Eternal Trail : A Tracker Looks at Evolution

by Martin Lockley; M. G. Lockley

• ISBN13: 9780738201658
• ISBN10: 0738201650
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-09-01
• Publisher: Perseus Books Group

Summary

Were Jurassic dinosaurs social creatures? Is the legendary Bigfoot merely a myth? Can you determine the shape of a ram's horns from its footprints? Paleontologist Martin Lockley answers these questions and many more in this highly original chronology of tracking and track-making. From the earliest fossilized prints left by a millipede on a volcanic island to Neil Armstrong's footprint, forever embedded in the lunar dust, Lockley reinterprets the story of evolution, recorded over millions of years in the strata and substrata of our planet and its environs. In the process, he offers a new, holistic approach to trackingone that highlights the self-organizing principles at work in the natural worldand demonstrates how the science of tracking is giving us new insights into the biology, behavior, and evolutionary history of a diverse array of extinct animals. Filled with fascinating anecdotes and surprising discoveries,The Eternal Trailinitiates us into the art and science of tracking, while offering a poetic reflection on the continuity of life.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Acknowledgments	xvii
Introduction: The Trail from There to Here	1	(300)
First Impressions	9	(34)
Act I: Cast of Characters	9	(2)
Love Is the Aboriginal Tracker	11	(4)
Our Long Track Record	15	(1)
Tracking Extinct Animals	16	(1)
Elite Feet	17	(2)
Memories, Impressions, and Reflections	19	(2)
Individual Signatures	21	(2)
Binary Bipeds and Digital Digressions	23	(2)
The Beat of the Feet	25	(1)
The Trail Through Time	26	(3)
Pioneers Along The Trail	29	(2)
Leading with the Legs	31	(8)
Male Feet and Female Footprints	39	(4)
Paleozoic Prelude	43	(36)
Act II: Cast of Characters	43	(1)
The Deep Structure of Sediments and Strata	44	(3)
Cruising the Cambrian: Fossil Art in the Making	47	(6)
Walking in Circles: The First Footprints on Land	53	(1)
Fish Out of Water: Giant Steps for Vertebrates	54	(2)
Monster Millipedes	56	(2)
The First Reptile Tracks?	58	(2)
Giant Swamp Dwellers	60	(1)
Dimetropus: Our Earliest Mammal Ancestors	61	(2)
Permian Murders and Dirty Devils	63	(1)
The Mammal Underground: Of Burrows and Bush Pigs	64	(3)
Running from Floods in the Desert	67	(4)
Shape Shifting	71	(3)
Spiders in the Dunes	74	(2)
The Italian Bigfoot	76	(3)
Hand Signals	79	(26)
Act III: Cast of Characters	79	(1)
Worldwide Wanderings	80	(2)
The Hand Animal	82	(4)
A Message in the Lady's Hand	86	(3)
Now You See 'Em, Now You Don't	89	(1)
Tracking the Crimson Crocs	90	(3)
The First Biped	93	(1)
A Protomammal wit Hairy Feet?	94	(1)
Lizards Galore	95	(1)
The First Giants	96	(2)
Now We See 'Em: A New Look at Dinosaur National Monument	98	(1)
Gateway to the World of Miniature Mammals	99	(1)
Dinosauroids and the First Dinosaurs	100	(2)
The Stress of Missing and Broken Pieces	102	(3)
Noah's Raven	105	(24)
Act IV: Cast of Characters	105	(1)
Fibonacci's Fingers: The Sacred Geometry of Hands and Feet	106	(2)
The First Dinosaur Tracker	108	(2)
Big Blue Bananas in the Great Rift Valley	110	(2)
Grallator: The ``Early Bird'' That Went on Stilts	112	(1)
True Thunder	113	(2)
The Giant Animal	115	(3)
Odd Foot	118	(2)
The Diminutive Dune Runners	120	(2)
Hop to It	122	(3)
Left Limp	125	(1)
The World's Longest Brontosaur Tracks	126	(1)
Glimpse of a Dinosaur from the Dark Ages	127	(2)
Lost Souls	129	(30)
Act V: Cast of Characters	129	(1)
Megalosaurs and Megatracksites	129	(5)
Holy Father of the Elephants: The World's Longest Dinosaur Trackways	134	(3)
Padded Out: Of Flesh and Bones	137	(1)
Pterosaur Runways	138	(3)
Dinehichnus: The People's Track	141	(2)
Social Commentary	143	(1)
The Rise and Fall of Thunder Beings and Thunder Lizards	144	(3)
Dinosaur Trails in Purgatory	147	(3)
Trampled to Death	150	(1)
Crocodiles in the Channel	151	(2)
Sacred Mule Tracks From Lobster Bay	153	(2)
Teil hard's Enigmatic Chinese Footprint	155	(4)
With God on Our Side	159	(32)
Act VI: Cast of Characters	159	(1)
Tracking Dinosaurs in The Lost World	160	(2)
A Pterosaurian Bigfoot or Two	162	(1)
A Rare Commodity: Tracks of Armored Dinosaurs	163	(2)
The Early Birds: New Perspectives on Bird Evolution	165	(1)
Ships That Pass in the Night: A Mesozoic Crossroads	166	(3)
Baby Brontosaurs	169	(1)
Wading in Deeper	170	(2)
Ghost Prints, Phantom Tracks, and Phantom Limbs	172	(1)
Bird's Herd	173	(3)
Trackers and Attackers	176	(4)
Sauropod Serenade	180	(1)
Creative Midnight Chisel Work: Evolution Versus Creation	181	(4)
Evolution as Creation: Science and Spirituality	185	(6)
Dancing Dinosaurologists	191	(34)
Act VII: Cast of Characters	191	(1)
Migrating Along the Dinosaur Freeway	192	(2)
A Promenade Along Dinosaur Ridge	194	(1)
More Flying Crocodiles	195	(2)
Dinosaurs and Dynamite	197	(2)
The Battle of Carenque	199	(2)
A Dinosaur Stampede	201	(2)
The Kangaroo Factor	203	(1)
A Korean Duck Pond	204	(1)
Pterosaur Psynchronicity	205	(2)
The Mystery Dinosaur	207	(2)
T. Rex Tracks and Dancing Dinosaurologists	209	(3)
The Wall: Getting High in the Andes	212	(3)
Of Hooves and Horned Dinosaurs	215	(6)
Celestial Messages on the Iridium Band	221	(3)
The Last Dinosaur Tracks	224	(1)
Out of Africa	225	(24)
Act VIII: Cast of Characters	225	(1)
Tracking The Rise of the Himalayas: Mammals Masquerading as Dinosaurs	226	(1)
Horse Tracks at Dawn	227	(2)
Of Frogs and Flamingos	229	(2)
Tracking the Symbolism of the Cloven Hoof	231	(4)
Pliocene Dressage: Early Equestrianism	235	(4)
Leakey Tracks Lucy	239	(6)
Blessed Trail of Our Ancestors	245	(4)
Spirit Trails	249	(26)
Act IX: Cast of Characters	249	(1)
Mammoths and Mastodons	249	(3)
A Sloth with Sandals	252	(2)
Spoor of the Carnivore	254	(2)
Giant Wombats Dead in Their Tracks	256	(1)
Moa Tracks but No Moa Track Maker	257	(4)
Tracking Bigfoot	261	(7)
A Convergence of Trails	268	(7)
The Signature of Humanity	275	(26)
Act X: Cast of Characters	275	(1)
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall	276	(3)
Fingerprints of Our Genes	279	(3)
Electrostatic Footprints	282	(1)
Over the Moon: The Trail Leaves Our Planet	283	(4)
Tetrapods on Mars	287	(3)
This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land	290	(2)
Sacred Ground	292	(4)
Save the Last Dance for Me	296	(5)
Notes	301	(24)
Index	325

