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:
“The moose will, perhaps, one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns ... to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Leonid Ivanovich Shigaev is dead.... The suspension dots, customary in Russian obituaries, must represent the footprints of words that have departed on tiptoe, in reverent single file, leaving their tracks on the marble....”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)