The Lost Tracks: A Journey of Discovery

In 1991, I referred to the Dinosaur Footprint Renaissance (Lockley, 1991), rather shamelessly appropriating the term from one Bob Bakker (1975) who spoke of the “Dinosaur Renaissance.” The first book devoted to dinosaur tracks, a symposium volume entitled Dinosaur Tracks and Traces, was published a generation ago (Gillette and Lockley, 1989). Since then, there have been a score of books and edited volumes dealing primarily with dinosaur ichnology, and other fossil footprints, including at least five reviewed in Ichnos. Among these, we can include the self-published Canyon Country Dinosaur Tracks and Trackers (Barnes, 1997), which I reviewed (Lockley, 2000) after working intermittently with Barnes in eastern Utah. I mention this because, like The Lost Tracks, it is a book devoted entirely to dinosaur tracks from the canyon country of Utah which shows the importance of the contribution made by intelligent and enthusiastic amateurs. Specifically, The Lost Tracks deals with track sites found along or near the shores of Lake Powell, otherwise known as the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area (GCNRA), a vast reservoir (Fig. 1) that fills what was once Utah's Glen Canyon canyonlands of the Colorado River, upstream from the Grand Canyon.