Three years ago, the North Carolina congressman Mark Meadows sold a hundred-and-thirty-four-acre property in Dinosaur, Colorado. The buyer was Answers in Genesis, a Christian nonprofit based in Kentucky, which was founded by the Australian creationist Ken Ham. Answers in Genesis is dedicated to promoting young-Earth creationism, which holds that the Earth was created in six days, several thousand years ago. According to documents related to the sale, Meadows was to be paid about two hundred thousand dollars for the property, in monthly installments, the last of which was paid last year.

Neither the sale nor any such payments are noted on Meadows’s congressional financial disclosures, which he is required by law to file annually. Meadows is a founding member of the very conservative House Freedom Caucus and is one of the more prominent members of Congress; last year, Donald Trump reportedly considered making him the White House chief of staff. Why didn’t Meadows disclose the property or the sale? The congressman declined to comment for this story. In August, the Charlotte Observer reported that Meadows—who, before becoming a congressman, was a successful real-estate developer—owned land in northeastern North Carolina that he had also failed to list on his disclosure reports. It’s possible that these nondisclosures reflect a pattern of ignoring congressional reporting rules.

It’s also possible that Meadows wanted to avoid drawing attention to the Colorado property and the complicated and perhaps unflattering story behind it. The property is not an ordinary piece of land but a rich site for finding dinosaur bones, and this appears to be the primary reason that Meadows bought it. Those bones then became the subject of a long-running fight among young-Earth creationists—and they are likely the reason that Meadows sold the land, ultimately, to Answers in Genesis. Meadows’s involvement with the land may have been, in part, a moneymaking venture, but it seems chiefly to reflect his commitment to, and entanglement with, the contentious and controversial world of creationist paleontology.

Doug Phillips, a fifty-four-year-old contractor and documentary filmmaker, was, at one time, a part of that world. He’s the son of Howard Phillips, who founded the Constitution Party and was a key figure in the rise of the religious right. For several years, Doug Phillips worked as a lawyer at the Home School Legal Defense Association, a Christian nonprofit that lobbies for homeschool-friendly legislation and provides legal support to homeschooling families. In 1998, he founded Vision Forum Ministries, best known for its insistence on Biblical patriarchy—a creed that holds, among other things, that “the woman was created as a helper to her husband” and that “the God-ordained and proper sphere of dominion for a wife is the household.” Phillips also maintained a commercial offshoot of the ministry, Vision Forum, Inc., which sold books and other materials to Christian consumers.

In the spring of 2002, he co-organized a fossil-hunting expedition called the Dragon’s Den Dig, which was advertised to evangelical homeschoolers—attending the outing cost nine hundred and ninety-five dollars for adults and children older than ten. Phillips’s partner in the venture was Pete DeRosa, a Florida entrepreneur whom he’d met at a homeschooling conference. DeRosa ran a family operation, later incorporated as Creation Expeditions, that took homeschoolers out to swim with manatees and taught “a fresh approach to ecology from a Creationist’s perspective.” The Dragon’s Den Dig promised to give kids the excitement of hunting for dinosaur bones while teaching them that fossils provide evidence for the flood described in the Book of Genesis.

This explanation of the fossil record has been around for more than a century, and it prevails among young-Earth creationists. It has particular traction with evangelical homeschoolers, many of whom adhere to that version of creationism and also have to give their kids science lessons. “For homeschooling parents who want to teach their children that the earth is only a few thousand years old, the theory of evolution is a lie, and dinosaurs coexisted with humans, there is no shortage of materials,” a writer for the Atlantic noted, in 2013. “Kids can start with the Answers in Genesis curriculum, which features books such as Dinosaurs of Eden, written by Creation Museum founder Ken Ham.”

Mark Meadows and his wife homeschooled their children, and, in May, 2002, they took them on the Dragon’s Den Dig. The first two days of the expedition were to be spent on day trips in Utah, with time allotted for white-water rafting and digging for fossils in Cowboy Canyon, according to an itinerary for the event. (“Keep what you find!” the itinerary promises.) The other three days were set aside for digging at a site in Dinosaur, Colorado.

Shortly after the trip, Vision Forum put out a surprising press release: “Home School Expedition Uncovers Rare Allosaur and Giant Sauropod.” According to the release, a father from Missouri who was at the dig discovered an allosaurus skull, and “the claws to a 100-foot Sauropod, presently believed to be of the rare Ultrasaurus variety,” were found by “nine-year-old home schooler Haley Meadows.” The release claimed that the group found the fossils “laying in a bed of leaves and plant debris,” with partly petrified “wood from trees mixed in among the bones”—evidence, the release suggested, that the creatures had been buried by “a relatively recent and catastrophic event similar to that described in the Bible as the Flood of Noah’s day.”

“They say, ‘Well, we found the allosaur with some plants and some wood next to it,’ ” the paleontologist Kirk Johnson said, when I asked him about the claims in the press release. “It’s, like, Well, yeah, the dinosaur lived in a forest.” Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, grew up a Seventh-Day Adventist, believing that Earth was created in six days and that the fossil record was formed by the Biblical flood. “I learned a lot about evolution because my church was trying to explain to me that it made no sense,” he told me. In his first year of college, he took a geology course that “completely changed” his life; after getting his Ph.D., at Yale, in 1989, he spent twenty-two years at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. He visited the dig site in Dinosaur, Colorado, in 2002, roughly around the time of the Dragon’s Den Dig. During his visit, he heard that creationist fossil hunters had recently been there. “Where they were digging is certainly a place that has, and does, and will produce dinosaurs,” he said. But, he added, “It’s markedly not four thousand years old.”

A few months after the dig, Vision Forum, Inc., released a documentary called “Raising the Allosaur: The True Story of a Rare Dinosaur and the Home Schoolers Who Found It.” The film’s voice-over is credited to a Winston MacArthur, who sounds a lot like Phillips. “An unusual group of thirty parents and their children journeyed to these badlands to participate in an experiment,” he says. “A rare experiment in paleontology and a unique search for one of the most elusive dinosaurs, the allosaur.” The narrator describes the DeRosa family as having “a decade of experience in field excavation.” The goal of their project, he explains, is to “bring the lordship of Jesus Christ to the field of science.”