Excerpts

I hope my mind will not grow tall

to look down on things,

but wide to embrace all sorts of things.

-Evelyn Underhill

Chapter One

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

ACT I: CAST OF CHARACTERS

This book is ostensibly about fossil footprints, the spoor left by extinct animals. But there is more to it than that. When we walk by a mirror we see our reflection, and it leaves an imprint in our mind. When we walk by a lake, again we see our reflection and we also leave imprints along the shoreline. There is the material realm and there is the less tangible realm of shadows and reflections--the world of known reality, conscious and tangible, and the world of the unknown, of the unconscious and of intangible dreams. But both worlds are real. The artist and scientist who convert images and concepts from the mind's eye into paintings and scientific treatises are merely transporting intangibles from the immaterial ether into the manifest, material realm of canvas and paper. One day a melody in the mind of Mozart, the next a brilliant musical score.

    In paleontology, tangible material objects are very important. The science could not exist without the bare bones that are its stock in trade. Fossil footprints, while being themselves tangible, are like scripts that tell of the less tangible dimensions of existence of extinct animals. They tell of behavior and give us subtle insights into the spirits of animals and how they interacted with contemporary species and the environments that they called home. They allow us to view the tangible world of fossil bones from alternate perspectives, and revisit conventional wisdom.

    Our cast of characters in this tracking adventure is all the animals that ever left a footprint in the geological record, and a few rather exceptional human beings. Some, such as the Bushmen of southern Africa are themselves master trackers, or readers of the trail. Others are trail blazers, authors of scientific and philosophical works that cannot be ignored if we hope to read the important message left by the wayside. In this chapter we shall meet a few of them, philosophical trail blazers, who have given us insights into biology and the biosphere. We are at a turning point in the history of biology. After several generations of emphasis by scientists on molecules, genes, and other bits of organisms, and the "mechanisms" that help them to function, it is becoming apparent that the story of bits is just a bit of the story. Organisms are coherent wholes, as shown very elegantly by researchers such as Mae-Wan Ho, of the bioelectrodynamics lab at Britain's Open University, one of the most brilliant holistic biologists of the present generation, and the biologist Wolfgang Schad, whose extraordinary book Man and Mammals: Towards a Biology of Form, casts new and highly compelling light on the biology of mammals.

    Why is this new holistic approach to organisms important to trackers such as ourselves and all who seek information, truth, and understanding? At first glance, tracks tell us so little that if we view them as isolated bits of evidence we will gain correspondingly limited insight into the animals that made them. If we change our perception, our way of seeing, however, we begin to notice relationships between tracks and the whole organism. There is a relationship, for example, between the shapes of hooves and horns. It was an intuitive, holistic understanding of such relationships, born of lifetimes of experience, that made Bushmen such great trackers. Having explored and benefited from the bio-"mechanical" approach to animal locomotion and track patterns, we can begin to explore the benefits of the holistic approach, which tell us we can always read something of the spirit of the animal from its spoor.

    We must put on our tracker's caps. Ultimately it is all about the perceptions we bring to bear on the subject of our attention. We should try to look deeply, not superficially, and make what the anthropologist William Irwin Thompson calls an archaeological excavation of our culture and species consciousness. In doing so we begin to understand Paleolithic (Stone Age) cultures, the very ones that spawned the best trackers, in a radically new light. We then realize that reevaluating our perception applies to all our endeavors, including science and the stories we tell in journals and in books such as these. We cannot be good trackers if we are not keeping track of our own perceptions. If we do this we can retain a modicum of humility and a sense of humor that will stand us in good stead when the mysteries of the universe again transcend our feeble perceptions and we again stand before nature and humbly ask that she may remind us anew that we are her offspring.

LOVE IS THE ABORIGINAL TRACKER

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Henry David Thoreau

Increasingly we live in a world of concrete, tarmac, television, and computer screens. These are great mechanical and electronic constructs of the human intellect--but they blot out our view of the rising and setting sun and keep our feet from being grounded in the earth, which in many cultures is a sacred act of communion. Our exterior technological constructs come between us and our inner hearts and souls, and certainly block out tracks and signs of our fellow creatures. As one of the greatest of all modern trackers, Laurens van der Post, has written: "[T]here is a great lost world to be rediscovered and rebuilt ... in the wasteland of our spirit."

    It is easy for us as twentieth-century paleontologists to talk in convenient and self-congratulatory sound bites about our efforts to rediscover a "lost world" of the type reconstructed in Sir Alfred Conan Doyle's story of the same name and bring it to the attention of an inquisitive public eager for an improved understanding of our ancient origins. Or, as Michael Crichton has done, we can convert the lost world into a fictitious domain of ferocious raptors run amok with an insatiable desire for blood and Hollywood stardom. But when van der Post wrote, in The Lost World of the Kalahari , "Love is the aboriginal tracker, the Bushman on the faded desert spoor of our lost selves" he was clearly speaking of a much greater human quest, the search for our very souls, and our search for grounding as an integral part of all nature. He was talking not of a mythical lost world, but of a real world, albeit one we can lose sight of all too easily.

