The Paluxy trackways

Trace fossils are impressions of behaviour — footprints, burrows, trails — as opposed to body fossils, which are the remains of the animal itself. Trace fossils give what skeletons cannot: gait, speed, and whether animals moved in groups. In the twentieth century the Paluxy tracks also became central to a dispute over alleged human footprints in the same beds; the contested prints proved to be erosional forms and partly faked carvings, and the episode is a serviceable example of how a fossil find can be read into a debate it does not belong to.