Fossil Tracks and Trackways

"Dinosaurs that could swim could land on such an area and remain for a time until it was flooded again. While there, they would make tracks, lay eggs, and scavenge dead dinosaurs, of which there would have been many." — Michael Oard, Creation, 2023¹

"The sediment pile above which tracks occur is commonly many kilometres thick. We are unable to conceive of a Flood so catastrophic as to lay down kilometres of sediment while at the same time allowing terrestrial animals 'temporarily to survive' that catastrophe." — Paul Garner and four other young-earth geologists, Journal of Creation, 2003²

"In theory and in practice it is impossible to determine exactly which species made a particular set of tracks." — Martin Lockley, Tracking Dinosaurs, 1991³

Summary

A footprint is a fossil of a moment.  An animal stood on a surface, the surface held the shape, and the shape was buried before anything erased it.  That makes tracks the hardest trace fossils for a one-year Flood to absorb, because every track-bearing surface is a place where the water had gone, the mud had firmed, and a living animal was walking about.  The young-earth literature knows this.  Answers in Genesis calls dinosaur footprints "an apparent dilemma for creationists,"⁴ and the one worked answer, Michael Oard's Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments (BEDS), is stated below in his own words before anything is said against it.

What this article found, in order.

1. The young-earth position is one model, stated by Oard and adopted by ICR and CMI.  Floodwater levels fell briefly and locally during the first 150 days, exposing fresh sediment;  dinosaurs that could swim, or were stranded nearby, walked on it, laid eggs, and scavenged;  the next rise buried the surface;  "hundreds of such oscillations" explain tracks at many levels.⁵  At Lark Quarry, Oard has the water going up and down "during a passage of only a matter of seconds to possibly a few minutes."⁵  ICR's version is "brief moments" between tsunami-like waves.⁶  Oard's six "unusual features" of dinosaur tracks that he says favour the Flood are listed and tested in Part 1.

2. What a trackway requires of its substrate is measured, and it takes longer than seconds.  A track forms only in a narrow band of substrate strength:  too firm and the foot leaves nothing, too soft and the print collapses.  Finite-element models find "only a narrow range of loads could produce tracks" on a uniform substrate, and for the two sauropods modelled the band of shear strength that records one set of feet is less than a factor of four wide.⁷⁸  At the Bighorn Basin megatracksites the preservation agent was a microbial mat growing on a seasonally arid tidal flat.⁹  At Lark Quarry the track horizon "hardened (perhaps subaerially)" before the sand that buried it arrived.¹⁰  At Glen Rose the track-bearing bed is riddled with Skolithos burrows through its full 20 to 30 cm, and at Bird's Bandera site the substrate was partly lithified before the sauropods crossed it.¹¹¹²

3. Megatracksites stack those surfaces.  Lockley's Entrada megatracksite near Moab runs 15 to 20 km along one bedding plane and over at least 300 km², at one to ten tracks per square metre.³  Kvale's Sundance surface carries an estimated 150,000 tracks per square kilometre, and the older Gypsum Spring tracks sit "at multiple horizons within a 1 m interval."⁹⁹  Glen Rose has four tracklayers.¹¹  Five young-earth geologists cite a Korean locality with "as many as 300 successive horizons … through a vertical thickness exceeding 110 m."²  Each horizon is a separate exposure that had to firm, record, and be buried intact.

4. Undertracks and substrate mechanics explain the manus-only sauropod trackways, and the swimming sauropod is dead at its own type site.  Roland Bird read a trail of front-foot prints at Bandera, Texas, as a floating brontosaur punting with its forelimbs.³  Finite-element work shows a forward-balanced sauropod leaves manus-only prints on a substrate firm enough to carry the hind feet, which "clearly reduces the need to invoke elaborate mechanisms … such as swimming (or punting) sauropods."⁸  In 2025 the Bandera site was re-excavated:  the second manus-dominated trackway has hind-foot impressions in four of five steps, the water was under a metre deep, and the authors rule out a swimming origin.¹²  BEDS leans on "dinosaurs that could swim."

5. Tracks before bodies are routine, on either timescale, and the one retracted case rests on radiometric redating.  Dinosauromorph footprints in Poland sit 5 to 9 million years below the oldest dinosauromorph bones on the mainstream scale and were simply absorbed.¹³  Bird-like tracks in southern Africa predate bird bodies by about 60 million years and remain in print.¹⁴  The 2002 Argentine "Triassic bird tracks" were retracted in 2013 after the rock was redated to the Eocene, so the retraction cannot be used by a writer who rejects the dating.  Within one section, tracks below bodies prove nothing either way:  tracks form where surfaces are firm and exposed, bodies preserve where burial is fast and wet, and Oard himself concedes "the typical pattern that formations with tracks do not have body fossils and vice versa."¹⁵

6. Laetoli is the best-preserved hominin trackway on earth, and the creationist side has not decided where it sits.  The prints lie in ten sublevels of a rain-cemented volcanic tuff beside 18,400 animal tracks in one 490 m² locality.¹⁶¹⁷  ICR, AiG and CMI say the prints are human.  None of them says whether the Pliocene tuff is Flood or post-Flood rock, and ICR's own Flood model, with its boundary at the top of the Neogene, puts a human trackway inside the Flood, a difficulty ICR's paleontology paper concedes for Cenozoic trackways generally.¹⁸

7. A footprint rarely names a species, and that limit binds both sides.  Lockley counted "almost nine hundred dinosaur species reported from the body fossil record but only a few dozen valid and widely used footprint species."³  Laetoli's discoverers write that the trails are "usually ascribed, not without controversy," to Australopithecus afarensis because it is "the only hominin taxon found to date in the Upper Laetoli Beds."¹⁶  A creationist reading "human" off the same prints is doing the same thing in the other direction.

Verdict.  The track record is a real problem for a one-year Flood, and BEDS has not finished answering it.  BEDS gives the right ingredients, a fall and rise of water with a firm surface between.  When the sum is run, in Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments, single surfaces and short stacks such as Glen Rose's four tracklayers fit an eighty-day window on count.  Stacks of horizons by the hundred are unfinished:  they fit only on a perfect tidal schedule, if at all, and every surface that carries tracks had to set, grow mats, be burrowed, or partly lithify before burial, above kilometres of earlier sediment.  The strongest statement of that problem comes from young-earth geologists, not from critics.  Against that, the record also says what the Flood model wants it to say about single surfaces:  a sharp track survives hours to days, so every preserved surface was buried fast.  Fast burial of one surface is agreed by everyone and proves nothing about the year.  The article's scope is superposition only, so it makes no first-appearance argument that needs a date from another continent.

The Coconino trackways are argued in Coconino Sandstone, the Paluxy "man tracks" in Human and Dinosaur Tracks Together, the Zachełmie tracks in Fish to Tetrapod, burrows in Bioturbation, and the full costing of Oard's model in Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments.