    Van der Post truly loved the sensitive African Bushmen, whom he studied closely in their natural habitat. No one who had ever seen their tracks could forget them, for they had little feet. They touched the earth very gently. Though of this world, they were really of another world, an interior, collective spirit world, that we have lost touch with in our relentless quest to rebuild the earth into the artificial construct in which we often find so little meaning and peace. The Bushmen believed that "there is a dream dreaming us"--so perhaps they intuitively knew of the implicate inner order of things. We on the other hand are always trying to "make our dreams come true" by seeking their manifestation in the material, exterior realm.

    The Bushmen were great trackers, they could follow anything anywhere and read the very spirit of the animals they loved. We on the other hand are generally lousy trackers, and very often cannot see things that are staring us in the face. Certainly, in our urban environments we feel very little of the pulse of nature around us, and so have to go to the wilderness to be revitalized and reborn. If we have the ability to revive our instinctive desire to commune with nature, and so love it, then we cannot have lost touch completely with our natural souls and the spirits of life around us. We are just out of practice. So it is with tracking. Few of us can identify the spoor of animals around us, much less the trails of insects and a myriad of more subtle signs. But it doesn't take much time to begin to learn. The anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who lived with the Bushmen, described in her classic, The Harmless People, how at an early age a Bushman child can pick out its mother's footprints from among those of the rest of the tribe. These accomplishments by so called "primitive" or "aboriginal" peoples may seem remarkable to us, but they pale into insignificance beside the tracking skills of animals that follow trails by scent alone. When crossing the path of a rabbit, a dog can quickly tell which way the animal was heading. By making a regulated series of short sniffs of precisely the same duration, it can determine if the scent is increasing or decreasing in intensity in a given direction, and will immediately turn around if it is not heading down the trail in the same direction as its quarry. A dog can literally sniff out time's arrow.

    When we lose touch with nature, we lose touch with our own natures, and so begin to think of rocks, plants, animals, and even people as somehow less important than the stressful job of fitting into the artificial world we are so busy creating. We lose our sense of perspective on history, and time becomes something we save or make, despite our awareness that there are no time banks or time storage units. We are so befuddled that we have to make time for people, and even make time to eat! All the while the Bushman's dream is dreaming us, and the inconceivably vast space-time continuum rolls on as it has from time immemorial.

    Aboriginal trackers believed in a powerful sympathetic or spiritual connection between a creature and its tracks. In his classic anthropological work The Golden Bough , Sir James George Frazer cites many examples of peoples who believed that an adversary could be injured, sickened, or caused to limp by deliberately tampering with his or her footprint, or removing earth from the track to perform the appropriate ritual or "voodoo" ceremony. Are our modern views so different when fans visit Hollywood to feel closer to their filmstar idols by standing in their footprints? Don't we have closer connections to friends or idols by possessing their autographs and letters? Even the most skeptical paleontologist would feel a warm glow or special sensation if he or she were in possession of, or "in touch" with, an original manuscript penned by Charles Darwin. Surely such a sensation of connectedness is no less superstitious than that of the aboriginal tracker. And what of the analytical forensic tracker who must explore every creature-track connection to solve a crime or paleontological puzzle--possibly even "feeling" a warped spirit in the course of following a criminal's trail?

    It is the premise of this book that footprints have great meaning--for like the hand of Charles Darwin, each is the energetic signature of the species and consciousness that made it. It is well known in literature and language that "hand" is synonymous with the actions of the head, mind, or spirit--that hands are the instruments of the soul. The guiding and surprisingly scientific principle behind palmistry (or chieromancy ) is just this: the hand is a microcosm of the whole makeup of the individual. As I shall note later, geneticists make the same claim for genes. The same principle is now programmed into computers to expose the "hand" of authors who attempt to write anonymous, politically motivated best-sellers. If the universe is conscious, so is every living creature and substance. This view comes naturally to many aboriginal people, theologians, and mind-body physicians. Here each species, whether animal vegetable or mineral, manifests its own unique vital force or consciousness--what Einstein would call the field, and what homeopaths call the energetic "footprint" of the species.

    It is my belief that the footprint of each species, or life form, is distinctive. Modern studies support this conclusion in most cases, though in the fossil record it is not always easy to distinguish the tracks of two or more closely related species. But this does not mean that it cannot be done with practice, or will not be done in the future. Current research shows that we are moving in the direction of being able to distinguish different track types with greater confidence and read characteristics of pace and stride as manifestations of the behavior and very spirit of animals. Trackers also pay attention to where and when tracks are found, for each species had a habitat or range, and its own time slot or season in Earth's history.

    The eternal trail is well symbolized by the continuous trail of footprints of terrestrial animals that began almost a half billion years ago. This trail continues uninterrupted today as paleontologists map out the footprints of centipedes, dinosaurs, and hominid ancestors, to which they add their own paper trail of words, paragraphs, and text-file stories, some at least as fanciful as any told by aboriginal tribes. We are converting real track fossils into our own symbolic messages scribbled on paper and stored in our sacred academic vaults. Let us also remember with humility that the Bushman is a serious, full-time tracker, not just of animals but of the very elements of air, wind, and water. According to Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, the Bushmen could tell from fallen leaves whether they had been disarranged by wind or by passing animals. "Bushmen" she wrote "are always right when it comes to tracks." I would rather have a Bushman's guidance through any physical or spiritual desert than be compelled to rely on most of what has been written "scientifically" on the subject of tracks.

    Like the Bushman tracking the spirits of all life, we also transform our record of tangible measured trails into ephemeral words and interpretations uttered in scientific meetings and media sound bites. Until, like a trail growing old, our electronic messages become spirit trails and whispers in the ether, with all the components of myth and uncertainty that we regard as fanciful when someone else tells a tall story. My last e-mail message on tracks has vaporized amid the same starlight in which the Bushman's tracker mythology is constructed. How is this circumstance different from the songlines of the Australian Aborigines, described by Bruce Chatwin in his book The Songlines . The Aborigines' ancestors "while traveling through the country [were] thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of [their] footprints" leaving a trail to be followed. Half the world gets through daily life humming along with their favorite musical "tracks" and the spirit messages they contain. "It would seem" Chatwin noted, "that there exists, at some deep level of the human psyche, a connection between path finding and law."

    Scientifically we cannot say where the eternal trail begins, or where it will end. Before the first cousin of a common "rolypoly" wood louse walked on land, marine worms and other invertebrates were already leaving countless trails as they nosed their way along the Precambrian seafloor. These creatures incidentally were our own billionth cousins. Then came tracks of amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, and mammals, eventually leading to the footprints of Lucy striding with her kin across the African savannah. (Lucy represents our archetypal hominid Eve, though some have suggested she was in fact a "he.") When we gaze on these famous tracks, the spoor of our own kin, only a few thousand generations removed from the tracks on the moon, can we avoid pausing to think of the billions of miles traveled?

