Continental trace fossils and museum exhibits: displaying organism behaviour frozen in time

Abstract

This paper introduces continental trace fossils, and suggests ways in which modern and ancient traces can be used in museum exhibits. Burrows, tracks, trails, nests, borings, excrement and root patterns represent organism-substratum interactions of terrestrial and aquatic plants, invertebrates and vertebrates, and are preserved in the geologic record as continental trace fossils. Trace fossils are important because they are analogous to behaviour frozen in time and preserve information about organisms not recorded by body fossils. They can be used also as fossil evidence of organisms in the geologic record; an organism can make tens to millions of traces in a lifetime. Trace fossils represent hidden biodiversity; they preserve in situ evidence of food-web relations between fossorial, terrestrial and aquatic communities, and are useful for interpreting palaeoenvironmental, palaeohydrologic and palaeoclimatic settings. Public education on the importance of continental trace fossils to palaeontology and the study of Earth history can be accomplished with side-by-side displays of casts of modern traces and trace fossils, which represent homologs or analogues to modern behaviours. Such displays allow the public to see how scientists study and interpret the significance of trace fossils as behaviour. This kind of exhibit demonstrates also that modern organisms and their behaviours have an evolutionary history through deep geologic time as recorded by the record of body and trace fossils. Several examples of modern traces and ancient trace fossils presented here illustrate ways to produce museum exhibits to educate the public on continental trace fossils.