journalist William N. Russell from Los Angeles, who made several trips to Acambaro and became the “representative” of the German amateur archaeologist in the United States of America. At the same time, Julsrud’s personal interest was exclusively scientific. He never tried to make a business out of his finds and therefore never sold items from the collection, except for exhibitions. He tried hard to convince experienced archaeologists to get acquainted with his collection and to conduct excavations themselves on the El Toro hill. Unfortunately, at the same time he put forward a theory that cast great doubt on the authenticity of his magnificent find.

The fact is that the collection contains many large figures of reptiles, some of them are depicted together with a person. The relationship between man and dinosaur in the motifs of these figures is sometimes friendly, in other cases – hostile. Waldemar Julsrud was not a professional paleontologist. But because some of the creatures these figurines depict look like dinosaurs, he concluded that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. In addition, after reading books about Atlantis, he made another strange conclusion, that people and dinosaurs inhabited Atlantis together. One can imagine the commotion that arose among archaeologists when articles were published in the Mexican press in which this idea was particularly highlighted. For many years to come, no archaeologist came to Acámbaro again. If learned archaeologists spoke out about the Yulsrud collection, it was only to call it a falsification.

In 1955, the Foundation for the Study of Consciousness sent Charles H. Hapgood to Mexico. He spent the whole summer there doing excavations. At first he was amazed by the richness of the collection. The American scientist carried out a thorough classification of Yulsrud's finds. At the same time, he identified many different styles. He had no difficulty in discovering many similarities between the clay figurines and various aspects of famous Indian cultures. In some of the exhibits identified by Waldemar Julsrud as creations of pre-Inca culture, the American recognized works of Toltec or Aztec art. According to the German, some figurines are supposedly Sumerian, and Hapgood discovered several artifacts that, in his opinion, are distantly related to the culture of ancient Egypt. He came to the conclusion that many artifacts can be attributed even to a very early era of Tarascan culture. However, despite numerous speculations about the connection of the people who created these figurines with other civilizations, Charles H. Hapgood soon saw that the collection really showed many aspects of the life of a certain primitive people, their weapons, equipment, art, methods of obtaining food and their connections with nature.

An American scientist interrupted his study of the collection to conduct serious excavations on the El Toro hill. He knew that most of this area had already been devastated by the Tinajero peasant. In addition, slanderers claimed that all these artifacts were made by Tinajero himself and his sons. Therefore, Hapgood decided that the most suitable site for excavation would be the area directly under or adjacent to one of the new houses built on the site where the finds had previously been discovered. This would eliminate any possibility of falsification. As a result, a house was chosen that was located directly on the site of the excavations carried out by Tinajero. The owner of the house, the head of the city police department, allowed the American to conduct excavations right under the house. Hapgood dug a hole about 6 feet deep under the center of the living room, and found many fragments of figurines that were very similar to the figurines from the Yulsrud collection. This convinced the scientist of the authenticity of the collection and the absence of a hoax.

After this, the American scientist returned to study the collection from the point of view of the culture they depict. In his opinion, this culture is unique in many respects. It seems that the “people of Julsrud,” so called by Hapgood, were not familiar with the custom of human burial. Obviously, there was no bow and arrows in their arsenal, and for hunting, representatives of this people used only spears, clubs and knives made of wood, stone or bone. It also appears that for most of their history they had no idea of agriculture beyond growing bottle gourds and weaving, but nevertheless produced unpainted pottery. They reflected their culture in ceramics. At the same time, the fact of the presence of pottery in pre-agricultural society is unusual, but not unique.

Much in the clay figurines of Julsrud's collection indicates a close connection between these people and animals. We see scenes of them petting their dogs, riding wild horses or llamas without saddle or bridle, and hugging great (or great) apes. Judging by some of the figurines, it can be assumed that the “people of Julsrud” tamed and domesticated reptiles, as well as anteaters and other mammals.

Much in the collection indicates its great age. Firstly, this is evidenced by the forest culture depicted in the motifs of the figurines. Instead of today's barren and arid valley surrounded by eroded hills, the collection suggests that the region was well watered during this era. Geologists have found that this valley was filled with water even after the end of the Ice Age, and there was a large lake here. The location where the artifacts were found used to be the shore of this lake. In support of this fact, Hapgood discovered forest and lake landscapes in the motifs of the figurines.

This alone may indicate that the discovered artifacts were created in a very ancient era, but there is much stronger evidence for this assumption. There is no doubt that the collection includes figurines of a dromedary camel and a horse from the Ice Age, as well as animals reminiscent of rhinoceroses and giant apes that lived in South America during the Pleistocene era.