    These countless miles cannot be measured simply on the terrestrial odometer, for with every step our little planet has been hurtling through space at the breakneck speed of 18.5 miles per second, racking up the ultimate tally of frequent flier miles through the compounding of Earth-speed with footspeed. And with every epoch track makers have been evolving their own paths, behaviors, and spirits. As twentieth-century paleontologists we are just the latest to step on the stage, to discover where millions have passed before. Let us revere our ancestors, and the tracking skills we can learn from them, not just in the narrow physical realms of geological strata and zoological biomechanics, but in the profound insights they give into the great chain of being written as an eternal trail throughout space and time.

OUR LONG TRACK RECORD

That turnpike earth!--that common highway all over dented with the marks of ... heels and hoofs.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

About 400 million years ago a new type of backboned animal with fishy origins began to develop legs and walk on land. These animals and their descendants have been leaving footprints ever since. The central theme of this book is the global "track record" of land-based animals (mainly vertebrates) that begins in the Ordovician Period, about 450 million years ago, and continues into the present era, when in our generation NASA's twelve disciples made footprints on the moon, and space probes made trails on Mars.

    It would take a considerable effort in arithmetic to estimate how many four-footed vertebrate species (tetrapods) have walked on land, and even greater powers of extrapolation and speculation to calculate how many individuals of each species have walked on Earth at one time or another. Thus the reader will forgive the omission of a realistic estimate of the astronomical number of footprints made by all individuals of all species since the first creatures set foot on land. If Earth's 5 billion mobile human inhabitants took an average of 1,000 steps each day (the equivalent of strolling around for about half a mile), they would produce the equivalent of 5,000 billion (5 trillion) seen or unseen footprints in a day. This is to say nothing of the tracks made by elephants in Africa, polar bears in the Arctic, and mice in the attic. And these are just a few of several thousand mammal species. Let us not forget ducks by the pond, lizards in the desert, and frogs on the bayou. Our busy human population could make almost 2,000 trillion footprints in a year (2 quadrillion) and 200 quadrillion in a century. If only one in 100,000 of these human tracks were made on soft ground where a clear footprint would register, and if only one in a million of those were to be preserved in the fossil record, there would still be an accumulation of 2 million tracks per century.

    Without even multiplying these numbers to allow for other vertebrates, these conservative estimates for humans and their ancestors still add up to 20 billion footprints being preserved after a million years, or 8 trillion preserved since the first one was made on land. However conservatively or generously we do these calculations, the results come out the same-lots of fossil footprints. If only one in a million of these preserved footprints is accessible among the ragged edges of strata exposed at the earth's surface today, there are still millions available for study.

TRACKING EXTINCT ANIMALS

"Hallo" said Piglet, "What are you doing?"

"Tracking something" said Winnie-the-Pooh very mysteriously.

"Tracking what?" said Piglet, coming closer.

"That's exactly what I ask myself. I ask myself, What?"

A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

The investigation of fossil footprints is not quite the same as tracking modern animals. It is quite easy to become proficient at identifying modern tracks because sooner or later one can see the animal that is making them. Remarkable tracking skills were common among hunter-gatherer societies, as recounted by Laurens van der Post in The Lost World of the Kalahari . When tracking extinct species, however, there is always some uncertainty as to "whodunnit." We must draw also on our knowledge of fossil skeletal remains to reconstruct the identity of the possible track makers. This does not mean we cannot study tracks if we don't have the skeletons of track makers available because, in many cases skeletal remains are unknown. Ultimately, however, it helps if we can put the track and bone records together in an integrated picture.

    This exercise in fitting track makers into tracks is one of the obvious objectives of a good tracker. Ten years ago it would have been hard to get trackers to agree on what track types correspond to particular extinct groups, but much progress has been made in recent years. While writing this book I was struck by how many track types have been matched with track makers, with reasonable confidence. Such progress is encouraging in the light of previous sometimes hilarious errors. For example, large millipedes have been confused with amphibians, and pterosaurs mistaken for crocodiles. This progress comes from careful comparison of tracks with foot skeletons, and from looking more closely at the age of the rocks in which the tracks occur. This way we place the correct culprits at the scene of the crime and do not attempt the paleontological equivalent of trying to fit our australopithecine ancestor Lucy into the footprints on the moon.

    Finding the foot that fits the footprint is what I have dubbed "Cinderella syndrome." Ultimately there was only one individual responsible for making any particular footprint. In this context it is helpful to remind ourselves of the first principles of detective work. A track maker cannot be held responsible for making a track if it did not have the means, opportunity, and motive. Means corresponds most closely with having the right foot anatomy. Only elephants have the means to make elephant tracks. Opportunity relates to time and place. Elephants have the opportunity to make tracks today, in certain areas, but did not have the opportunity to make tracks during the age of dinosaurs, and extinct Australopithecus could not make tracks on the moon. Motive is quite another matter, since it involves interpretation of the behavior and cannot be established as easily as means and opportunity.

    Fitting fossil feet into footprints is not always easy because we are tracking animals in the flesh and not tracking foot skeletons. An excellent illustration of this difficulty is provided by our own feet. Let us imagine for a moment that we are anthropologists from a future millennium, and that we have found one or two human foot skeletons. How would we reconstruct the footprints? Would we get all the pads and flesh in the right position and proportion? Flesh is almost invariably lost from the fossil record. We must remind students of skeletons to look at tracks as the imprint of the living part of the foot.

    Ultimately a deeper question arises: not simply what are we tracking, but how and why are we tracking? Are we seeking knowledge for some "useful" purpose? If we do not know what we are tracking, then we are like Winnie-the-Pooh, that bear of very little brain. Tracking extinct animals could easily be considered a futile exercise, leading to no results other than a cluttering of the scientific literature with obscure verbiage. If the exercise results in the rewriting of textbooks, and captures the imagination of children who get a better education, then perhaps the endeavor shows promise. If we recognize that fossil footprints are part of the present landscape, we may be able to preserve them as national parks and not destroy irreplaceable natural heritage in the name of development and technological progress. We cannot live in the past, but we cannot forget our past altogether. For a rewarding future we must integrate ourselves with past and present.

ELITE FEET

How beautiful are the feet of them that ... bring glad tidings of good things.

