Many books on trace fossils have been published in this decade. But Adolf Seilacher's book is like none of them. In this remarkable book, at least as much space is occupied by illustrations as by text. And most of the illustrations are the renowned art-work of Dolf himself. Some of these figures have been published before, but most of these are improved and updated. Many new figures are here, and the 75 plates are enjoyable to look at, detailed and precise, their accuracy deriving from Dolf's mastery of the old-fashioned camera lucida. The plates convey an immense amount of information. A picture is worth a thousand words.
The text is closely tied to the plates. It is intense and detailed and clearly written. Ichnotaxonomy is bypassed, which greatly eases the flow of the text. Likewise, references to the literature also are omitted from the text, making reading much easier.
The book is divided into chapters, each dealing with a group of tracemakers, or a behavioural set of trace fossils, starting with trace fossils produced by vertebrates. Dolf emphasizes the basic concepts and interpretative pitfalls of tracks and track preservation through a series of case studies. This chapter includes swimming trails of fish. It is followed by chapters on trilobite burrows, arthrophycid burrows, deep-sea farmers, etc. Each chapter contains a number of plates, and begins with lists of references to the literature. To each reference is attached a brief statement of contents with respect to the chapter. These literature lists have been compiled with the help of Gabriela Mángano, Luis Buatois, Andrew Rindsberg and the late Roland Goldring. The fullness of these lists is an enormous help to the reader, the lists being placed within the chapter, close to the plates they refer to. Except in these lists, nowhere is an author or date of authorship used to interrupt the flow (well, almost nowhere).
It is relieving and relaxing to see trace fossil names used as labels and not dealt with as nomenclatorial phenomena. These names are bent as completely informal family names to describe groups, such as teichichnids, lophocteniids, daedaloids and ophiomorphids. The use of some ichnogenera is confusing. Granularia was synonymized with Ophiomorpha annulata Ksiazkiewicz by Uchman (Reference Uchman1995); Muensteria is used instead of the generally accepted Taenidium (but D'Alessandro & Bromley (Reference D'Alessandro and Bromley1987) is listed in the references); and Isopodichnus is used instead of Rusophycus (while Bromley & Asgaard (Reference Bromley and Asgaard1972) is listed). (Well, to mention a few more quibbles, I do not like to see spatangoid echinoids likened to bulldozers, and Daimonelix was made by beavers, not prairie dogs, and Chirotherium tracks were made by pseudosuchian reptiles, not sauropod dinosaurs (Tresise & Sarjeant, Reference Tresise and Sarjeant1997)).
Make no mistake, this book is made for serious students of ichnology of all ages and stages. It is superbly organized, superbly illustrated, a treasure trove of knowledge and understanding – understanding of how trace fossils work and what they can tell us. The complex and detailed artwork is beautifully presented and printed, not too small for old eyes, black-and-white with an elegant emphasis on details in blue. Photographs of outstanding specimens are scattered at key positions through the book. €53.45 is somewhat expensive, but this hardbound book is well, well worth it.
