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:
“Most men would feel shame if caught preparing with their own hands precisely such a dinner, whether of animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for them by others. Yet till this is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men and women. This certainly suggests what change is to be made.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.”
—René Daumal (1908–1944)