Romans, 10:15 (King James)

Just as some feet are more beautiful than others, so some footprints are more attractive than others, at least from a scientific viewpoint. Vertebrate paleontologists naturally look to whole skeletons for a complete picture, but such skeletons are much rarer than most people might infer from a casual survey of paleontology books. Complete foot skeletons are even rarer, because they consist of small bones that are the first to wash away after an animal dies. Even so, tracks represent only feet, and only give a partial picture of the track maker. Some have even suggested that only lunatics would study tracks, and in one infamous case a scientific manuscript on footprints was rejected without being read on the grounds that tracks cannot provide any information of value. The British tracker Bill Sarjeant told me that a paper of his had been rejected by a leading journal of earth sciences simply because the subject was footprints. Ironically, a more accommodating journal later published the article without revisions.

    Fortunately, such extreme views are rare. Tracks obviously reveal evidence of the living animal in the flesh. A brontosaur track is more than a mere foot skeleton with individual toe bones touching the ground. They consist of large elephantine footprints that show very large fleshy areas in contact with the substrate. Such experience tells us that we must treat tracks and foot skeletons as two different but related types of evidence. Paleontological tradition recognizes such differences and so we use different scientific terms to describe tracks and bones. The naming of plants and animals falls in the science of taxonomy (literally, the arrangement or classification of names) or systematics . The naming of fossil footprints is ichnotaxonomy (from the Greek ichnos meaning "trace"), and so trackers can be referred to as ichnologists (not to be confused with ichthyologists , who study fish).

    Taxonomy labels different classes of animals, including species and genera, on the basis of anatomy; in addition, we have ichnogenera and ichnospecies , based on tracks. For example, if the skeleton is genus Tyrannosaurus , the track ichnogenus is Tyrannosauripus (meaning "tyrannosaur foot"). Such a system may seem wordy and duplicative, but it has some distinct advantages. It allows paleontologists to recognize their limitations. We would be less than honest if we claimed we could match every track with a track maker. Worse, we would make too many mistakes. Yet there are many examples of tracks that match with a particular genus, as in the case of the tyrannosaur track (discussed in detail in Chapter 7). Often, however, we are not quite so lucky, so we typically identify the track maker at the more general level of a family, or other larger grouping. This means that we have not yet found Cinderella. The shoe is known to fit a lady who was at the ball but we don't yet know her identity.

    The first and most important tracker's rule is "Don't name crummy tracks." Put another way, "Be elitist!" and work primarily with pretty tracks in which the details of anatomy are well preserved. I have coined the term "elite tracks" to describe just such tracks of "museum quality." A complete set of these guidelines has actually been presented in the form of "Ten Commandments" of tracking. Unfortunately these commandments were not passed down from on high until 1989, so many crummy tracks have been named in the past. Little by little, however, trackers are learning to use common sense and track down and name only the footprints that are useful to science.

MEMORIES, IMPRESSIONS, AND REFLECTIONS

When orthodox conceptions prove unfruitful ... a little scientific heterodoxy may not be amiss.

Edmund W. Sinnott, The Biology of the Spirit

Earth has recorded the passage of multitudes of creatures. Some registered their sojourns decisively with obvious, elite signatures, others left only unintelligible smudges, mere ghost signatures. (We will talk more about these ghost signatures in Chapter 6.) The Earth therefore has a memory of its former inhabitants locked in the track record. But how much is remembered, and how are such memories recorded? For every particle emitted by an unstable element, only a few are recorded as fission tracks in the matrix of a receptive crystal. When a creature walks across the bare rock of a granite massif no trace is registered. Similarly, a thief leaves no fingerprint when touching the rough texture of fabric or upholstery. To leave an impression or signature, the earth must be receptive and absorb, or "register," the signal sent it. We can read only the tracks that are accessible to us with our present level of scientific knowledge and tracking skills. But, like tracks yet to be discovered, more information awaits our discovery as our tracking skills improve.

    The ideal condition to record a clear fingerprint is to prepare a smooth surface of ink on a plate of glass. The ink is rolled out flat, pristine and dark, like the emulsion on a fresh roll of film, and like film emulsion it is receptive, designed to register signals sent to it from elsewhere. Like a mirror, it is smooth and shiny enough to reflect the image of the approaching finger, even before the finger makes an impression. As a fingertip touches the plate, only the raised ridges make a full impression in the inky layer. As the finger is removed white furrows remain and the light pattern of dermal loops, whorls, or arches is registered like light etching the emulsion of a negative. As the inky fingertip is transferred to white paper, the zebra pattern is recorded in reverse, making a positive print: the black ink on the ridges is transferred to, "printed" on, the paper, and the inkless furrows register as white lines between the sticky black trails.

    Our fingerprint patterns resemble those on a zebra skin or the ripple-marked surface of a beach or riverbed. Explanations for such patterns point to certain inherent properties of matter under what scientists call boundary conditions . Hence, sand forms into ripples at the boundary between the sea bed and the sea, and color patterns and fingerprint skin texture reflect the dynamics of growth at the boundary between organism and environment, a growth pattern that begins in the embryo.

    The sand of a beach can be compared to our crime-lab inked glass plate, in that it is an ideal surface to register and record the activity of passing animals. Without such sensitive surfaces, capable of registering the impression of nomads on the eternal trail, we would have no track record. These surfaces have the ability to record and so "remember" the morphology of the feet that walk all over them. This process of recording the history of the Earth and the Solar System has been going on since the beginning of time. Record keeping is not something invented by our species, and memory is not just a phenomenon of the human mind. Animals "remember" to migrate, plants "remember" to sprout in the spring, and the planets "remember" to orbit, all with the utmost precision. Somehow, without our intervention, the universe remembers to stay organized and do all kinds of things, many of which are still beyond our comprehension. So I should interject a sincere note of thanks to whatever forces are responsible for doing most of the legwork in recording all the data on which this book is based. We have merely learned how to read some of the eternal trail long after most of it was written.

    Can we talk of sandflats and mudflats having memory? Are they more than just inert layers of sludge that absorb the physical impact of footprints? Where do we draw the line in attributing memories to creatures or entities other than humans? Does a crystal have memory if it records the decay of unstable elements? Does the earth have memory if it records the impact of meteorites and the fallout of iridium? Does photographic film have memory if it records our most memorable moments by responding to split-second light signals? Does our skin have memory if it records the scars of battle and rugby matches? Does the vertebrate body of a lizard or a frog have memory if it can regrow a tail or a leg? Could we have reconstructed anything of Earth's history if, before the advent of our species, our rocky little planet had not accumulated a rich storehouse of memories, written in a multiplicity of geological and paleontological languages?

INDIVIDUAL SIGNATURES

The art of signature teaches us to give each being its true name in accordance with its innate nature.... There is nothing that Nature has not signed in such a way that man may discover its essence.

