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T W I N
C I T I E S
C R E A T I O N
S C I E N C E
A S S O C I A T I O N
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Joe D Taylor Tells His Story
I was born 10-2-44 on a farm in West Texas to a rodeo cowboy and a Mother who sang hymns. My Pa became a preacher and ran for Congress in 1962 as an arch conservative Republican, radically affecting my political views. My family were all good Christian people and though just farmers and cowboys, we leaned towards the intellectual. One cousin became a world famous scientist. On brother became an actor in NYC traveling with Fiddler on the Roof. My younger brother pursued the family tradition and became a rodeo cowboy and managed a 35,000 acre ranch near my hometown of Crosbyton. This gave me access to vast fossil beds and is where I acquired much of my fossil knowledge. He is now the pastor of my church here in Crosbyton, Texas.
Graduated 1966 from the CIA art school with a degree in advertising design and illustration. After a brief stint in the Army, went to NYC and worked as an illustrator and sold my first of 24 type font designs, the most famous being one called Blippo Black which is used on all computers called PUMP. My lettering was used in hundreds of thousands of ads, packaging, and logos around the world wherever the English letter form is used. I even added Russian forms in the original. I was surprised last year when traveling Peru to see Blippo Black used everywhere in their signage and posters. Also painted hundreds of photo-real large outdoor billboards of Recording artists 1973-83 for Sunset Strip. I may hold the distinction of being the only billboard painter to both design the original album cover but then paint a big billboard of it too.
My art school roommate and I went to LA in 1969 and fell into the middle of the Jesus Movement. We were one of the first Christian singing groups of the movement. Joel moved to Berkeley and did the first bumper stickers and posters of the movement as well as doing the layout for one of the first Christian Underground papers called Right On. While working for him in 1971, he had me do the cover for Hal Lindsay's book The Late Great Planet Earth. The cover I did was when it was called Homosepians, Evacuation or Extinction. Joel then did the cover for Hal's next book, Satan Is Alive On The Planet Earth.
I started several bands and we played in churches and Christian coffee houses all over the West Coast, Midwest and New York State. I did several recordings, but just as my music career was taking off, the Lord brought 10 little kids into my life who didn't have dads in their homes. So, eventually, the music life had to be left off.
My earliest contact with Creationist speakers was at Hal Lindsay's Bible school where ICR came and spoke. After hearing Dr. Gish debate an evolutionists in 1976, I could see that Creationists had the right message but they had no bones. So, with that in mind, I began studying any source of information available.
In 1980 I worked for the La Brea Tar Pits and because I could restore fossils so that the experts couldn't tell, and because I had a passion to learn, the otherwise rabid atheists told me I could become a paleontologist without going back to school, that they would help me. And they did. With all the kids at my house, going back to school would have been impossible. This started a long and fruitful relationship with many well-known evolutionist paleontologists. It opened doors to information I would never have gotten even if I had gotten a degree at a university. But my ability to restore, sculpt and mold opened many basement collections in major institutions and private collections. It also gave me real knowledge about fossils and living counterparts.
In 1984, life was getting too tough in North Hollywood to raise kids, so I took the ones I could and moved back to my hometown of Crosbyton, Texas. All 10 of them have turned out very well, except the youngest one. We're still praying for him. I now have several grand kids and great grand kids.
Moving to Texas now gave me the opportunity to explore local fossil beds and my collection grew. I was commissioned to mold more tremendous fossils and am now considered one of the best. Baylor University in Waco Texas hired me to work on the Waco Sudden Death Mammoth site where 21 mammoths are buried suddenly, 12 females and babies and one huge male along with a giant camel. I helped excavate the big bull with a female on his tusks and then made a latex rubber mold of the two mammoths still in the ground. It is still the largest mold ever made of in-situ animals. I also went on to do the three next largest molds of in-situ specimens. One site was the famous Taylor Trail for Carl Baugh. It is 55 feet long. Otis Kline has a cast of it in his new museum in Glendive, Montana to open soon.
I did some work for AiG, going to their new museum site before the foundation was laid and looked at the layers for fossils for them. Before they opened I helped set up their department to deal with all their fossils. I also did their dinosaur dig site in the new museum and they now have the triceratops I molded for Mike Trieblod whom I taught to mold and is now one of the biggest in the business. This last year, ICR acquired a real Phytosaur skull from me for their museum.
My Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum here in Crosbyton is the world's largest fossil evidence Creation museum in the world. It is also a working museum so that we have new fossils from all over the world coming in all the time. I am currently restoring a pair of tusks from an Indiana peat bog. They are huge and extremely difficult to fix. Next to it is a skull of a lower-tusked Rhino from China I am restoring.
I have written several books on fossils and how they agree with the Biblical account. I launched a new magazine dedicated to fossils from a Creation view last year, but due to daunting legal battles, canceled it. Currently, I am finishing a four book series on my life as an artist and musician and life with my kids. I am still looking to publish three other books on fossils.
Joe Taylor
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