When conditions are right, footprints can be left behind when animals walk over soft sediments like mud or sand. Those spores can then be baked dry by the sun and then filled up with other sediments. That makes it more likely that they will become trace fossils, fossils also known as ichnofossils.
“Track fossils are fossils that record aspects of an animal’s behavior or anatomy that are not fixed in the skeleton,” Barrett said. “That could include paths of paw prints, coprolites [gefossiliseerde uitwerpselen], tunnels and burrows and the contents of the gut, which is a representation of the animal’s interactions with its environment or of the materials it produces.”
“Often such tracks are not associated with any particular species, except in very exceptional circumstances, but they can be very common as things like footprints are created thousands of times over the lifetime of a single animal.”
When rocks rise and erode over time, traces buried for millions of years can surface. Many trace fossils are found near water as the rocks that surround them are eroded away, exposing the underlying fossils.
However, there are also natural processes that can produce shapes that resemble paw prints.
For example, minerals such as gypsum can dissolve and leave cavities that resemble footprints, while small mud volcanoes can produce what appears to be the rim of a footprint.
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