Paracelsus, from Paracelsus: Essential Readings

We are all aware that individual fingerprints are so distinctive that they are routinely used to identify individuals in criminal cases. Despite a global population of 6 billion, governments, immigration officials, and law enforcement agencies keep track of us through our fingerprints. This puts fingerprint experts into the category of master trackers, ultimately capable of tracking down any one of us who leaves our individual signatures on a glass or door knob.

    If it is hard to consistently identify different species of track makers from the fossil footprint record, it would therefore seem even harder to identify individuals. Paradoxically, however, using size and shape we can distinguish one individual from the next, more easily than we can distinguish sexes, races, or species. Within a sample of fossil footprints some may tend to be slender while others are stout. Phyllis Jackson, a now-retired English podiatrist, has recounted how during World War II her practice was suddenly flooded with refugee patients of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh descent, whose feet appeared to be different from those of typical Anglo-Saxons. She observed that Anglo-Saxons had broad feet and that Celts had longer and slimmer feet. Although she did not use statistical tests to establish her thesis, the simple observation that the Saxon shoes did not fit proved her point. Ms. Jackson has since attracted the attention of professional archaeologists by demonstrating that she could tell ancient Celts from Anglo-Saxons by their foot skeletons, and her most recent work reveals a huge range of variation in foot shape all across modern and ancient Europe.

    If we can distinguish different races or ethnic groups by their feet and foot skeletons, then presumably we should be able to use footprints to distinguish different hominid species, assuming we can find sufficient tracks. Among the various species of the genera Homo and Australopithecus that make up our own taxonomic family, the Hominidae, anthropologists readily identify distinctive robust (heavyset) and gracile (lightweight) varieties. As their footprints are known, we must ask ourselves how easy it is to track our own immediate ancestors? Would we recognize a Homo erectus or Gigantopithecus track as anomalous if we found one on the beach among those of our own species?

    The study of individual signatures is an aspect of the broader study of variation among individuals in a population or species; Darwin made this variation among individuals the cornerstone of his theory of evolution. We do not really know why individual fingerprints or footprints differ, but it is a subject of great interest to scientists and forensic experts. There is evidence that palms and hand shapes fall into various categories that reveal much of the character of the person. In palmistry an elongate hand is regarded as a sign of the gift of high intelligence, sensitivity, intuition, and psychic ability, whereas a stout hand, of the type sometimes called the square or useful hand, is considered a sign of a "salt of the Earth," commonsense personality. Differences in hand shape that we can verify for ourselves by simple observations may also reflect gender to some degree; usually the female hand is less stout than a man's. Anthropologists recognize broad and narrow heads and body types expressed within all major racial groups. So broadness or narrowness is seen in the whole body, in the head, in the hand, in the foot. A pattern, surely. As we shall see, inherent qualities are also associated with narrowness and breadth, so we might infer from their foot shape that ancient Celts were more intuitive and mystical, whereas Saxons more practical and down to earth.

    There is substantial scientific evidence that fingerprints and palm crease patterns fall into distinct categories. For example, susceptibility to Alzheimer's, and other diseases has been correlated with certain distinctive fingerprint patterns. There is also strong evidence that left-handedness correlates with certain fingerprint types and personalities. Lefties live shorter lives and are more likely to end up in jail or in mental institutions, but we don't know why. If genes for such diseases and psychological profiles are linked to skin or hand anatomy, then surely such correlations should be studied seriously. At present forensics studies fingerprints but not palms. Why? Perhaps because it is easier and less messy to collect and store fingerprints than palm prints. Or is there a taboo against studying palms, based on scepticism toward the ancient art of palmistry? This book would be sketchy and incomplete if trackers studied only the impressions of toe tips and claws. In the absence of any efforts to explore the scientific underpinnings of palmistry, we shall remain ignorant of its potential, and not appreciate the adage that hands and feet are the instruments of the soul. Within the broad realm of medical science there are many correlations between disease and physical attributes and less tangible characteristics such as behavior and personality. On a more practical level, our immense global fingerprint database could be used to identify individuals with susceptibilities to particular diseases. But a palm-print database would provide considerably more information. Such prospects lend a humanitarian perspective to a data set otherwise used primarily to facilitate bureaucracy and law enforcement.

BINARY BIPEDS AND DIGITAL DIGRESSIONS

I shot an arrow into the air,

It fell to earth, I knew not where.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Arrow and the Song"

As humans we share many common traits with all other tetrapods and vertebrates. We have bilaterally symmetrical bodies. Externally our right and left sides are mirror images in all but the smallest details. The mirror plane is called the sagittal plane (from the Latin sagitta , meaning "arrow"). This bilaterality is reiterated in sutures between the symmetrical pairs of bones that make up the skull and the division between the right and left brain, and is reflected in our language and culture. We speak of there being two sides to a discussion or the need to see the other side of the story. Our simplest method of counting is the base-2 binary system of mathematics, which is used in computers because it can be expressed as a simple on-or-off electrical pulse. We use light switches that are generally either on or off and legal arguments where the answer is either yes or no.

    The Desana Indians of Colombia view the sky as a giant brain, divided into two hemispheres by the Milky Way. This view of the plane of the galaxy makes it analogous to the sagittal plane that bisects our brains and bodies. To stand in sagittal alignment with the night sky is to integrate our entire beings with the cosmos. In fact, the Milky Way has great significance to many cultures as a spirit trail or river aligned in the vastness of eternity.

    In Western cultures the existence of the sagittal plain influences many of our images and social and cultural constructs. We tend to be preoccupied with two sides. We turn either to the right, or dextral, side (which by extension also means correct, fitting, decent, or honorable) or to the left, or sinistral, side (meaning unlucky, unfavorable, or evil). Such entrenched notions of right and left, right and wrong, and what is righteous or what should be left out, has made it hard on left-handers, who have in some cultures become literal outcasts. What is the larger meaning of this preoccupation with sides? Is there an evolutionary message in our bicameral world of right and wrong, light and dark, day and night?

    As a tracker I note that we leave symmetrical trackways as we walk endlessly, moving astride the sagittal plane. We are perhaps too preoccupied with duality and think too much in terms of polarity between opposing right or wrong theories. On this subject it has been suggested that our ancestors were ambidextrous (neither hand dominant) and so perhaps more holistic than we in their view of the world. It has also been suggested that "sidedness" arose from the habit of tool using where one hand (the left) holds an object, while the other (the right) actively strikes it to manufacture an artifact. Right makes might?

