A trackway is an ancient route of travel for people or animals. In biology

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

, a trackway can be a set of impressions in the soft earth, usually a set of footprint

Footprint

Footprints are the impressions or images left behind by a person walking. Hoofprints and pawprints are those left by animals with hooves or paws rather than feet, while "shoeprints" is the specific term for prints made by shoes...

s, left by an animal. A fossil trackway is the fossil

Fossil

Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...

ized imprint of a trackway. Trackways have been found all over the world. They are especially valuable for determining some characteristics of life-forms, such as behavior. Thus some trackways for hominids in Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

 showed that they lived together and were not solitary. The study of trackways is an aspect of ichnology

Ichnology

Ichnology is the branch of geology that deals with traces of organismal behavior, such as burrows and footprints. It is generally considered as a branch of paleontology; however, only one division of ichnology, paleoichnology, deals with trace fossils, while neoichnology is the study of modern traces...

, the study of marks left by living organisms. Since identifying the makers of trackways has not ordinarily proved possible, trackway-makers are given the conventional genus

Genus

In biology, a genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia...

 name Ichniotherium, "marking creature".

A possible first connection of a trackway with the vertebrate that left it was published by Drs. Sebastian Voigt and David Berman and Amy Henrici in the 12 September 2007 issue of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology was founded in 1980 at the University of Oklahoma by Dr. Jiri Zidek. It is a scientific journal that publishes original contributions on all aspects of the vertebrate paleontology, including vertebrate origins, evolution, functional morphology, taxonomy,...

. The paleontologists who made the connection were aided by unusually detailed trackways left in fine-grained Lower Permian

Permian

The PermianThe term "Permian" was introduced into geology in 1841 by Sir Sir R. I. Murchison, president of the Geological Society of London, who identified typical strata in extensive Russian explorations undertaken with Edouard de Verneuil; Murchison asserted in 1841 that he named his "Permian...

 mud of the Tambach Formation in central Germany, together with exceptionally complete fossilised skeletons in the same 290 million-year-old strata. They matched the two most common trackways with the two most common fossils, two reptile-like herbivores known as Diadectes absitus

Diadectes

Diadectes was a genus of large, very reptile-like amphibians that lived during the early Permian period...

(with the trackway pseudonym Ichniotherium cottae) and Orobates pabsti

Orobates

Orobates is an extinct genus of diadectid. It lived in the middle Permian, about 260 million years ago. Its remains were found in Germany....

(with the trackway pseudonym of Orobates pabsti).

Example trackways

• Mammoth, White Sands National Monument
  White Sands National Monument
  The White Sands National Monument is a U.S. National Monument located about southwest of Alamogordo in western Otero County and northeastern Dona Ana County in the state of New Mexico, at an elevation of 4235 feet...
  
  . Near Alamogordo, New Mexico
  Alamogordo, New Mexico
  Alamogordo is the county seat of Otero County and a city in south-central New Mexico, United States. A desert community lying in the Tularosa Basin, it is bordered on the east by the Sacramento Mountains. It is the nearest city to Holloman Air Force Base. The population was 35,582 as of the 2000...
  
  
• Theropod dinosaur
  Dinosaur
  Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade and superorder Dinosauria. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic period until the end of the Cretaceous , when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of...
  
  s, near Las Cruces, New Mexico
  Las Cruces, New Mexico
  Las Cruces, also known as "The City of the Crosses", is the county seat of Doña Ana County, New Mexico, United States. The population was 97,618 in 2010 according to the 2010 Census, making it the second largest city in the state....
  
  
• Dinosaurs, Glen Rose Formation
  Glen Rose Formation
  The Glen Rose Formation is a shallow marine to shoreline geological formation from the lower Cretaceous period exposed over a large area from South Central to North Central Texas...
  
  , Texas
• Dinosaurs, England
• Dinosaurs, China
• Hominids, Africa
• Paleozoic trackways near Las Cruces, New Mexico
  Las Cruces, New Mexico
  Las Cruces, also known as "The City of the Crosses", is the county seat of Doña Ana County, New Mexico, United States. The population was 97,618 in 2010 according to the 2010 Census, making it the second largest city in the state....
  
  

External links

• Twenty-one texts on dinosaur tracks from the coal mines of central Utah