Part 1: the young-earth reading, in its own words

Oard's BEDS model

Michael Oard is the author of the model every creationist organisation now uses for tracks.  He first stated it in 2002, after Kvale and colleagues reported two Middle Jurassic megatracksites in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming.¹⁹  Any Flood model that keeps land animals alive on fresh sediment needs a way to expose that sediment while the water is still rising, and Oard named four:  "1) tidal oscillations, 2) tsunamis, 3) vertical tectonic uplift, and 4) the dynamics of rapid Flood currents in relatively shallow water that would cause the sea level to fall in 'troughs'."¹⁹  The exposed land "could be a series of shoals," and "Some dinosaurs would be able to swim for a while and then get on these exposed sediments making tracks and laying eggs before finally succumbing to the Flood."¹⁹  Repeated horizons come from repeated cycles:  "after making tracks in one area, sea level rose depositing sediments over the tracks, preserving them, and forcing the dinosaurs to flee. As sea level fell, the dinosaurs moved back into the particular spot of the previously-made tracks."¹⁹

By 2014 the model had a name, Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments, and a fuller statement:

"The BEDS model is based on the fact that the level of the Floodwater would fluctuate up and down as it rose in the first half of the Flood. The fluctuation would be caused by tides, uplift and sinking of the earth's crust, and other mechanisms including effects of the earth's rotation. The dinosaur tracks can be placed early in the Flood before all land animals died by Day 150."⁵

"In areas with rapid deposition of sediments, a brief drop in the level of the Floodwaters would expose a flat bedding plane (BEDS). Dinosaurs swimming or on higher land nearby could move onto the BEDS and thus make tracks, lay eggs, and scavenge dead dinosaurs. But as the water level goes up, the muddy Flood water would cover the dinosaur features and rapidly drive the dinosaurs off the BEDS."⁵

The number of cycles is large:  "Since there were likely hundreds of such oscillations early in the Flood, such a scenario could repeat many times. This would account for several levels of dinosaur tracks in an area."⁵  The area of one exposure can be large too;  the 2023 version says a single block of exposed sediment "could represent a small or large area of exposure, for instance up to 10,000 km2 (4,000 miles2)."¹  And the time is short.  Writing about the Lark Quarry trackways in Queensland, which the University of Queensland team reads as a river crossing over days or weeks, Oard objects that "They cannot seem to envision the water level going up and down fast enough during a passage of only a matter of seconds to possibly a few minutes," and concludes that "the water levels really were fluctuating rapidly, in seconds."⁵

Oard's 2023 article lists six features of dinosaur tracks that he says fit the Flood better than deep time.¹  In his words:

• Straight trackways: "The vast majority of dinosaur trackways are straight or only gently curved … This makes sense in the light of dinosaurs fleeing rising floodwaters."¹
• No trackways on slopes: "Trackways are always found on flat bedding planes within sedimentary rock. Interestingly, the dinosaurs seem to never climb any hills."¹
• Trackways in marine sediments, where "The automatic secular supposition of a beach within the limestone is arbitrary."
• Superimposed repeating trackways, the two Wyoming surfaces "said to be separated by three million years" carrying similar tracks.¹
• Tracks usually of good swimmers: "One rarely finds tracks of dinosaurs likely to be poor swimmers, such as stegosaurs with their plates on their back and spiked tail, Triceratops with its heavy head frills, and ankylosaurs with their spiked armour and heavy tail."¹
• Tracks present at all: "Normally, exposed tracks erode away within days to a few weeks. In a Flood scenario, they would be buried by the next cycle of sedimentation, preserving them until now."¹

ICR, CMI and AiG

The Institute for Creation Research adopted BEDS by name in 2013, when Brian Thomas read the Lark Quarry re-study as something that "strikingly confirms the Flood-friendly Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments (BEDS) hypothesis," with the track-makers as "the last hardy, barely surviving creatures," dinosaurs "struggling against currents, predation, starvation, and exhaustion as they tromped in soggy sediments."²⁰  ICR's fullest statement, in 2018, starts from the premise this article will keep returning to:  "Tracks require rapid preservation. If exposed for months or even mere days, what would prevent worms, clams, fish, crabs, and especially rain (if exposed to air) or tidal action (if near a sea) from obliterating them?"²¹  It quotes a 1991 study of modern tracks at Lake Manyara for the window:  "These windows are measurable in terms of days (shoreline/Zones 1 or 2 equivalent) to months (Zone 3) [underwater]."²¹  It supplies Oard's arithmetic for how many tracks a fleeing dinosaur could make:  "if a dinosaur made one track every 3 seconds [a very slow pace] while trying to escape the relative rises in the Floodwater by walking on BEDS [briefly exposed sediments] for five days, it would make 144,000 tracks, assuming it was so stressed it did not stop."²¹  And it states the model's geography:  a "Dinosaur Peninsula" of thin early-Flood deposits across the western United States that "coincides with the Dinosaur Freeway and even many of the dinosaur-fossil quarries across the West."  Its conclusion:  "Dinosaurs definitely tromped across freshly deposited sediment that muddy water quickly covered."²¹

ICR's geologist Tim Clarey gives the exposure a shorter clock than Oard.  On a Welsh trample-ground:  "We also expect tsunami-like ocean waves to wash in and out during the Flood's advance, leaving some areas above water for brief moments."⁶  On Glen Rose, with Thomas:  the dinosaurs "could have walked there during the early Flood and made tracks during lulls between each violent wave," and the time-honest part of the same article:  "Bear in mind that thousands of feet of Flood sediments lie beneath these track layers. Thus, these footprints occur near the top of the rising water phase of the Flood."²²²²  ICR's president John Morris gave the longest budget:  "Evidently some dinosaurs and other creatures avoided being drowned for several weeks into the Flood, and were able to leave their footprints in freshly deposited muds."²³

Creation Ministries International publishes Oard, and its popular treatment of the 2022 Paluxy drought restates BEDS for Glen Rose:  "Tectonic activity would have caused water levels relative to the land to fluctuate, leading to areas of freshly laid sediment layers being exposed for brief periods," on which an Acrocanthosaurus "coming from higher ground or able to survive by swimming till then" could walk.²⁴  The same article adds the argument this series treats in Part 5, that "footprints of dinosaurs—and other creatures—are found in much lower strata than the animals that made them," and disowns the Paluxy man tracks in a footnote:  "these are likely eroded dino prints."²⁴²⁴  Answers in Genesis hosts Oard's 2003 article, which already had the pieces:  the tracks "had to have been made during the first 150 days of the Flood," and the makers were "Either swimming, floating on debris mats, or trapped on higher land nearby."²⁵²⁵

Brand on the Coconino, in one paragraph

Leonard Brand's newt experiments are the one creationist research programme on trackways, and they belong to Coconino Sandstone.  The point that matters here is what Brand himself concluded in Journal of Paleontology:  "The data do suggest that the Coconino Sandstone fossil trackways may have been produced in either subaqueous sand or subaerial damp sand."²⁶  That is a disjunction, not an underwater diagnostic, and the damp sand that worked in his trials had been sprayed and "left to dry overnight or for at least eight hours."²⁶  The Coconino also supplies the plainest counter-example to Oard's "never climb any hills":  its trackways run up dune foresets, and the current mainstream model explains their toe marks by digits sliding on inclined sand.  The details are in that article.

