New theropod display arena sites in the Cretaceous of North America: Clues to distributions in space and time

Lockley, Martin G.; Houck, Karen J.; Matthews, Neffra A.; McCrea, Richard T.; Xing, Lida; Tsukui, Kaori; Ramezani, Jahandar; Breithaupt, Brent H.; Cart, Ken; Martin, Jason; Buckley, Lisa G.; Hadden, G.

doi:10.1016/j.cretres.2017.09.009

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 24 publications

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“…In vertebrate footprint ichnology, the possibility of recognizing actual anatomical characters in a track specimen is usually attached to the term preservation (e.g. Thulborn, 1990;Haubold et al, 1995;Lockley, 1994Lockley, , 1998Lockley et al, 2018;Gand and Durand, 2006;Voigt et al, 2007;Marty, 2008;Marty et al, 2009Marty et al, , 2010Marty et al, , 2018Lucas, 2010a, 2018;Klein and Niedzwiedzki, 2012;Castanera et al, 2013aCastanera et al, , 2013bCastanera et al, , 2018Díaz-Martínez et al, 2015a, 2018Belvedere and Farlow, 2016;Belvedere et al, 2018;Marchetti et al, 2017a,b;Marchetti, 2016Marchetti, , 2018Farlow et al, 2018a;Voigt and Lucas, 2018;Xing et al, 2018). In this usage, preservation is a direct expression of the morphological quality of the specimen.…”

Section: Track Preservationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining the morphological quality of fossil footprints. Problems and principles of preservation in tetrapod ichnology with examples from the Palaeozoic to the present

Marchetti¹,

Belvedere

Voigt³

et al. 2019

Earth-Science Reviews

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143

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The morphology of fossil footprints is the basis of vertebrate footprint ichnology. However, the processes acting during and after trace fossil registration which are responsible for the final morphology have never been precisely defined, resulting in a dearth of nomenclature. Therefore, we discuss the concepts of ichnotaphonomy, ichnostratinomy, taphonomy, biostratinomy, registration and diagenesis and describe the processes acting on footprint morphology. In order to evaluate the morphological quality of tetrapod footprints, we introduce the concept of morphological preservation, which is related to the morphological quality of footprints (M-preservation, acronym MP), and distinguish it from physical preservation (P-preservation, acronym PP), which characterizes whether or not a track is eliminated by taphonomic and diagenetic processes. M-preservation includes all the morphological features produced during and after track registration prior to its study, and may be divided into substages (ichnostratinomic, registrational, taphonomic, stratinomic, diagenetic). Moreover, we propose an updated numerical preservation scale for M-preservation. It ranges from 0.0 (worst preservation) to 3.0 (best preservation); intermediate values may be used and specific features may be indicated by letters. In vertebrate footprint ichnotaxonomy, we regard the anatomy-consistent morphology and to a lesser extent the trackway pattern as the only acceptable ichnotaxobases. Only footprints showing a good morphological preservation (grade 2.0-3.0) are useful in ichnotaxonomy, whereas ichnotaxa based on poor morphological preservation (grade 0.0-1.5) are considered ichnotaphotaxa (nomina dubia) characterized by extramorphologies. We applied the preservation scale on examples from the Palaeozoic to the present time, including three ichnotaphotaxa and 18 anatomy-consistent ichnotaxa/morphotypes attributed to several vertebrate footprint producers. Results indicate the utility, feasibility and suitability of this method for the entire vertebrate footprint record in any lithofacies, strongly recommending its use in future ichnotaxonomic studies.

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