In addition, Charles Hutchins Hapgood noticed horse figurines in the collection, as well as their images carved on pots, and found in it several real teeth, in his opinion, horse teeth. He later came to the American Museum of Natural History and showed these teeth to Dr. George Gaylord Simpson, a leading American paleontologist. He identified them as the teeth of an extinct Ice Age horse (Equus conversidans owen).

Hapgood initially thought it likely that the reptiles in the collection, despite their sometimes striking resemblance to dinosaurs, were merely transformed representations of still-extant Central American reptiles such as the iguana. In addition, he knew that descriptions of such monsters are found in many Indian legends, so the figurines could also be characters from these legends. However, later this scientist was inclined to the point of view according to which some of the large reptiles may have continued to exist for a long time in the Acambaro region.

In principle, the idea of a kind of “lost world” in this part of Central America does not seem so outlandish if you think about some examples of so-called “living fossils” (the Indonesian Komodo dragon, which outlived the rest of its family by 100 million years, or the New Zealand tuataria , a direct descendant of the dinosaurs of the Mesozoic era, or a fish of the genus Coelacanth, recently discovered off the African coast, although the age of the fossil representatives of this order is at least 200 million years old). According to Hapgood, the fact that dinosaurs have long gone extinct in other parts of the world is not a law of nature that denies the possibility of their survival in Mexico until relatively recently.

Collection of Waldemar Julsrud

Humans and lizards lived at the same time. It is precisely this paradoxical conclusion that is suggested by the artifacts found near the Mexican town of Acambaro.

This story began in July 1944. Waldemar Julsrud was a hardware merchant in Acambaro, a small town about 300 km north of Mexico City. Early one morning, while riding on horseback along the slopes of El Toro Hill, he saw several hewn stones and fragments of pottery protruding from the soil. Julsrud was a native of Germany who moved to Mexico at the end of the 19th century. He was seriously interested in Mexican archeology and back in 1923, together with Padre Martinez, he was digging the Chupicauro cultural monument eight miles from the El Toro hill. The Chupicauro culture was later dated to the period 500 BC. - 500 AD

Waldemar Julsrud was well versed in Mexican antiquities and therefore immediately realized that the finds on El Toro Hill could not be attributed to any culture known at that time. Julsrud began his own research. True, not being a professional scientist, at first he acted very simply - he hired a local peasant named Odilon Tinajero, promising to pay him one peso (then equal to about 12 cents) for each complete artifact. Therefore, Tinajero was very careful when excavating, and glued accidentally broken objects together before taking them to Julsrud. This is how the Julsrud collection began to take shape, the addition of which was continued by Voldemar’s son Carlos Julsrud, and then by his grandson Carlos II.
The sizes of the figures varied from tens of centimeters to 1 m in height and 1.5 m in length. In addition to them, the collection included musical instruments, masks, instruments made of obsidian and jade. Along with the artifacts, several human skulls, a mammoth skeleton and the teeth of an Ice Age horse were discovered during excavations. During Waldemar Dzhulsrud's lifetime, his entire collection, packed, occupied 12 rooms of his house.

In Dzhulsrud's collection there were many anthropomorphic figurines representing almost the complete set of racial types of humanity - Mongoloids, Africanoids, Caucasians (including those with beards), the Polynesian type, etc. But this is not what made his collection the sensation of the century. Approximately 2,600 figurines were images of dinosaurs! Moreover, the variety of types of dinosaurs is truly amazing. Among them there are species that are easily recognizable and well known to paleontological science: brachiosaurus, iguanodon, tyrannosaurus rex, pteranodon, ankylosaur, plesiosaur and many others. There are a huge number of figurines that modern scientists cannot identify, including winged “dragon dinosaurs.” But the most striking thing is that the collection contains a significant number of images of humans along with dinosaurs of various species. The iconography of the images suggests the only idea that humans and dinosaurs coexisted in close contact. Moreover, this coexistence included the entire spectrum of relationships - from the struggle of two such incompatible species of living beings to, possibly, the domestication of dinosaurs by humans.

Ramon Rivera, a professor in the history department at the Acambaro Graduate School, spent a month doing fieldwork in Acambaro to determine the possibility of local production of the Julsrud collection. After numerous surveys of the population of Acambaro and the surrounding areas (Rivera especially carefully interviewed the elderly), the professor stated that over the past hundred years there had been nothing resembling large-scale ceramic production in this area.
Moreover, critics of the Julsrud collection often forgot that it consisted of more than just ceramic artifacts. The collection contains a significant number of stone sculptures and all of them show signs of severe erosion. It is almost impossible to fake such an element of the surface of an object as erosion.
And finally, it should be remembered that Odilon Tinajero, who for several years added to the Julsrud collection, had incomplete four grades of education and could hardly read and write. Therefore, it makes no sense to talk about the possibility of his deep knowledge in the field of paleozoology, just as it makes no sense to say that in the 40s of the last century in a small Mexican library one could find enough books on this topic, and even in Spanish.

