If you had told 18-year-old me that I would, one day, be an ichnologist I wouldn’t have believed you – or even known what that was. But, more than 15 years later, I get to introduce myself as an ichnologist.

Like my teenage self, many people outside the discipline don’t know, or have a limited understanding of, what ichnology is. It’s the study of the tracks and traces made by animals and plants in the fossil record, also called trace fossils. These can range from animal footprints (tracks/trackways), invertebrate trails, feeding traces on fossil leaves, fossilised faeces (coprolites), tooth traces (gnaw/bite marks) on bone/wood, to burrows and borings all preserved in the sedimentary rock record. When someone mentions seeing a “dinosaur footprint” they are talking about ichnology.

It may seem strange to spend so much time looking at fossils from the distant past. But doing so doesn’t just help scientists to understand animals and plants that existed long ago: it also informs our understanding of the environments they occupied and other aspects of the past world like extinction events or climate change. That can help us understand how things might shift in future.

A rich information source
Maybe this all sounds rather dry; fossil bones tend to grab people’s imagination far more. But ichnology is a very rich source of information about an animal that could not be deduced from the bones alone. A once living animal is leaving a clue about what it was doing, the way it was doing it, and the conditions around it.

Trace fossils even preserve moulds and casts of body parts – for instance, a fossil footprint can be thought of as a partial 3D mould of the animal’s foot, its flesh and bone.

My current work in ichnology deals with fossil footprints (tracks) of one of the largest animals to have walked the earth: the sauropod. These dinosaurs of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods (~200 and 150 million years ago) are like nothing we know today.

Read more - https://theconversation.com/my-job-is-full-of-fossilised-poop-but-theres-nothing-icky-about-ichnology-182906