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INTRODUCTION:
Devotees of 19th century American literature will have a good picture of Natty Bumppo,
James Fenimore Cooper's pre-eminent woodsman of the Leatherstocking Tales, following
a deer or human trail, often for days in pursuit of his quarry. Likewise, the crossing of the continent by Lewis & Clark
and their Corps of Discovery in 1804-06 by following rivers, animal trails, and other
features of the landscape is legendary. From our third millenium, urban perspective, in
which reading train schedules and road signs is more important than following a faint trail
through the wilderness, such feats may have an ethereal quality, which makes it hard for us
to appreciate the consummate observational skill and interpretative ability that people of
earlier generations developed when confronted by needs which now are no longer important to
the vast majority of us.
We don't need a level of expertise in interpreting animal tracks equivalent to that of
the Deerslayer or Meriwether Lewis to proceed with our analysis, but we do need to be able
to identify dinosaur footprints, and distinguish them from tracks made by other animals or
from inanimate markings. The focus of our first foray into the question of dinosaur running
speed is to determine how best to do this. We will examine footprints of some modern
animals as a means of examining the question of whether animals can be identified by their
footprints alone.
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