Reading the Clues in a Dinosaur Trackway

Audio Stop: Footsteps Without a Skeleton

1Welcome to the dinosaur trackway display. The slab before you is a cast: a copy made from a mold of a fossil surface. It reproduces a sequence of footprints without bringing the original rock into this room. Look along the row of three-toed impressions. A single print records one contact with the ground; a trackway preserves a sequence of steps. That distinction matters because a sequence can reveal patterns that one isolated mark cannot.

2These footprints are trace fossils, preserved evidence of an organism’s activity rather than parts of its body. Fossil bones and teeth are body fossils. Both kinds of evidence help paleontologists, scientists who study ancient life, investigate dinosaurs. However, they answer different questions. A tooth may provide clues about feeding, while a footprint can record contact between a foot and the ground. Neither gives us a complete picture by itself.

3Now consider a proposed interpretation of this display. An inference is an explanation drawn from observations, not an observation itself. Here, the guide suggests that the animal changed direction. Several successive footprints curve toward the left instead of continuing in a straight line. The cast has a gray surface. A label sits beside the slab. Visitors can walk around the display.

4Researchers seek additional evidence to corroborate an interpretation—to support it with information from another observation or source. For example, they might examine whether the footprint shapes and positions fit the proposed movement. They also consider alternative explanations. Soft ground can distort a footprint, changing its shape as the animal steps or as sediment shifts. A blurry outline therefore requires caution; it does not necessarily represent the exact shape of a dinosaur’s foot.

5The nearby skeleton is a reconstruction, an arrangement intended to show how an animal’s body may have looked. A reconstruction can combine original fossils, casts, and modeled replacements. Its completeness as a display does not mean that every bone was recovered. Read the labels to distinguish preserved material from added parts. The finished outline communicates an interpretation, while the labels let visitors examine what supports that interpretation.

6Finally, notice the word provisional on the trackway label. A provisional identification is accepted for now but remains open to revision when new evidence appears. It is not simply a careless guess. Before you leave, compare the confident-looking skeleton with the cautious wording beside the tracks. Both displays ask you to separate what has been preserved from what researchers have worked out.