Theropod Tracks, Mud-collapsed and distorted, 2023
For photos of Ballroom photos from previous years, see:
http://paleo.cc/paluxy/ballroom/Ballroom Menu.htm
All photos (C) 2023 Glen J. Kuban unless otherwise indicated
By all evidence most of the original track surface at the Ballroom was very soft and wet (more so than most other sites), so that the majority of tracks are quite deep and show at least some degree of mud-collapse -where the soft mud slumped back over or into the digit impressions. This often makes the tracks appear smaller than the foot that made them, or sometimes appear more like tracks of bipedal dinosaurs called ornithopods (which have shorter and blunter digits than theropods); however, if one looks closely one can almost always see the slits where the long, narrow digits entered the sediment, confirming that they are indeed theropod (bipedal predator) tracks.
