Agreed, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim and clearly they did not carry this burden. Generally I don't worry about how crackpots do science because you know they are crackpots. I worry that the first response of the critics was a sadly uncritical rebuttal which turned out to be incorrect. Namely that the rock formations were not fossils and they the pictures were a 'Ink Blot' that someone was imagining fossils into. There really were fossiles. Lets do better next time.

It is correct to say that Perpetual Motion machines are impossible, but it is incorrect to say that Perpetual Motion machines are impossible because of the rotation direction of the earth.