Dinosaur Tracks

Ten years ago a book about dinosaur tracks would have appealed to a handful of specialists. Today, it is likely to attract wider interest, in the wake of some major controversies about the natural history of dinosaurs. Few readers will be completely unaware of those spirited debates about 'cold~blooded' versus 'warm~blooded' dinosaurs, and eyebrows are no longer raised at the suggestion that dinosaurs may still be alive and kicking - in the guise of birds. Issues such as these have prompted many biologists and palaeontologists to take a serious second look at the everyday lives and habits of dinosaurs, and in doing so they have begun to turn their attention to the long~neglected study of fossil tracks - the direct testimony of dinosaur behaviour. This resurgence of interest in dinosaur tracks might legitimately be described as a renaissance, and its extent may be gauged from the success of the First International Symposium on Dinosaur Tracks and Traces, held in May 1986 at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History, Albuquerque. The proceedings of that symposium, which attracted no fewer than 60 contributions from researchers in 14 coun~ tries, were published recently by Cambridge University Press under the title Dinosaur Tracks and Traces, edited by D.D. Gillette and M.G.