Fossil track
Over the years, many ichnites have been found, around the world, giving important clues about the behaviour (and foot structure and stride) of the animals that made them.
Special conditions are required, in order to preserve a footprint made in soft ground (such as an alluvial plain or a formative sedimentary deposit).
[1] A famous group of ichnites was found in a limestone quarry at Ardley, 20 km Northeast of Oxford, England, in 1997.
The largest known dinosaur footprints, belonging to sauropods and dating from the early Cretaceous were found to the north of Broome on the Dampier Peninsula, Western Australia, with some footprints measuring 1.7 m.[2][3] The 3D digital documentation of tracks has the benefit of being able to examine ichnite in detail remotely and distribute the data to colleagues and other interested personnel.
[6] The hominid prints were produced by three individuals, one walking in the footprints of the other, making the original tracks difficult to discover.
As the tracks lead in the same direction, they might have been produced by a group – but there is nothing else to support the common reconstruction of a nuclear family visiting the waterhole together.
Sebastian Voigt and David Berman and Amy Henrici in the 12 September 2007 issue of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The paleontologists who made the connection were aided by unusually detailed trackways left in fine-grained Lower Permian mud of the Tambach Formation in central Germany, together with exceptionally complete fossilised skeletons in the same 290-million-year-old strata.
[12][13] The earliest fossil trackway of primitive tetrapods in Australia occurs in the Genoa River Gorge, Victoria, dating from the Devonian 350 million years ago.
A variety of scenarios was proposed to explain the tracks, but most likely represent twelve sauropods "probably as a herd, followed somewhat later by three theropods that may or may not have been stalking – but that certainly were not attacking.
[22] The Phu Pha Man National Park in Thailand contains one of the oldest dinosaur tracks to have been discovered in Asia.
[23] Discovered in January 2024, paleontologists from the Department of Mineral Resources have dated the tracks to around 225–220 million years old (the late Triassic period).
[25] The Lark Quarry Trackway in Queensland contains three-toed tracks made by a herd of ornithopod dinosaurs crossing a river.
[26] In a Bathonian limestone quarry site at Ardley, Oxfordshire more than 40 sets of footprints, with some trackways reaching up to 180 metres in length, were discovered in 1997.
The sauropod tracks could be grouped into wide-gauge trackways, associated with early titanosauria or brachiosauridae, and narrow-gauge ones, possibly from Cetiosaurus or a basal diplodocoid.
[27] In 2024 at nearby Dewars Farm Quarry,[28] five new extensive Middle Jurassic trackways dating back about 166 Ma were discovered, with evidence of more in the neighbourhood.
