Thousands of carved stones from Ica, Peru show humans hunting and riding dinosaurs: proof that people and dinosaurs coexisted, exactly like the Bible describes with Behemoth and Leviathan.

The Ica Stones take their name from the desert town in southern Peru where, starting in 1966, a physician named Dr. Javier Cabrera Darquea began collecting engraved andesite rocks. His first came as a birthday gift, supposedly depicting an extinct fish; convinced he'd found evidence of a lost civilization with advanced science, he kept buying. By the time he died in 2001 his private museum held an estimated 15,000 to 50,000 stones, and the most famous ones show humans in apparent contact with dinosaurs: riding them, hunting them with what look like weapons, even performing what Cabrera read as open-heart surgery and organ transplants. Most of his supply came from a local farmer, Basilio Uschuya, who told Cabrera the stones came from a secret cave.

The stones drew international press in the 1970s, and a BBC investigation prompted Peruvian authorities to look into where they were actually coming from. Uschuya was arrested for trafficking archaeological artifacts and confessed to carving the stones himself, using a dental drill on river rocks and aging them by baking them or burying them in manure, working from images he'd seen in comic books, textbooks, and magazines rather than any ancient source. He later told a German journalist he'd only confessed to avoid a prison sentence for selling genuine antiquities, and over the following years he flip-flopped between claiming forgery and claiming authenticity depending on which admission carried the lighter legal risk: a pattern researchers who have reviewed the case since (see Bob Blaskiewicz's 2023 retrospective in Skeptical Inquirer, and History.com's summary of the affair) read as someone protecting himself from prosecution, not as evidence the stones are genuine. Multiple other Ica locals, including members of the Soldi family who sold to Cabrera before Uschuya did, independently described being paid to produce and age the carvings. No stone has ever been recovered from a documented archaeological context; they only ever surface for sale.

The stones still circulate in young-earth creationist material as physical proof that dinosaurs and humans lived together, which matters because that claim is doing real theological work for some readers: Job 40-41's description of Behemoth and Leviathan is a genuine and long-running point of discussion among serious interpreters, some of whom read those creatures as dinosaur-like and others as hippopotamus, crocodile, or ANE chaos-monster imagery drawing on Canaanite Yam/Leviathan traditions (that debate gets its own fair treatment elsewhere on this site). But the Ica Stones are not evidence for either side of that discussion. They're a documented, confessed 20th-century forgery industry, and citing them as if they were physical proof of human-dinosaur coexistence only hands skeptics an easy target: using a debunked stone to defend a real Bible passage does the passage no favors.