Mystery Rock

I phoned my mother this morning to see if she remembered. “Was I ten or eleven when I showed up at Grandma’s house with that weird rock?”

Of course, I didn’t just “show up”—my friend and I came running up, dripping with water and mud, and I was cradling the rock, about the size of a loaf of bread, against my chest.

Neither mom nor I can remember my age, but we both remember that rock!

It was a springtime Saturday. My friend and I were city kids who loved exploring in the country. We loved wading in the creek at my grandparents’ farm. As we slogged around a bend in search of crawdads, I noticed an odd shape in the sandy dirt along the bank. My friend and I dug it out, washed it off, and held it up in the sunlight.

Strange, really strange.

Mom suspected that my “rock” was once part of an animal. She took it to a nearby university, and it turned out to be a fossilized mastodon tooth. Talk about cool! My friend and I were instantly famous—well, to our local elementary school anyway. We were told that the animal from which this tooth came was likely huge (even bigger than an elephant), and we were told the standard evolutionary story as to how it got there. We became “evangelists” of that story, and I’m sad to say I was guilty of exciting a lot of kids to the idea of evolution that year.

A lot has happened in the world of creation research and publishing since then.

As our team was putting the finishing touches on the special Kids Answers section of this issue (the insert with the woolly mammoth on the front and the mastodon on the inside), I couldn’t help but feel again the rush of finding that old fossil, and the excitement of showing my discovery to everyone I knew. Praise God, now I feel the joy of knowing that the kids and families who read this publication, with its special emphasis on fossils, will have the biblical basis for interpreting the facts that I did not, back when I was . . . who-knows-how-old.

Equip your family to explore the “lost world” of fossils. Enjoy this issue!

All for Him,

Dale T. Mason, Publisher

P.S. We’ve changed a few things about Answers magazine. See how many changes you notice, then visit our site at Facebook (www.facebook.com/answersmagazine) and let us know what you think!