>Art, there is still one thing that is certain. The animal cannot make
>tracks if the water is 100 feet deep. No way. Not unless you have a lizard
>with 100 foot long legs.
Why are myou assuming they had to walk around with their heads out of
water? Don't you think that the marine iguanas of Galapagos might walk
around on the bottom? Brand's data shows that amphibians (which is what the
tracks in the Coconino were before McKee decided the deposit was desert
dunes, at which time the trackways were all mysteriously changed to
reptilian) spend up to 75% of their underwater time walking around on the
bottom.
>For those who might not know, Brand has suggested that the tracks in the
>Coconino were produced by animals which were partially floating with only
>their back legs on the surface. (Even if that were true, the flood waters
>Brand wants couldn't be any deeper than the length of the animal) Brand
>cited tracks which changed direction suddenly and which had feet pointing
>uphill but the animal moved perpendicular to the direction the feet pointed.
> Brand suggested that this was due to a current carrying the animal along
>while his back feet kept hitting the ground. There are many problems with
this.
No, actually, there are no problems with this unless you want to believe
that the tracks were made subareially (which some people seem not to want
to give up
The vast majority of trrackways are pes and manus. An occasional trackway
would represent only pes or only manus, but this could only be possible
when the animal was completely submerged in water, since the animal cannot
contact the foreset surface of a dune with only one set of prints
subaerially, or while floating unless the water impinged on the foreset
surface, and if this had been the case, there would have been no dune to
record the tracks!
>1. there are scorpion and spider tracks. Since these are shorter than the
>lizards, it is unexplained how the arthropod tracks were laid down.
> 1 a. Scorpions leave a different track depending on the temperature. At
>high temperature they use fewer feet to touch the ground. We find high
>temperature scorpion tracks.
Well, "scorpion tracks" is an interpretation made on the basis that the
dunes were believed to be subaerial. You cannot then use this
interpretation to conclude that the dunes were subaerial! The tracks
certainly are consistent with a wide variety of arthropods, most of which
were marine in the Permian. The same people conveniently omit reference to
the frequent occurrence of worm burrows.
>2. animals have been observed today walking across the dunes with feet
>pointing uphill but moving perpendicular to that, Lockley and Hunt state,
>
> "Trackways found in fossil sand dune deposits have generated
>much interest over the years. One of the most common
>observations is that the tracks often have bulges or sand
>crescents on one side, thereby proving that they were made [p.
>42]on inclined surfaces. Typically these sand crescents--also
>sometimes referred to as impact rims--are situated behind the
>rear or 'heel' of footprints, showing that the animals were
>progressing upslope. It seems that this type of upslope trackway
>is the most common and usually the best preserved. Even so,
>trackways that indicate downslope progression are also known, as
>are a number that show sideways or oblique movment across dune
>faces. These sideways or transverse trackways are especially
>interesting because the tracks often point upslope while the
>trackway crosses the slop horizontally or obliquely. There is,
>however a modern analog. We have observed fresh trackways of
>lizards with tail drag marks, that run transversely across dune
>faces, leaving individual tracks that point uphill." Lockley and Hunt,
>Dinosaur Tracks, (New York:Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 41-42
Lockley and Hunt are fighting an uphill battle to hold on to cherished
beliefs. You should not do the same. They go to ludicrous contortions
trying to explain trackways where the animal is being dragged sideways
across a foreset slope, where animals are recorded by only pes tracks,
where trackways suddenly appear or disappear in the center of a slab, where
trackways headed up a slab suddenly veer off at an angle, then recover, all
the time with claws headed directly uphill. Only subaqueous conditions
could allow all of these observations.
Art
http://chadwicka.swau.edu