By 1954, criticism of the Julsrud collection, at the instigation of Dipeso, reached its maximum and this led to the fact that official circles in Mexico were forced to show interest in the collection. A delegation of scientists headed by the Director of the Department of Pre-Spanish Monuments of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, Dr. Eduardo Nokvera, went to Acambaro. In addition to him, the group included three more anthropologists and historians. This official delegation itself chose a specific location on the slopes of El Toro Hill to conduct control excavations. They took place in the presence of many witnesses from local reputable citizens. After several hours of excavation, a large number of figurines were found, similar to the samples from the Julsrud collection. According to the capital's archaeologists, examination of the found artifacts clearly demonstrated their antiquity. All members of the group congratulated Julsrud on his outstanding discovery and two of them promised to publish the results of their trip in scientific journals.
However, three weeks after returning to Mexico City, Dr. Norquera submitted a trip report claiming that the Julsrud collection was a fraud because it contained figurines depicting dinosaurs. Those. the same universal argument was used: “This cannot be, because it can never happen.”

At the end of the 90s the situation changed. In 1997, the NBC television channel aired a series of programs called “The Mysterious Origin of Humanity,” in which part of the material was devoted to the Dzhulsrud collection. The authors of the program also adhered to the version about the recent origin of the collection and even sent a couple of samples for independent examination using the C14 method. The anthropomorphic figurine has been dated to 4000 BC, and the dinosaur figurine to 1500 BC. However, the authors of the program simply stated that the second date was erroneous.
Also in 1997, the Japanese corporation Nissi sponsored a film crew's trip to Acambaro. A scientist who was part of the group, Dr. Herrejon, stated that the figurines depicting brontosaurs do not correspond to the appearance of actually known representatives of this class, since they have a number of dorsal plates. However, in 1992, paleontologist Stephen Zherkas published an article in the journal "Geology" (N12, 1992), in which he first pointed out this feature of the anatomical structure of brontosaurs. Needless to say, in the 40-50s. this fact was not yet known to paleontologists.
The decisive turning point in the recognition of Julsrud's findings came as a result of the work of two American researchers - anthropologist Denis Swift and geologist Don Patton. During 1999 they visited Acambaro five times. By this time, Julsrud's collection was under lock and key at City Hall and inaccessible to the public. The collection was locked up after Dzhulsrud’s death, when his house was sold.

At the end of the same 1999, part of the Dzhulsrud collection was exhibited as a permanent exhibition in a house specially designated for the museum.

So, facts and hypotheses:

All these figurines, of which there are about 35 thousand, were all completely individual, not a single one was repeated, and the technique of making ceramics in local ancient cultures was completely different.

In the second half of the 20th century, a number of independent US laboratories analyzed the figurines from El Toro and determined their age. It ranges from 2 thousand to 5 thousand years. At the same time, the extraordinary realism of the execution is surprising. All the figures are made very carefully: even the folds of the dinosaur skin are drawn. It was as if they were sculpted from life. Moreover, some of them, for example, Tyrannosaurus, Iguanodon, Brachiosaurus are well known to modern science. The collection also included figurines of other relict animals that became extinct 10-12 thousand years ago: a saber-toothed tiger, an ancient horse, and there were also creatures unknown to science - all kinds of crawling, flying and running monsters. And the types of people were also represented very different. Here, for example, is an oriental man with a beard carefully curled in the ancient fashion. Finally, there is one more oddity. Some human and animal figures have 6 fingers. And this is clearly not the artist’s mistake. But how can we explain the juxtaposition of humans and dinosaurs in this collection? Supporters of alternative history do not have a common opinion. Some see this as the intervention of an extraterrestrial civilization, which introduced the aborigines to the history of the planet.

The point is that it was not people who lived with dinosaurs, but these people were simply given knowledge about dinosaurs. Gave knowledge from outside. Some other civilization.

However, there are other hypotheses. A number of historians believe that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time.

In fact, many believe that humanity is much older than is commonly believed. And previously there was another civilization, much more ancient than ours. I think so. I believe that in order to make all these figurines, a person had to be familiar with dinosaurs, had to see them.

In the meantime, there are discussions that the sacred Hill of El Toro reliably keeps its secrets. Local residents claim that there are 4 tunnels that lead deep into the hill. And there seems to be an underground city of some ancient civilization hiding there. However, no one is in a hurry to conduct research yet. And it’s not just a lack of funds and desire. Perhaps humanity is simply not ready to learn the whole truth about itself.

Indeed, it is possible that El Toro Hill holds other mysteries. According to our information, it is pierced by several yet undiscovered tunnels that go deep into the hill. However, local residents diligently hide their location, as they are afraid that their native places will become the subject of unnecessary increased interest.

These photographs were taken by our Russian scientists in 2007. .