The dissent inside the camp

Not every young-earth geologist accepts BEDS.  In 2003 Paul Garner, Michael Garton, Richard Johnston, Steven Robinson and David Tyler answered John Woodmorappe's suggestion that small changes in floodwater level could explain the track record.  Their list is the sharpest statement of the problem in print on either side:

"The sediment pile above which tracks occur is commonly many kilometres thick. We are unable to conceive of a Flood so catastrophic as to lay down kilometres of sediment while at the same time allowing terrestrial animals 'temporarily to survive' that catastrophe."²

"In Korea, there is one locality where as many as 300 successive horizons have been counted, through a vertical thickness exceeding 110 m. In the course of a few hours or, at most, days the deposition of 110 m would be catastrophic. Somehow we are to imagine the beasts surviving wave after wave of deluge and returning to the same spot, notwithstanding that it was under shallow water and thus not even visible to them."²

"It also needs to be pointed out that sediment is deposited in topographic lows, not highs, i.e. we are not to imagine a repeatedly emerging and submerging island, repeatedly covered with trackways, but precisely the reverse."²

They call the floodwater-level mechanism "merely an ad hoc postulation of possible circumstances at one particular moment," and they note that tracks come with "burrows, nests, eggs, feces," which "points to animals feeding and breeding and generally not operating under stress."²²  Their own answer is to put the Flood/post-Flood boundary low:  the unbroken track record "is surely clear evidence that the latter two thirds of the Phanerozoic (at least) is post-Flood."²  That is a minority position among young-earth geologists, and it moves the problem to the Ice Age rather than solving it, but it is an answer, and it is one Oard's model has never engaged on the sediment-fills-lows point.

ICR's own paleontology paper has a smaller concession in the same direction.  After arguing that burial by ecological zone fits the fossil record, Tomkins and Clarey write:  "Our interpretation still has a bit of difficulty explaining the trackways and footprints found in some layers of the Cenozoic. It is possible some of these layers have been misidentified and should be Pleistocene (post-Flood), but more research is needed on each site."¹⁸  That sentence matters for Laetoli in Part 6.

Testing Oard's six features

Each of Oard's six features is a claim about the record, so each can be checked against it.

Straight trackways.  Any animal going somewhere leaves a straight or gently curved trail;  a trail that wanders is the rare case in modern tracking too.  Lockley's reading of the Entrada megatracksite is "repeated trackmaking activity in the same beds over a long period of time," and the Lark Quarry trails are parallel because the animals moved with a current.³¹⁰  Straightness is not evidence of flight.

No trackways on slopes.  False as stated.  The Coconino trackways climb dune foresets dipping 25 to 30 degrees, which is why Brand ran his newts on a 25-degree slope, and the mainstream model of those tracks is built on the slope.  Oard's "always found on flat bedding planes" is true of coastal-plain megatracksites because those were flat, which is the ordinary explanation.

Trackways in marine sediments.  The limestone at Glen Rose is riddled with vertical Skolithos burrows that "indicate an intertidal to shallow subtidal depositional environment … consistent with the presence of dinosaur tracks," and the ledge above Bird's trackway "contained many fossil oyster shells and other marine invertebrates left there when the sea advanced over the area."²⁷¹¹  Kvale's carbonate megatracksites formed "in upper intertidal to supratidal sediments."⁹  A tidal flat is marine sediment that is exposed twice a day.  Both sides agree the surface was out of the water when the tracks were made;  the disagreement is over the clock.

Superimposed repeating trackways.  Kvale's own abstract says the lower site's tracks "occur at multiple horizons within a 1 m interval," and the Sundance surface lies "many meters" above it.⁹¹⁹  Similar bipedal tridactyl tracks on two surfaces of one coastal plain are what a stable fauna on a repeatedly exposed shoreline produces;  "What are the odds" is not an argument when the same kinds of theropod tracks occur on hundreds of Jurassic and Cretaceous surfaces worldwide.

Tracks usually of good swimmers.  The Broome Sandstone survey names six types of thyreophoran (armoured dinosaur) tracks among its 11 to 21 track types, and the NASA Goddard slab carries nodosaur prints.²⁸²⁹  Where heavy quadrupeds are absent from a surface, the Goldilocks effect is the first suspect:  "A track site limited to large producers, e.g. a purely sauropod track assemblage, is likely to be a preservational artefact, or indistinguishable from such."⁷

Tracks present at all.  Everyone agrees.  The measured survival window of a sharp footprint on a lake margin is hours to days (Part 2).  A track-bearing surface was buried fast on any model, and that fact is not a discriminator between a year and a million years, because it is a fact about each surface and not about the pile.

Part 2: what a trackway requires of its substrate

Neither too hard nor too soft

Lockley's rule of thumb is the whole subject in one sentence:  "well-preserved tracks tell us that the substrate was neither too hard or too soft. Hard substrates are not at all conducive to preserving tracks, and soft, sloppy substrates produce tracks that are indistinct and hard to identify."³  Falkingham, Bates, Margetts and Manning put numbers on it.  They loaded virtual feet of four dinosaurs of very different mass onto cohesive substrates of varying undrained shear strength and found that on a uniform substrate "only a narrow range of loads could produce tracks, given that small animals failed to indent the substrate, and larger animals would be unable to traverse the area without becoming mired."⁷  They called it the Goldilocks effect.  The companion paper gives the bands for two sauropods:  "Diplodocus would leave pes-only trackways in substrates with 13 < Cu < 45 kN m−2 and Brachiosaurus would leave manus-only trackways when 65 < Cu < 110 kN m−2."⁸  A surface that holds a clean print of a given animal is therefore a surface whose strength sat inside a band a few tens of kilopascals wide at the moment the animal crossed it.

Two things widen the band.  One is a firm layer below a soft one:  "If a firm subsurface layer is assumed, a more complete assemblage is possible, though there is a strong bias towards larger, heavier animals."⁷  Laporte and Behrensmeyer found the same in Kenya:  "Preservation is best in mud and sand interbeds of medium thickness where the animal foot punches out a plug of coherent surface sediment (usually mud) and presses it into underlying units of contrasting lithology (usually sand)."³⁰  The other is time.  "The Goldilocks effect described in this study is mitigated when a substrate is exposed for a period of time during which the mechanical properties alter, such as when a substrate is drying out."⁷  A surface that carries sharp prints of animals of several sizes is a surface that passed through several bands, which means it was exposed and drying for a while.  That is the first clock on BEDS:  a surface made and reflooded in seconds has one strength, and records one size class.

How long a track lasts

ICR is right that tracks need quick burial, and the measurement is better than the 1991 study it quotes.  At Ileret in Kenya, Roach and colleagues made 118 barefoot prints on moist and shallow-water-covered silty mud at Lake Turkana and re-measured them every 6 to 12 hours.  "Taphonomy experiments show human footprints retained high definition features (in red) an average of only 1.3 days (A), with 0.5% of tracks preserving these features longer than 4 days (1 track retained toe ridges for at least 1 month). Notably, tracks formed in deeper muds, like many of the fossil hominin prints, often lost their distinctive toe ridges (B) in minutes to hours. Of the 188 tracks recorded, 53% were completely obliterated within one week."³¹  Two per cent were still recognisable after a month, and the killers were "sediment slumping and settling, overprinting by other tracks or were washed away by water movement."³¹  Their conclusion for the fossil prints is that "each of these trackways represents minutes to no more than a few days in the lives of the individuals moving across these paleolandscapes."³¹

So a sharp print is a record of a day or two at most before burial.  Oard says the same, "exposed tracks erode away within days to a few weeks," and ICR says it louder.¹  This is the point where the two sides agree and then part.  The Flood writer takes "buried within days" as evidence of a catastrophe.  The taphonomist takes it as the ordinary condition of every preserved track anywhere, including the 481 Pleistocene prints at Ileret that lie on "multiple discrete, bedded silt layers found throughout the 20ka sequence."³¹  Fast burial of one surface is a fact about that surface.  It is the number of surfaces, and what each needed before it could record anything, that measures the pile.

What the preserved surfaces actually needed

The best track sites say in their own sediment what happened before the animals arrived and after they left.