    On either side of the sagittal plane we plant five toe impressions with every footfall and wave five fingers at the world. So the number ten registers constantly in the unconscious abacus of our minds. Is it any wonder that we devised the decimal system? Things might have been different had we evolved with more or less than five digits. Indeed, the very term digit , which we commonly use to refer to numbers, is the Latin word for fingers and toes, which paleontologists still number, Roman style, I through V, beginning on the inside, with the thumb or big toe. Books on evolution traditionally talk of the "rise of animals" from lowly beginnings to higher status. This is seen quite literally in the evolution of low-slung, flat-footed (or plantigrade ) animals such as amphibians and lizards, to those that walk on tiptoes (digitigrade) , such as birds and hoofed mammals. This process was one of becoming increasingly emancipated from close adherence to the Earth's surface. Birds and humans have so far been most successful at this by freeing their front limbs from the Earth entirely. It is more than mere linguistic coincidence that "plantigrade" (which means feet "planted" fully on the ground) also has the connotation of no higher than "plant grade" i.e., earthbound. Despite our having free hands, the human foot is plantigrade because both heel and toes contact the ground when we are standing and walking.

THE BEAT OF THE FEET

Whenever the moon and stars are set,

Whenever the wind is high,

All night long in the dark and wet, a man goes riding by.

Late in the night when the fires are out,

Why does he gallop and gallop about?

Whenever the trees are crying out loud,

And the ships are tossed at sea.

By, on the highway, low and loud, by at a gallop goes he.

By at a gallop he goes, and then, by he comes back at the gallop again.

Robert Louis Stevenson, "Windy Nights"

Walking or running is a very rhythmic activity. The tempo of this beat of feet decreases or increases as the track maker slows down or speeds up. In most cases the heartbeat also slows down and speeds up with these changes in pace, so that the internal and external music of a body synchronizes naturally.

    The locomotion of quadrupeds is more complicated than that of bipeds because more feet are involved. If one has ever tried to watch the sequence of footfalls of a dog or cat, one soon notices that without a video camera it is hard to keep track of the cycle of footsteps, even at slow walking speeds. If we study the locomotion of the horse, we learn that it can progress at a walk, pace, trot, canter, or gallop--all different patterns of footfalls. Although the horses are blissfully ignorant of the definitions given their types of locomotion by humans, people with an equestrian bent have become engrossed in the intricacies of equine deportment, and strict adherence to protocol is desired in such things when it comes to deciding the distribution of Olympic medals (which, incidentally, go to the rider, not the horse). Each gait has its own distinct rhythm, cadence, and characteristic sequence of footfalls. The trackway records footprints as notes in space, comparable to a musical score. Though the sound wafts away from the trackway as it is registered, the horseman may hear the gait by listening to the beat. We too may attune our ears to a walk or trot, or thrill to the sound of a gallop. The beat and rhythm of horses in motion was incorporated into poetry before train tracks brought us the rhythm of the rails. Track making can be heard as well as seen, and the sound and vibration of footsteps has been recreated in many a drama.

    In the late nineteenth century, Eadward Muybridge pioneered the use of photography to make detailed studies of animal locomotion. In doing so he developed a graphic method for recording the sequence of footfalls or beats made by animals as they progress with different gaits. Learning his system of notation for recording a walk, trot, or gallop is like learning to write a musical score. These symbolic abstractions turn the real trackway pattern into musical scores designed to explain the timing of footfalls. Following such a score, one may begin to make the appropriate foot motions. It's a silent dance at first, but becomes audible once the foot tapping starts. With the right sheet music one may rerun the Kentucky Derby or Paul Revere's historic ride.

THE TRAIL THROUGH TIME

Is there any conceivable reason that evolution, which has labored so mightily for 15 billion years and produced so much wonderment, would just up and abruptly cease? Are there not higher spirals lying ahead? If we have discerned even the vaguest features of time's arrow, can we not stand on tiptoe and foresee dimly the arrow's arc into tomorrow?

Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

Paleontologists deal with long periods of time. We talk of millions of years as if they were mere days or weeks. In our attempts to explain such incomprehensible spans of time we collapse 4.5 billion years of Earth history into a two- or three-month curriculum. Sometimes we condense time even further and express Earth history in terms of the hours of a single day. In this 24-hour day of Earth's history, the first amphibian walked on land just before 10 o'clock in the evening. The dinosaurs roamed the Earth from 10:50 p.m. until around 11:40 p.m., and Lucy and her relatives left their tracks on the African savannah a mere minute before midnight. Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon in the same split second that the clock chimed midnight. It's all a mental exercise in time travel.

    Like detectives, geologists must be good chronologists. We can go back exactly 155 million years to the age of brontosaurs and date a track-making event to the nearest million years or so. In our 24-hour day a minute represents 3 million years, so going back 155 million years is the equivalent of pinning down activity at a crime scene to a 20-second interval between 11:10 and 11:11 P.M. In terms of our 24-hour-clock time scale, geologists can sometimes pin down events with what amounts to split-second accuracy.

    Although physicists and metaphysicians may argue that linear time does not really exist, geologists cannot ignore accurate chronology. They see prehistory as a sequence of distinctive events, measured in a number of different ways. In our short life span we measure events in days, months, and years. For geologists, the most satisfactory time-measurement methods are based on natural cycles given us by the celestial mechanics of the Solar System. They group these cycles by length: Seventh-, sixth-, fifth-, and fourth-order cycles are those of about 26,000, 42,000, 109,000, and 413,000 years, respectively (cycles will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4). One such longer cycle is the precession of the equinoxes (about 26,000 years, a seventh-order cycle), based on the change in angle of the axis around which the Earth rotates. Twenty-five hundred precessional cycles have taken place since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Such celestial periodicity affects climate, and may have an effect on species extinction and evolutionary change. Such changes in turn are the basis of fossil zones, the geological equivalent of historical dynasties. Tracks are sometimes all that remains of certain dynasties.

    Geologists do not date every track or fossil they find. In practice they rarely date the fossils at all. Other geologists known as geochronologists date the rock layers, thereby establishing the age of the fossils they contain. It is sort of like numbering the pages of a book; we often find tracks on pages that are already numbered. Fission-track dating and other radiometric methods use the statistical rate of decay of unstable elements such as uranium. Carbon 14 ([C.sub.14]) is useful for recent archaeological dating of organic materials such as wood, leather, and bone (but usually not rock). Whether we are dealing with celestial cycles or the ticking of a radioactive clock, we are learning to transcend time and establish chronological time-posts on the eternal trail.

