Dinosaur Footprints and Trackways of La Rioja [Hardcover]

During the Early Cretaceous, lakes, meandering streams, and flood plains covered the region where the current foothills of Rioja now exist. Today the area is known for its wine and for the dozens of sites where footprints and trackways of dinosaurs, amphibians, and even pterosaurs can be seen. The dinosaurs that lived here 120 million years ago left their footsteps imprinted in the mud and moist soil. Now fossilized in rock, they have turned Rioja into one of the most valuable dinosaur footprint sites in all of Europe. F?lix P?rez-Lorente and his colleagues have published extensively on the region, mostly in Spanish-language journals. In this volume, P?rez-Lorente provides an up-to-date synthesis of that research in English. He offers detailed descriptions of the sites, footprints, and trackways, and explains what these prints and tracks can tell us about the animals who made them.

1. La Rioja Footprints
2. Ichnology
3. The Tracksites
4. Conservation of the Tracksites
5. Summary
References
Index

F?lix P?rez-Lorente teaches geology at Universidad de La Rioja, Spain.

Felix Perez-Lorente has to be congratulated for sharing his career-long experience in a book that will be the reference for La Rioja and that will undoubtedly serve for the study of tracksites around the world. It is a worthy read for anyone interested in - or fascinated by - these exceptional inchological wonders and the animals that made them.

Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of Europe by Martin Lockley and Christian Meyer (Columbia University Press, 2000). ISBN 9780231107105.

Likely to become a landmark reference in dinosaur ichnology. Specialists in the field and workers on the functional morphology of dinosaur locomotion will find a great deal to think about in the work. La Rioja preserves a world-class set of dinosaur tracksites, and making this information available to Anglophone readers performs a great service to the research community.