At the Bighorn Basin megatracksites, in carbonate "once thought to be totally marine in origin," Kvale and colleagues found the tracks "in upper intertidal to supratidal sediments deposited under at least seasonally arid conditions," and they name the agent of preservation:  "Microbial mat growth on the ancient tidal flats apparently initiated the preservation of these prints."⁹  Marty, Strasser and Meyer watched the same thing happen on modern tidal flats:  "A footprint may be consolidated by desiccation or lithification of the mat, or by ongoing growth of the mat," and they expect that "modified true tracks and overtracks make up an important percentage of fossil footprints and that they may be as common as undertracks."³²  A mat has to grow;  it does not grow in seconds.

At Lark Quarry, the surface Oard reads as a BEDS exposure of seconds was, in the words of the paper he quotes, a horizon that "ceased deposition, hardened (perhaps subaerially), prior to the high-energy regime when sand was deposited."¹⁰  The original describers had said the lake "would have receded to become little more than a remnant water-hole surrounded by newly-exposed mud," and that "the mud may have had the consistency of potter's clay at the time it was traversed by the dinosaurs."³³³³  The two readings disagree about the dinosaurs and agree about the mud:  it had drained and firmed.

At Glen Rose, Farlow's team describe the Main Tracklayer as "a 20-30 cm thick, homogeneous dolomudstone that is thickly riddled with vertical invertebrate burrows (Skolithos),"¹¹ and they propose using the burrows as a clock:  "The density of Skolithos burrows might provide a clue as to how long the muddy deposit that became the Main Tracklayer was exposed before burial. If the ichnofabric proves to have little sign of second-generation burrowing (e.g. vertical burrows that cut across older burrows), this will support the interpretation that the dinosaur track-making event(s) occurred over a relatively short time interval."¹¹  That is a fair test and it has not yet been run.  Note what "relatively short" means to them:  short enough that one generation of burrowers colonised a 20 to 30 cm bed throughout, which is a matter of days to weeks for an intertidal flat, not seconds.  At Bird's Bandera site, forty kilometres west, the 2025 re-study found "partial marine lithification of the substrate" before the sauropods crossed it, under water "less than one metre" deep.¹²

Put together, a preserved track surface needs:  water gone or shallow;  a substrate firmed into the Goldilocks band for the animal that crossed it, which for a carbonate mud means drainage and early cementation;  often a microbial mat or a burrowing population;  and burial within hours to days of the last print.  The last item is the only one BEDS supplies in its own words.  The others take longer than the seconds-to-minutes Oard allows at Lark Quarry, and they recur at every horizon.

Part 3: megatracksites, and how many surfaces a section stacks

The scale

Lockley opened his 1991 book with the scale of the record:  "Some sites exhibit only a handful of footprints, whereas others yield thousands, even millions, of tracks in areas that extend for thousands of square kilometers," and his Colorado group alone knew "several hundred sites in our region. We find them or have them reported to us at the rate of about fifty a year, or one every week."³³  He coined "megatracksite" for the largest.  The Entrada Sandstone site near Moab is his type example:  "Tracks in the main track-bearing layer can be traced laterally for at least 15 to 20 kilometers along an almost continuously exposed bedding plane and less continuously due to sporadic outcrops over an area of at least 300 square kilometers. We call these large sites megatracksites (see Chapter 12). Individual sites that have been mapped indicate track densities from one to ten per square meter."³  Almost all the tracks are medium to large theropods, and "The formation both in the Moab area and elsewhere in the region is essentially devoid of dinosaur remains attributable to these or any other trackmakers."³

The Dakota Group "Dinosaur Freeway" along the Colorado Front Range is the one Oard names.  Lockley and Fleming's first report tied all such sites to one setting:  "Recent studies of regionally extensive dinosaur track-bearing strata reveal that all known occurrences are associated with coastal plain lithosomes. These can be associated with clastic facies assemblages, as in the case of the Dakota Group of Colorado (Cretaceous, Albian-Cenomanian), or with carbonate platform environments, as in the case of the Glen Rose Formation of Texas (Cretaceous, Albian)."³⁴  In the Dakota, "The track-bearing layers appear to be confined to a single valley fill sequence and are therefore closely associated with relative sea-level changes that have recently been documented."³⁴  Lockley's general statement is that "megatracksites, where the water table is at or near the track-receptive surface over wide areas of lowland coastal plain, may contain tracks over hundreds or even thousands of square kilometers."³

The Wyoming sites that started BEDS are in the same class.  Kvale's Sundance surface "locally covers 7.5 square kilometers in the vicinity of Shell, Wyoming," with other tracks "apparently on the same horizon approximately 25 kilometers to the west," and "over 150,000 in situ tracks may be preserved per square kilometer."⁹  The Broome Sandstone of Western Australia carries "thousands of tracks" at 48 discrete sites along 25 km of surveyed coast, within a track-bearing belt earlier reported "over more than 80 km of coastline."²⁸²⁸

The stacking

A megatracksite is rarely one surface.  Kvale's lower site has tracks "at multiple horizons within a 1 m interval in the middle part of the Gypsum Spring Formation," and the Sundance surface is "separated vertically by many meters of sedimentary rock" from it, in Oard's own description.⁹¹⁹  At Glen Rose "tracklayers occur at four horizons."¹¹  The Broome horizons "seem to have been generated between periodic sheet floods that blanketed the preexisting sand bodies."²⁸  The Purgatoire site in the Morrison Formation "contains in excess of thirteen hundred mapped footprints, attributable to about one hundred individual animals," on beds that "represent a modest-size lake basin subject to periodic phases of drying."³  Ileret's 481 Pleistocene tracks lie on "multiple discrete, bedded silt layers" through a 20,000-year sequence on the mainstream scale.³¹  And the Korean locality that Garner and his colleagues cite from Lockley's own group has "as many as 300 successive horizons … through a vertical thickness exceeding 110 m."²

Each horizon is an independent instance of Part 2:  a surface that drained, firmed into the band, often grew a mat or was burrowed, was walked on, and was buried within days.  Oard's "hundreds of such oscillations" is an honest count of what the model needs.  What the model does not supply is the time inside each oscillation, and the sediment between them.  His 2003 article says the makers were "trapped on higher land nearby";  Garner's group answers that "sediment is deposited in topographic lows, not highs," so the repeatedly exposed and reflooded surface is the low, and the animals must come from a high that is not in the section.²⁵²  Beneath the first Glen Rose tracklayer, by ICR's own reckoning, "thousands of feet of Flood sediments lie."²²

The mainstream reading, and where it is weak

The mainstream reads a megatracksite as a coastal plain or lake margin used repeatedly over a long time, "repeated trackmaking activity in the same beds over a long period of time," which Lockley prefers to a huge population because of the Goldilocks problem.³  Its weak point is that the time inside any one surface is short and the time between surfaces is inferred from sedimentation rates and sequence stratigraphy, not measured on the surface itself.  Lockley says so in a sentence that cuts both ways:  a dinosaur that sank through to an underlayer "may be leaving tracks on a layer that is hundreds or thousands of years older than the exposed surface."³  A young-earth reader can fairly say that the "long period" is a model, and that nothing on a single bedding plane dates it.  What the young-earth reader cannot say is that the surfaces were made in seconds, because the mats, the burrows and the hardening are on the bedding plane, and those are measured in days.

