Deciphering the traces left by organisms – whether footprints, tracks, trails, burrows – is the realm of a discipline known as ichnology. Basically, ichnology is what you would get if you mixed Sherlock Holmes with felonious fossils. Ichnologists look at the shapes of tracks, their distribution, and other clues to learn more about the animals and the environment at the time the tracks were made.
We didn’t always know what spider footprints looked like. When paleontologist Raymond Alf (the museum’s namesake) retrieved the fossil in 1968, he did some experimenting to determine whether the eight-legged footprints were the work of a spider or a scorpion or something else. “He got some spiders and inked up their little legs on an inkpad and had them run across paper,” Farke says. “In his opinion, these things were fairly close matches for a spider.”
via Wired
Image: Andrew Farke/The Alf Museum
