Abstract
A series of sandstone slabs from Hamstead, Birmingham (West Midlands, UK), preserve an assemblage of tetrapod trackways and individual tracks from the Enville Member of the Salop Formation (late Carboniferous: late Moscovian–Kasimovian). This material has received limited previous study, despite being one of the few British sites to preserve Carboniferous tetrapod footprints. Here, we restudy and revise the taxonomy of this material, and document it using 3D models produced using photogrammetry. The assemblage is dominated by large tracks assigned to Limnopus isp., which were made by early amphibians (temnospondyls). A number of similar but smaller tracks are assigned to Batrachichnus salamandroides (also made by temnospondyls). Dimetropus leisnerianus (made by early synapsids) and Dromopus lacertoides (made by lizard-like sauropsids such as araeoscelids) are also present. This ichnofauna contrasts with a slightly stratigraphically older, more extensive and better-studied assemblage from Alveley (Shropshire), which is dominated by small amphibians with relatively rare reptiliomorphs, but which lacks Dromopus tracks. The presence of Dromopus lacertoides at Hamstead is consistent with the trend towards increasing aridity through the late Carboniferous. It is possible that the assemblage is the stratigraphically oldest occurrence of this important amniote ichnotaxon.
Highlights
In 1912, in a paper presented to the Geological Society of London, Walter Henry Hardaker described fossils, including a series of tetrapod footprints and trackways, from what were considered Permian rocks near Birmingham in the British Midlands
The tracks have previously been assigned to L. vagus, an ichnospecies that tends to be approximately a third of the size of the largest tracks found amongst the Hamstead material (Tucker & Smith, 2004)
Many previously erected ichnospecies within the Limnopus ichnogenus are considered synonymous with L. vagus, but assigning the Hamstead specimens to L. vagus or any other ichnospecies is difficult without more complete trackways
Summary
In 1912, in a paper presented to the Geological Society of London, Walter Henry Hardaker described fossils, including a series of tetrapod footprints and trackways, from what were considered Permian rocks near Birmingham in the British Midlands. A small number of other localities in the Midlands and Somerset (Haubold & Sarjeant, 1973; Haubold & Sarjeant, 1974; Milner, 1994) have yielded tetrapod footprints Because of this scarcity, we here provide a redescription and reassessment of the Hamstead footprints and make comparisons to other late Carboniferous ichnofaunas, that from Alveley. The meshes were exported as .ply files into the freeware software package CloudCompare 2.7, which was used to visualise the models These included digital 3D reliefs with coloured contour intervals (methodology from Romilio & Salisbury, 2014), and reliefs with steep gradients (i.e. the edges of a footprint) brightly highlighted. A solitary large manus-pes pair measured 114 mm for manus-pes separation
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