The arithmetic that would settle the matter is a sum:  for each track horizon in a section, the least time its surface needed to reach the band and grow what it grew, plus the sediment between horizons at the rate the model allows, against 150 days.  This article does not run it.  Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments, which owns the model's full costing across tracks, nests and burrows, does:  single surfaces and short stacks fit on count, and stacks by the hundred are unfinished.  What this article contributes is the list of what each surface demands.

Part 4: undertracks, the swimming sauropod, and Glen Rose

Roland Bird at Glen Rose

The modern study of sauropod tracks begins in a trader's shop window in Gallup, New Mexico, in November 1938, where Roland T. Bird of the American Museum of Natural History saw two 15-inch "man tracks" and judged them "a pair of fake footprints."³⁵  The same dealer had three-toed dinosaur tracks in the same stone, and following them led Bird to Glen Rose, Texas, where the Paluxy River cuts the Cretaceous Glen Rose limestone.  He found the theropod prints "the most perfect I had ever seen," and explained why:  "The limey matrix had originally been firm, viscous mud, ideal for impressions; and the softer shales that represented the muds that filled them later, had disintegrated freely without marring the tracks."³⁵  Then, in a silt-filled pothole, the first clear sauropod trackway:  "Each of these three prints was over a yard in length, by nearly two-thirds of a yard across. All were four-clawed, and as such, could be definitely classified as hind feet."³⁵  Bird's own picture of the animal was the 1930s one:  "Still such a creature once floated a vast body most of the time in lakes and lagoons where favorable plant food abounded. Here a similar sauropod had apparently been moving over a shallow mud flat."³⁵

He came back in 1940 with federal relief labour, built a cofferdam, and spent five months on it.  "In all, 40 tons of track-bearing rock were removed from the river bed."²⁷  The track layer was "less than eighteen inches thick" on a bed of soft material;  the limestone ledge above it "contained many fossil oyster shells and other marine invertebrates left there when the sea advanced over the area";  and the widened excavation showed that "no less than a dozen sauropods had crossed this section. All were progressing in the same direction as a herd moving across a shallow mud flat."²⁷²⁷²⁷  The theropod trail that crosses the sauropod trail became the famous "chase sequence" now mounted under the museum's Apatosaurus.

The sauropod prints were formally named Brontopodus birdi in 1989, and the park's tracks have since been photomosaicked, traced and scanned.  The 2012 survey found that "Paluxy dinosaur tracksites occur in more than one tracklayer, but the largest and most spectacular footprints occur in the Main Tracklayer," and that "despite the large areal extent of tracksite exposures along the Paluxy, only two distinct dinosaur footprint morphotypes have been recognized, making this a low-diversity vertebrate ichnological assemblage."¹¹¹¹  The "Lone Ranger" theropod trackway that the 2022 drought exposed, 140 prints over 30 m by CMI's count, is in the same Main Tracklayer.²⁴  Bird's man tracks had a long afterlife, which Farlow's group call the "blowback" from his 1939 "exercise in grantsmanship";  that history belongs to Human and Dinosaur Tracks Together.¹¹

The swimming brontosaur

In 1940 Bird also mapped a trail of thirteen sauropod prints at the Mayan Dude Ranch near Bandera, Texas, almost all of them front feet.  Lockley tells it:  "In 1944 Bird reported that he had found such evidence. From a trackway consisting almost entirely of sauropod front-foot impressions, he inferred a swimming brontosaur (see Fig. 6.6). It apparently had touched the bottom only once with its left rear foot as it changed direction, veering to the right."³  The reading fitted its decade:  "Bird's interpretation was supported by the then-prevailing notion that sauropods were aquatic or semiaquatic and barely capable of supporting their own weight on land."³  It "spawned several dozen papers on swimming dinosaurs," and it is the reading BEDS inherits when Oard writes of "Dinosaurs that could swim" landing on exposed sediment.³

Lockley already had the alternative in 1991:  "The Texan and Moroccan front footprints are very shallow and occur in thinly layered sediment that we would expect to be severely depressed by the tracks of large animals. This suggests that the forefoot tracks could simply be undertracks associated with hind footprints that are less deeply impressed in the underlayers."³  Undertracks are the prints a foot makes on the layers below the one it stands on.  "Such tracks are called undertracks, underprints, or ghost prints. Because they are already buried at the time they are made, their preservation potential is very high."³  Falkingham and Gatesy later filmed the process with X-rays, walking a guineafowl through poppy seed and simulating the grains:  "despite sediment collapse yielding poor quality tracks at the air–substrate interface, subsurface displacements maintain a high level of organization owing to grain–grain support. Splitting the substrate volume along 'virtual bedding planes' exposed prints that more closely resembled the foot and could easily be mistaken for shallow tracks."³⁶  A clean print on a bedding plane can be a transmitted print, and the walking surface may be gone.

The decisive mechanism is simpler still.  Falkingham, Bates, Margetts and Manning loaded reconstructed Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus feet onto substrates of varying strength and found that "when pressure differs between manus and pes, as determined by the distribution of weight and size of respective autopodia, there is a range of substrate shear strengths for which only the manus (or pes) produce enough pressure to deform the substrate, generating a track."⁸  A forward-balanced sauropod leaves front-foot prints on ground that carries its hind feet without a mark.  "The mechanism described here clearly reduces the need to invoke elaborate mechanisms for manus-only trackway formation such as swimming (or punting) sauropods. Therefore, a manus-only trackway may not necessarily be evidence of a very soft, submerged substrate, but instead of a substrate sufficiently firm as to prevent track formation by the pes of these large animals."⁸  The same logic warns both sides off reading gait from a trail:  "The presence of a bipedal trackway may not be evidence of bipedalism."⁸

Then the type site itself was reopened.  Between 2002 and 2024 the Bandera trail was re-excavated, seven more prints were found in Bird's trail, a second manus-dominated sauropod trackway was uncovered beside it, and a theropod print turned up on the same horizon.  The 2025 study concludes:

"The results of our study indicate that the second manus-dominated sauropod trackway records partial pes impressions with 4 of the 5 steps preserved. Along with the single theropod track, this indicates that the individuals were not buoyed up by deep water and were not kicking off the bottom with their forelimbs. Depositional evidence demonstrates exceedingly shallow-water conditions (less than one metre) and partial marine lithification of the substrate, hence ruling out a swimming sauropod origin of the tracks."¹²

The paper notes that Bird's reading rested on the belief that sauropods lived in water, and that when Pittman found a hind-foot print in the trail in 1990 "he reinterpreted the trackway as having an undertrack origin."¹²  For BEDS this removes a load-bearing assumption.  The sauropods at Glen Rose and Bandera were not swimmers waiting for a shoal.  They were walking in a few centimetres of water or on exposed flat, on ground that had already partly cemented.

