Animal tracks are the imprints left behind in soil, snow, mud, or other ground surfaces that an animal walks across. Animal tracks are used by hunters in tracking their prey and by naturalists to identify animals living in a given area.
Books are commonly used to identify animal tracks, which may look different based on the weight of the particular animal and the type of strata in which they are made.
Tracks can be fossilized over millions of years. It is for this reason we are able to see fossilized dinosaur tracks in some types of rock formations. These types of fossils are called trace fossils since they are a trace of an animal left behind rather than the animal itself.
Famous quotes containing the words animal and/or tracks:
“An animal can learn to fight, but to sing beautiful things and make people believe them....”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)
“The tracks of moose, more or less recent, to speak literally, covered every square rod on the sides of the mountain; and these animals are probably more numerous there now than ever before, being driven into this wilderness, from all sides, by the settlements.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)