The long walk from the Carboniferous: mysterious fossil tracks are rediscovered after 87 years

Abstract

An unmarked crate stored for many years in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology was opened in 2005 and found to contain large slabs of small (one- to a few-centimetre-sized) fossil tetrapod footprints that were clearly geologically very old. The lack of data on or in the crate left the contained specimens orphaned and mysterious and nothing was definitively gleaned about their age, provenance or history for over a dozen years. But when a new book on an extraordinary assemblage of Carboniferous trackways in Alabama was published in 2016, it was found to contain a few sentences that gave clues to the origin of the specimens and soon illuminated the hidden story. Not only had the tracks been amassed by George Gaylord Simpson, one of the foremost vertebrate paleontologists of the 20th Century, many are exquisitely preserved and quite important scientifically. The story of their rediscovery and ongoing interpretation is an intriguing mix of luck, revelations and probing of both the geologic and paper records.