What BEDS must supply at Glen Rose

Gather the Glen Rose facts.  The track-bearing unit is a carbonate tidal flat:  Skolithos through the full 20 to 30 cm of the Main Tracklayer, oysters in the ledge above, "partial marine lithification" before the Bandera tracks.  There are four tracklayers in the section, each a separate exposure.  The Main Tracklayer may be "deposited in a single event," and Farlow's group think the tracks on it were made "over a relatively short time interval," which is friendly to a catastrophic reading of that one bed.¹¹  But "short" is the time one generation of burrowers takes to riddle a bed, and the Goldilocks paper names Glen Rose as a site whose low diversity is probably preservational:  "In the case of the Glen Rose tracks, the site is dominated by large sauropod and medium to large theropod tracks."⁷  Beneath all of it, in ICR's words, lie "thousands of feet of Flood sediments."  BEDS at Glen Rose therefore needs four falls of the water during the first 150 days, each leaving a lime-mud flat drained and firmed long enough to be burrowed through and partly cemented, walked across by a dozen sauropods moving one way and the theropods following them, and reflooded gently enough to fill the prints with silt "laid down in comparatively quiet water" without erasing them.²⁷  ICR's own description of the burial, sediment flowing "not so slow that the fresh tracks have time to collapse or erode, and not so fast that it destroys the tracks beneath," is accurate, and it is a description of a calm tidal flat.²²

Part 5: tracks before bodies

The argument, and the scope rule

CMI's Paluxy article makes the argument in one paragraph:  "This also explains the widespread observation that footprints of dinosaurs—and other creatures—are found in much lower strata than the animals that made them. According to evolutionary 'dating' methods, the footprint layer is millions of years older than the creature layer. But no creature had a lifespan of millions of years! Rather, there must have been very little time between laying the footprints and burying the creature."²⁴  The footnote is to Marcus Ross in the documentary Is Genesis History?

The argument has a true premise and a false step.  The true premise is that for many groups the oldest tracks lie below the oldest bones.  The false step is "the animals that made them":  nobody claims the animal that made the Polish print was buried in Argentina five million years later.  The claim is that the group existed earlier than its bones show, and that is a first-appearance claim across sections.  This series' rule is that a first-appearance argument must be made from one section, because correlating a track horizon in one basin with a bone bed in another borrows the radiometric and biostratigraphic timescale the young-earth writer rejects (The Order of the Fossil Record).  Within one section the observation is expected on any model and proves nothing either way.  Oard concedes the pattern himself:  the Patuxent Formation "follows the typical pattern that formations with tracks do not have body fossils and vice versa."¹⁵  Lockley says the same of the Entrada:  "essentially devoid of dinosaur remains attributable to these or any other trackmakers."³  The reason is taphonomic.  A track needs a firm exposed surface and burial in days;  a skeleton needs fast wet burial and no scavengers.  The two conditions rarely coincide, and where they do, as on the NASA Goddard slab where siderite cemented a reducing wetland "where even the flesh of body fossils can be mummified," tracks and bodies occur together.²⁹  The same rule governs every count in this series:  the PBDB body-fossil queries drop ichnotaxa, because a footprint name is a shape, not an animal.

Cases the evolutionary account absorbed

On the mainstream timescale, tracks pushing a group's origin earlier than its bones is routine, and the account has passed the test each time by moving the date.

Dinosaur ancestors.  Brusatte, Niedźwiedzki and Butler described Prorotodactylus prints, 40 mm long, from three Buntsandstein sites in the Holy Cross Mountains of Poland:  "Here, we report footprints from the Early–Middle Triassic of Poland, stratigraphically well constrained and identified using a conservative synapomorphy-based approach, which shifts the origin of the dinosaur stem lineage back to the Early Olenekian (ca 249–251 Ma), approximately 5–9 Myr earlier than indicated by body fossils, earlier than demonstrated by previous footprint records, and just a few million years after the Permian/Triassic mass extinction (252.3 Ma)."¹³  The tracks are rare, "no more than 2 and 3 per cent, respectively, of total vertebrate tracks" at two of the sites, and the identification rests on foot characters alone.¹³  No retraction, no crisis;  the origin date moved.

Birds.  Abrahams and Bordy reported tridactyl tracks from the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic of southern Africa "with demonstrable bird-like affinities, predating basal bird body fossils by c. 60 million years."¹⁴  Their own reading is that the maker was an unknown bird-like archosaur, not a bird, and the paper stands.

Tetrapods.  The Zachełmie trackways in Poland lie below the elpistostegid fishes, including Tiktaalik, that were presented as the transition to tetrapods.  Per Ahlberg, the idea of Tiktaalik as an immediate predecessor "must thus be discarded if the footprint evidence is accepted."³⁷  The prediction's timing premise failed and the field re-read the elpistostegids as late survivors.  Fish to Tetrapod argues the case in full, including why a young-earth writer cannot make the Poland-versus-Ellesmere comparison himself:  the two sites are 4,000 km apart and the only bridges are the dating methods.

The retracted case

The one "tracks before bodies" claim that was withdrawn is the one creationist writers cite most.  In 2002 Melchor, de Valais and Genise reported bird-like footprints from rocks in Argentina they took to be Late Triassic, tens of millions of years before the first bird skeletons.³⁸  In August 2013 the same authors retracted the paper after the formation was redated to the Late Eocene;  the tracks were then simply bird tracks of ordinary age.³⁹  Creationist writers read this as "reinforcement syndrome":  a date was changed to protect a theory.  The series' position is set in Archaeopteryx and Bird Origins:  the retraction is a clean answer to the charge of suppression, because the authors withdrew their own claim in public;  but it rests on radiometric redating, so a writer who rejects the method cannot present the retraction as settled, and the article flags it rather than closing it.  The unretracted southern African case is the one that is live.

Part 6: Laetoli

The surface

Laetoli, in northern Tanzania, is the best-preserved hominin trackway anywhere, and it is a trace-fossil site before it is a hominin site.  Mary Leakey and Richard Hay announced in 1979 that excavation of the tuffs of the Laetolil Beds "has revealed the presence of a large variety of footprints from the Pliocene. Many of these prints can be correlated with fossilised remains of Pliocene animals found in the same area."⁴⁰  The scale of the animal record is the first thing to fix.  Site A at locality 7 is "a 490 m2 area dated to 3.66 million years ago (Ma) and featuring 18,400 animal tracks."¹⁷  Across the area, "Mammal, bird and insect prints and trails have been identified in 18 sites (labelled from A to R) out of 33 total palaeontological localities in the Laetoli area."¹⁶  The hominin trails at site G, found in 1978, and at site S, found in 2015, are a few dozen prints among tens of thousands.

The substrate is volcanic ash, and the record is not one surface:  "Footprints occur in 10 sublevels within the so-called Footprint Tuff, corresponding to the lower part of Tuff 7 in the Upper Laetolil Beds stratigraphic sequence."¹⁶  Ten sublevels means ten ash falls, each one wet enough to take a print and each one set before the next fell on it.  Where the overburden is intact, "the tracks are sealed by the upper, laminated part of Tuff seven and filled with strongly cemented sediment."¹⁶  The 2015 site S trail runs "an estimated total length of 32 m" from one individual.¹⁶  On the mainstream scale the Upper Laetolil Beds are "dated to 3.6–3.85 Ma" and the Footprint Tuff to 3.66 Ma by argon dating of the tuffs;  this article uses those numbers only to say where the site sits in the mainstream column, not as evidence.⁴¹⁴²

What the Laetoli surface required is therefore the same list as Part 2, in a different material:  a fresh ash wet enough to mould a foot, firm enough to hold heel and toe, dry enough not to slump before the next ash sealed it, repeated ten times in the lower Footprint Tuff alone, with animals of every size from insects to elephants walking across the flat between falls.