    The Russian philosopher-mathematician Peter Ouspensky (1878-1947), in his work Tertium Organum , expressed his view that time is merely another, fourth dimension of space "imperfectly sensed." This is not so hard to comprehend. Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, organisms have increased their ability to explore space. The spatial realm of a worm or centipede is very limited compared to that of the albatross or astronaut. Through an improved ability to travel and perceive a larger spatial realm we evolve a greater overview, becoming more conscious of expanded dimensions. Like all sciences, paleontology and tracking have undergone a similar evolution into expanded dimensions. Having begun with a focus on individual organisms, these fields broadened into the macrocosm to consider populations, communities, ecosystems, and the evolutionary relationships of all species in evolutionary time paleontology and the life-sciences have also delved into the microcosm, going deep inside the organism to explore organs, tissues, and genetics in the dimension of developmental time. Trackers have expanded their vistas from studying individual tracks to studying track assemblages, or populations, that provide insights into the broader picture of ancient animal communities and ecosystems. Most recently, the recognition of dinosaur "freeways," vast trampled terrains that can only be viewed in their entirety from space, establishes a new global perspective on the wide-ranging activities of Earth's former inhabitants.

    The progressive transcendence of spatial dimensions by evolution and knowledge continues relentlessly and is now breaking down our traditional perception of time. Since the nineteenth century we have redefined the chronology of the history of the Earth and universe and have confidently constructed an elaborate evolutionary timescale using both rocks and molecular paleontology. Our newly educated temporal consciousness travels back and forth from the present to the Mesozoic and Paleozoic with the same confidence displayed by our ancestors when they first explored new dimensions of space on the Cambrian seabed or the virgin shores of Devonian continents. Like surfers who have learned to ride the waves of time, we now journey back through vast celestial cycles with the nonchalance of Sunday drivers on a ride through rolling countryside. Along the way we investigate and establish geological dates and units of time that we happily rely on as temporal signposts--"timeposts"--that are just as trustworthy as the spatial map coordinates of longitude and latitude, signposts that science established just a few generations ago. As chronological markers on our paleontological timescape, such points in time are just as reliable and real as dusk and dawn or the swing of the clock pendulum. There is an intimate relationship between signpost and timepost, for we measure distance, quite literally, in degrees, minutes, and seconds and in the "time" it takes to get there. A journey can be three hours "long." Conceptually the time-space continuum is already ingrained in our language.

    Surely Ouspensky and like-minded thinkers have a compelling perspective when they suggest that the temporal dimension, of which fossil footprints are an obvious material manifestation, is simply the unfolding perception of another spatial dimension "imperfectly sensed." In this Ouspenskian sense the temporal dimension is merely a manifestation of the evolution of our intellects and consciousness. We viewed the oceans and the heavens with wonder and apprehension before setting sail and taking flight into these realms. Does this then mean that because we stand at time's portal and look into eternity, we are soon destined to travel in this realm of time? Have we not already taken the first steps?

PIONEERS ALONG THE TRAIL

Oh how I love to travel back

And tread again that ancient track.

Henry Vaughn

Let us now turn to the trail taken by trackers in establishing the science of vertebrate ichnology as a respectable branch of modern paleontology. Rev. Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864) is rightly regarded as the father of vertebrate ichnology. Between 1836 and 1864, he devoted the greater part of his career to the description of Early Jurassic dinosaur tracks from the Connecticut Valley region, and amassed a classic fossil collection still on display at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts. At the time he believed that the majority of tracks were those of giant birds, a conclusion that turned out to be really not too far from the mark, since we now know that the dinosaur in question was closely related to ancestral birds.

    Hitchcock's work was well respected by leading contemporary geologists and paleontologists of the day, notably Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, and Rev. William Buckland. We must remember that at that time, Early Jurassic dinosaurs were not known to science, and giant fossil birds, and extraordinary marsupials from Down Under, were just becoming known. So the interpretations followed the scientific perceptions and paradigms of the day. Buckland, a celebrated professor of geology at Oxford University in England, led the way, describing British tracks found in Great Britain and presiding as master of ceremonies over experiments in which tortoises (primitive reptiles) made tracks in dough substrates on his kitchen table. These were heady days for trackers on both sides of the Atlantic and they firmly believed that the new science of ichnology was destined for continued acclaim and approbation.

    But early success led to an early slump. Later discoveries of the skeletal remains of dinosaurs and other vertebrates showed that the interpretations of both Hitchcock and Buckland had been wrong, at least in regard to who made the tracks. The paleontological mainstream lost faith in footprints and the subject soon languished in obscurity. Little work of note was published for the remainder of the nineteenth century, and even the revisions that reattributed Hitchcock's bird tracks to dinosaurs were somewhat turgid and perfunctory.

    The fossil footprint renaissance started just recently. Discoveries and casual reports in the 1930s in the western United States and elsewhere suggested some untapped potential and the glimmerings of interest among professional paleontologists, who could not deny the value of rich track yields from some bone-barren rock formations. It was mainly in Europe that the faith was kept alive, by an assortment of dedicated and mostly forgotten enthusiasts. Many who wrote obscure reports on fossil footprints were either amateurs or scientists of other persuasions whose well-trained clerical instincts assured posterity that new finds were recorded in local natural history journals.

    Not until the 1960s and 1970s did a few specialists in the field of fossil footprints emerge. I once dubbed these gentlemen the magnificent seven. With the exception of Don Baird, a former Princeton paleontology professor, and Rudolfo Casamiquela, a pioneer South American geologist, all are Europeans: George Demathieu (French), Paul Ellenberger (French), Hartmut Haubold (German), Giuseppe Leonardi (Italian), and Bill Sarjeant (English). Ellenberger and Leonardi also happen to be priests. As important as their individual contributions is how this group has worked together. Collaborating in several languages to document sites all over Europe, the New World, and southern Africa, they learned to begin to speak the same scientific language whenever possible. They held the faith while indifference about tracks still prevailed. None has become a paleontological superstar, yet all are known and respected in the paleontological profession. They helped lay the foundation for the current renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s.

The late sixties saw a paradigm shift in the field of biology toward ecological consciousness and holistic thinking. In the process the dinosaur renaissance was born, and these once-defunct evolutionary failures suddenly became athletic, intelligent, and scientifically marketable. Following right behind the track makers in the scientific and public consciousness came their tracks. Awareness of the value of footprints for providing information about dynamic aspects of dinosaur life awakened, and the pages of prestigious scientific journals aired debates about dinosaur speed, locomotion, and social behavior. Today, dinosaur trackers are still enjoying the approbation of recent years. After almost 150 years of neglect the science has enjoyed its first truly golden age since its inception in the 1830s.

(Continues...)

Copyright © 1999 Martin Lockley. All rights reserved.