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Dinosaur tracks in the computer age

Nature volume 399, pages 103–104 (1999)Cite this article

A three-dimensional record of dinosaur feet and movement comes from 200-million-year-old footprints made in wet mud. Comparisons of these prints with the tracks made by living birds clear up some of the mysteries about dinosaur toes and the tracks that they left.

It was no accident that Sherlock Holmes had the habit of rousing his faithful companion off to another adventure with the exhortation, “Come, Watson! The game is afoot”. Their creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was fond of footprints — even fossil ones — and he knew how they could be useful forensically1. Alas for the many palaeontologists who, through the years, have looked down their noses at such tracks and traces. For footprints have revealed many secrets of locomotion, ecology and behaviour to those who have been patient and sharp enough to study them2,3,4. And on page 141 of this issue, Stephen M. Gatesy and his colleagues5 bring the science of fossil trackways into the twenty-first century, in ways that Conan Doyle and his creations could never have dreamed.

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Figure 1: Putting your foot in it — feet from a theropod dinosaur (Compsognathus), the first known bird Archaeopteryx, and a pigeon (Columba).

References

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  1. Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology, University of California at Berkeley, California, 94720-3140, USA

    Kevin Padian

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  1. Kevin Padian
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Padian, K. Dinosaur tracks in the computer age. Nature 399, 103–104 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/20069

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