Reviewed by James O. Farlow (Purdue University Fort Wayne)

Lucas, S. G., A. P. Hunt, and H. Klein, eds. 2025. Vertebrate Ichnology: Tetrapod Tracks and Trackways. Elsevier, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 908 pp. ($150 paper / e-book.)

This big book has an equally large ambition: “A book that presents a comprehensive review of vertebrate ichnology has been long overdue. This is that book, the first volume to present a comprehensive review and extensive analysis of vertebrate trace fossils. It covers all aspects of the vertebrate trace fossil record: tetrapod footprints, fish trails and imprints, dentalites, bromalites (regurgitalites, consumulites, coprolites and others…gastroliths, burrows, and much more” (pp. ix, xi). Although it has some minor glitches, in my opinion this is an extremely valuable and necessary handbook for anyone doing research on footprints and trackways of terrestrial vertebrates.

First, let’s get the problems out of the way. Many readers will likely be confused, as I initially was, about what the volume under reviewed here actually covers. In the introductory chapter (from which the quotation above was taken), the authors (Lucas, Hunt, and Klein) repeatedly (pp. xi, xxi–xxxiii) state that in addition to discussing pre-Pleistocene tetrapod footprints and trackways, there will also be “in this volume” chapters covering Pleistocene footprints (including those of hominins) and the other, non-locomotory traces in the quoted list. These other chapters are cited in the bibliography of the introductory chapter (with purported 2024 publication dates). I kept scribbling notes to myself in the book margins of “where is this?” as I read the summaries of these other chapters in the introduction. The chapters in the present volume actually end with a discussion of Paleogene and Neogene tetrapod tracks. What is not stated anywhere I could find in the volume under review, and I later learned, is that there is to be a second volume with the title Vertebrate Ichnology: Fish Ichnology, Consumption, Burrows and Reproduction, Conservation, currently in press and expected to be published in 2025. The introduction serves both as an introduction to this first volume (focused on tetrapod ichnology) and the forthcoming second volume (on fish ichnology).

There is an impressively long list of international contributors to this book; one chapter has 13 co-authors. For many of these persons English is not their first language. In some chapters, the English expression is in places awkward, but I was usually able to ascertain the authors’ meaning.

I found a few discrepancies between call outs for figures in the text and what the figures actually showed (pp. 218–224).

So much for the negatives, which are far outweighed by the positive features of this book. The introduction is followed by a chapter by Lallensack dealing with the history of study of tetrapod traces. Then comes a very useful survey of methodology in the study of fossil footprints. What I found most interesting in this chapter, given my own research interests, is the author’s conclusion from canonical variate analysis that there may be “over-splitting of tridactyl dinosaurian ichnotaxa, especially in the larger theropod (Eubrontes) cluster (p. 12).

The heart of the book is a survey of tetrapod footprint ichnotaxa, described in chapters by stratigraphic age (Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene-Neogene). Lucas’s Devonian chapter is short, and reaches the interesting conclusion (p. 36) that “The trackmakers of the Devonian footprints and trackways are essentially unknown, so a major clade, or clades, of early tetrapods have been sampled by the footprint record but not by the body-fossil record.”

The remaining chapters follow a fairly similar format. There is a systematic description of ichnogenera, presented either strictly in alphabetical order, or alphabetically within presumed trackmaker groups. The authority of each ichnogenus is identified, a figure of the ichnogenus is presented, and the type and other ichnospecies of each are summarized. This is followed by a summary of the geographic and stratigraphic distribution of the ichnogenus, and a diagnosis and description of the form. If the authors consider the ichnogenus to be invalid, they state their reasons for so thinking. If an ichnogenus occurs in more than one of the geologic periods in which the chapters are presented, separate entries for that form appear repeatedly. Descriptions of one of my favorite ichnogenera, Eubrontes, thought by most workers to have been made by medium-to-large-sized theropods, appear in the Triassic (pp. 222–223), Jurassic (pp. 329–332), and Cretaceous (pp. 509–511) chapters. Following the systematic reviews, chapters variously provide synthetic discussions of what footprints contribute to understanding biostratigraphy, paleobiogeography, timing of evolutionary events, locomotor evolution, ichnofacies, compatibility with the body fossil record, and paleoecology.

Illustrations of footprints and trackways include interpretive line drawings as well as black-and-white or color photographs and a few false-color height maps. Reproduction of this art is of high quality.

I think the greatest value of this book will be as a first stop for those wanting an entry into the literature about a particular ichnogenus. In reading the accounts of footprints of the trackmaker groups of greatest interest to me, I found citations of papers in often obscure (and sometimes, regrettably, not so obscure) publications that I had previously missed. The book will also be useful to those making comparisons of footprints at new sites under study with previously named ichnotaxa.

Having seen this book, I now wonder how I ever got along without it!