What the prints show, and who made them

The bipedalism question is argued in Pre-Human Hominins, whose verdict this article takes as given:  the site G prints record an upright, extended-limb walker, and that verdict is not a reconstruction.  Two experimental papers disagree about the detail.  Raichlen's group matched the weight transfer to a human-like extended-limb gait.  Hatala, Demes and Richmond made prints with habitually barefoot people and with chimpanzees and found that "the Laetoli footprints are morphologically distinct from those of both chimpanzees and habitually barefoot modern humans," and that "the Laetoli hominin probably used a more flexed limb posture at foot strike than modern humans when walking bipedally," which they are careful to distinguish from a chimpanzee posture:  "one that simply involved slightly more knee and hip flexion at touchdown than is typical of modern humans."⁴¹⁴¹⁴¹  Neither result bears on the age of the ash.  They disagree about a few degrees of knee flexion, and either way the walker was a biped on a volcanic flat.

Who made them is the question the prints cannot answer alone, and the site's own scientists say so.  Hatala's introduction:  "These trackways are widely considered to have been made by Australopithecus afarensis, the only hominin taxon recognized from contemporaneous fossil deposits at Laetoli, although some have suggested that they were produced by members of a different hominin taxon that has not yet been discovered."⁴¹  Masao's team:  "The trackways are usually ascribed, not without controversy (Tuttle et al., 1991; Harcourt-Smith, 2005), to Au. afarensis (White and Suwa, 1987), which is the only hominin taxon found to date in the Upper Laetoli Beds (Harrison, 2011)."¹⁶  Harrison's own site summary says the prints "were presumably made by A. afarensis."⁴²  The attribution is by co-occurrence of bones in the same beds.  And the 2021 re-excavation of site A showed that co-occurrence is not enough:  five prints found in 1976 and long written off as a bear's turn out to be a biped whose foot proportions and gait are "readily distinguished" from site G's, which the authors take as two hominin taxa walking the same flat.¹⁷  Two kinds of biped on one surface means that "the only hominin found in these beds" is not a safe inference from a footprint.

Where Laetoli sits in young-earth frameworks

Every major creationist organisation reads the Laetoli prints as human.  ICR in 1997:  "A human footprint must be made by a human foot!"⁴³  ICR in 2010:  "rather than following the evidence where it leads--which in this case is that the Laetoli tracks were made by 'genus Homo' (modern man)--these scientists quickly modified the eternally plastic story of human evolution."⁴⁴  ICR in 2011:  "Repeated examinations of the biomechanics required to make this famous set of tracks have consistently shown that they must have been made by something almost exactly identical to modern human feet."⁴⁵  AiG in 2011:  "Despite many evolutionists' insistence that the footprints belong to an extinct human ancestral ape called Australopithecus afarensis, the footprints appear to belong to modern humans, albeit barefoot ones."⁴⁶  CMI in 1993 built the same case on Russell Tuttle's 1987 chapter, which it quotes as saying that on morphology alone the G-trail makers "could be classified as Homo sp." and that their feet "are like small barefoot Homo sapiens."⁴⁷  The creationist camp is not unanimous:  a 2023 New Creation essay concludes that "a closer look at the anatomy of the footprints suggests that they may not have been made by humans," on the ground that "the big toe stuck out more than in a typical modern human foot."⁴⁸⁴⁸

What none of the organisational statements says is where the Footprint Tuff sits relative to the Flood.  That is not a small omission, because the answer decides whether the argument is available at all.  The options are two.

Post-Flood.  If the Flood/post-Flood boundary lies below the Pliocene, as most creationist geologists have held for Cenozoic rock, the Laetoli hominins are people of the Ice Age, a few centuries after Babel, and a human reading of the prints costs nothing.  ICR's Brian Thomas states the majority view:  "Most Flood-friendly geologists have identified Cenozoic rocks as Ice Age layers that formed soon after the Flood."⁴⁹  The price is paid elsewhere:  the Upper Laetolil Beds, with their 18,400 animal tracks in one locality, their ten track-bearing ash falls, and the whole Pliocene fauna above and below them, must fit inside the post-Flood centuries, together with every Cenozoic deposit beneath them on the way down to the boundary.

Flood.  ICR's own model now places the boundary at the top of the Neogene, so the Pliocene is Flood rock.  Thomas continues:  "Others have recently reconsidered them to be Flood deposits," and names Laetoli in the next breath.⁴⁹  Under that model the Laetoli walkers were alive on an ash flat deposited during the Flood year, which the model forbids after Day 150 for every land animal, and ICR's own paleontology paper concedes the difficulty in general terms:  "Our interpretation still has a bit of difficulty explaining the trackways and footprints found in some layers of the Cenozoic. It is possible some of these layers have been misidentified and should be Pleistocene (post-Flood), but more research is needed on each site."¹⁸  Laetoli is such a site, and it has not been re-identified.

A creationist who wants to use Laetoli must therefore choose, and say which.  The human reading is cheapest on the post-Flood option, and on that option Laetoli is not a fossil-order anomaly at all;  it is an Ice Age trackway with an argon date the model rejects.  The article's own position is that the prints record a biped, that the maker cannot be named from the prints, and that the site is a strong example of what a trackway surface requires:  ten set ash falls, each walked, each buried intact.

Part 7: why a footprint rarely names a species

Lockley wrote the rule in his field guide chapter:  "In theory and in practice it is impossible to determine exactly which species made a particular set of tracks. For this reason we cannot use the same species designations reserved for fossil bones and record 'footprints of a Tyrannosaurus rex'; the skeptics would rightly demand proof. Usually the best we can do is refer to 'footprints that are Tyrannosaurus-like.'"³  Footprints get their own names, ichnotaxa, and the name is for the shape:  "Even if the name implies a track made by Tyrannosaurus, it does not, strictly speaking, imply a particular species of trackmaker."³  The reason is anatomical.  "many dinosaur species, especially those belonging to particular families, had similar, even almost identical feet, although other parts of their anatomy, on which their classification usually hinges, may have been significantly different."³  The count tells the story:  "We know of almost nine hundred dinosaur species reported from the body fossil record but only a few dozen valid and widely used footprint species."³

The field's practice confirms it at every site in this article.  At Glen Rose, "only two distinct dinosaur footprint morphotypes have been recognized," with the tridactyl prints "most or all of which were made by large theropods."¹¹  At Broome, of the thousands of tracks measured, "150 could be identified and are assignable to a least eleven and possibly as many as 21 different track types," and ten of the types "are currently too poorly represented to confidently assign to existing or new ichnotaxa."²⁸  At Lark Quarry two named ichnotaxa turned out to be one animal's feet in different water, and one name was sunk into the other.¹⁰  In Poland the dinosauromorph identification is "a conservative synapomorphy-based approach," a clade from a foot, not a species.¹³  And a trail does not even fix the gait:  "That manus- or pes-only trackways can be formed by obligate quadrupeds highlights the need for caution when interpreting locomotor mode from trackways."⁸

This limit binds both sides, and it is worth saying how.

For the mainstream, it means the "tracks before bodies" cases of Part 5 are claims about clades, made on foot characters, and the honest wording is Abrahams and Bordy's "bird-like" rather than "bird."  It means Laetoli's A. afarensis is a presumption from the bone beds, which the site's own workers say, and which site A has now tested and found wanting.  It means that a PBDB count of first appearances must drop ichnotaxa, which this series does.

For the young-earth side, it means that "a human footprint must be made by a human foot" is the same inference run the other way.  The Laetoli prints are the prints of a biped with an adducted big toe and a heel strike;  whether the biped was Homo is not written in the ash, and the people who have measured the prints most closely disagree with one another by a few degrees of knee flexion.  It also means that the one thing a footprint does establish is the thing the Flood model finds hardest:  a living animal, on a surface that held its weight, in the open air or a few centimetres of water, at that level of the section.  A track is poor evidence of who, and excellent evidence of where and when.

