When in the field, almost nobody is immune of being tempted to over interpret the possible dinosaur tracks. I have experienced it on my own skin. Like I have said so many times before, finding the perfectly preserved tracks is a rather rare and special event, probably equal to finding dinosaur fossil bones. In reality, you are most likely to finding an array of poorly preserved, single and atypical ones. This shouldn't be surprising, if you consider all the dinosaur genera that existed and their various size classes, that might have left the tracks; all the actual conditions under which the tracks were preserved and the time span and erosion that the tracks underwent until being discovered. My advice (B. Krzic) is not to be too enthusiastic about every possible track, nor overly conservative. You'll often find yourself in a situation of either being tempted to interpret some geological artifacts as tracks, or discarding some interesting real tracks as artifacts. If you don't really believe you had found a real track, basically you won't be able to convince the others either. So, the first and the toughest step in identifying and defining a track is convincing yourself it is a real track.
If you want to play it safe, you should definitely follow my friend Jim's "Three laws of dinosaur ichnology", which he had devised with a great dose of knowledge, field experience and humour.
Dr. James O Farlow is a professor of geology at Indiana University and one of the leading experts in dinosaur ichnology.
Some of Albert Einstein's quotes for which I thought would fit in this post:
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
The only source of knowledge is experience.
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size.
A scientist is a mimosa when he himself has made a mistake, and a roaring lion when he discovers a mistake of others.
With fame I become more and more stupid, which of course is a very common phenomenon.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
KRZIC'S SCALE FOR GRADING DINOSAUR TRACK QUALITY:
- - ARTIFACT ......................................... - 1 .............. --
- - PROBABLE ARTIFACT .................... 0 .............. -
- - POSSIBLE TRACK ............................ 1 ............. *
- - PROBABLE TRACK ......................... 2 .............. **
- - POORLY PRESERVED TRACK ....... 3 ............... ***
- - WELL PRESERVED TRACK ............ 4 ............... ****
- - PERFECTLY PRESERVED TRACK.. 5 ............... *****
Definitions are yet to be written.