Objections and responses

"Tracks need burial in days.  That is a catastrophe, and the Flood is the catastrophe."  Burial in days is what every preserved track on earth had, including the Pleistocene prints at Ileret on silt layers through a 20,000-year sequence and the modern prints that Roach's team watched vanish in a week.³¹  The window is a fact about one surface.  A flood on a river, a storm tide on a flat, an ash fall on a plain:  each buries a surface in a day.  Nothing in the window says how many days separate one surface from the next.

"BEDS supplies the exposure.  Falls of water level during the Flood are plausible."  Granted, and the mainstream reading of the Dinosaur Freeway also ties the track beds to "relative sea-level changes."³⁴  The dispute is not whether the water fell but what happened while it was down.  The surfaces that carry the tracks grew microbial mats, were burrowed through 20 to 30 cm, hardened, or partly lithified before the animals crossed them.^9111012  Oard's seconds-to-minutes at Lark Quarry is contradicted by the sentence he quotes.

"Oard never claimed every exposure lasted seconds.  Morris allowed weeks."  True, and the article prints both.²³  Take the generous budget:  several weeks, during the first 150 days, for all the track horizons in a section.  Glen Rose has four.  The Korean locality cited by young-earth geologists has 300 in 110 m.²  The budget has to be divided among the horizons and the sediment between them, and nobody on the young-earth side has done the division.  The BEDS article does it:  Glen Rose's four leave 20 days each in eighty days, which fits on count, and the Korean locality's 300 leave 6.4 hours each.

"The Korean 300 horizons is a secondary citation."  It is, from Garner's group citing Lockley's group in a 1994 Lisbon volume this project could not open, and the article says so in the note.  Drop it and the point stands on Kvale's "multiple horizons within a 1 m interval," Glen Rose's four, the Broome horizons "between periodic sheet floods," and Laetoli's ten sublevels.⁹¹⁶²⁸

"The dinosaurs swam.  Their tracks are usually those of good swimmers."  Swimming dinosaurs existed;  the Lark Quarry ornithopods swam and waded in a river.¹⁰  But the sauropods did not punt across Texas:  the Bandera trail has hind-foot prints and the water was under a metre deep, and manus-only trails are a substrate effect.⁸¹²  Armoured dinosaurs left tracks too, six types at Broome and nodosaur prints at Goddard.²⁸²⁹  And the model needs not swimmers but animals alive and walking on the surface, which is the problem whether they arrived by swimming or not.

"Garner and his colleagues are not representative.  They put most of the Phanerozoic after the Flood."  Correct, and the article says it is a minority position.  That does not make their observations wrong.  Kilometres of sediment below the first tracks, tracks at successive horizons, sediment filling lows rather than highs, and tracks with nests and burrows are facts about sections, and Oard has not answered the lows-not-highs point.

"The mainstream dates these surfaces by assumption too.  Nothing on a bedding plane says a million years."  Agreed, and Part 3 says so.  The time inside a surface is days and the time between surfaces is a model.  The young-earth writer is entitled to that point.  What the writer is not entitled to is seconds, because mats, burrows and cementation are on the plane.

"Tracks below bodies show the record is compressed."  Within one section the pattern is what both sides expect, because tracks and bones preserve under opposite conditions, and Oard concedes it.¹⁵  Across sections it borrows the timescale.  There is no version of the argument that both survives the scope rule and favours the young-earth side.

"Laetoli's prints are human, as Tuttle and Johanson said."  The prints are a biped's, with a human-like foot in most measured features and a few that are not.  Hatala's experiments found them "morphologically distinct from those of both chimpanzees and habitually barefoot modern humans."⁴¹  Reading a genus off a footprint is what Part 7 says cannot be done, in either direction.  And a creationist who insists the prints are human owes the reader an answer to where the tuff sits:  post-Flood, in which case the Pliocene of East Africa is Ice Age rock and the argument is not about the fossil record at all;  or Flood, in which case ICR's own model has a human trackway inside the Flood year and its own authors concede the difficulty.¹⁸

"The Melchor retraction proves dates are adjusted to save the theory."  The authors retracted their own claim in public when a radiometric redating moved the rock from Triassic to Eocene.  That is the opposite of suppression.  Whether the redating is sound is a radiometric question outside this series, and the article neither uses the retraction as settled nor as evidence of bad faith.  The parallel case in southern Africa has not been retracted, and its authors do not read their tracks as a bird's.¹⁴

"The Coconino trackways were made underwater.  Brand showed it."  Brand's published conclusion is a disjunction, "either subaqueous sand or subaerial damp sand," and the damp sand that worked had set for at least eight hours.²⁶²⁶  The argument is owned by Coconino Sandstone.

Issues and unanswered questions

• The time per surface is the open term in the BEDS sum. Briefly Exposed Diluvial Sediments runs the count against 80, 110 and 150 days. What no one has priced is the time each horizon needed to reach the Goldilocks band, grow a mat or be burrowed, and set, which Parts 2 and 3 list. Published mud-consolidation rates and Falkingham's shear-strength bands would let someone compute it for Glen Rose.
• Farlow's burrow clock has not been read. Whether the Main Tracklayer's Skolithos fabric shows one generation of burrowers or several is a decidable question that would bound the exposure of the most famous track surface in America.¹¹
• Kvale et al. 2001 was read only in abstract. Oard's page citations for the swim tracks and the wet-substrate evidence (pp. 249–252) are his and were not checked.
• The Dinosaur Freeway's extent is not printed. Figures for the number of Dakota Group tracksites and the area they cover circulate widely but were not found in a primary this project could read; the article cites only the 1990 abstract and Lockley's book.
• The Korean 300-horizon locality rests on Garner's citation of Lim and others 1994, which was not obtained.
• Leakey and Hay 1979 and Hay's 1987 geology chapter were not obtained. The Footprint Tuff's sublevels and sealing come from Masao 2016 and McNutt 2021, which cite them.
• No creationist organisation has stated the Flood/post-Flood placement of the Laetoli tuff. Until one does, the human-print argument is unpriced.
• Lockley's page numbers for the Purgatoire and water-table passages were anchored on OCR running heads and should be checked on page images before publication; the pages quoted for undertracks (23), Bird (67–69), Entrada (91–92) and naming (48–49) are anchored on their own running heads.

Verdict

The track record is an unsolved problem for a one-year Flood, and the best statement of it is by young-earth geologists.  The one answer on offer, BEDS, has the right ingredients:  water falls, a surface is exposed, animals walk, water rises, the prints are buried in a day.  Every preserved track surface on earth went through that last step, which is why it proves nothing about the year.  What the surfaces themselves record is the part BEDS leaves out:  mats that grew, burrows through 20 to 30 cm, mud that hardened, carbonate that partly lithified, ten set ash falls, and dozens to hundreds of such surfaces stacked above kilometres of earlier sediment.  Oard's clock at Lark Quarry is seconds;  the sediment's clock is days per surface and the count of surfaces is large.  Summed in the BEDS article, that leaves the model fitting single surfaces and short stacks on count and unfinished for stacks by the hundred.  The swimming sauropod, which gave the model its dinosaurs, is gone at its own type site.  Tracks below bodies is a pattern both sides predict and neither can use.  And a footprint names where and when far better than it names who, which is why Laetoli cuts against anyone, creationist or not, who reads a genus off a print, and why the creationist organisations that call the prints human still owe their readers a sentence saying whether the ash is Flood or Ice Age.

Sources