The study of tracks is often regarded as a fringe subdiscipline outside the scientific mainstream. Papers dealing with footprints traditionally appear either in popular magazines like Natural History (Bird 1939, 1944; Brown 1938), or in very obscure publications (Sarjeant 1974). Usually it is only the spectacular discoveries, which are directly applicable to topical debates, that rouse much scientific interest. For example, the discovery of Pliocene hominid tracks (Leakey and Hay 1979) provided unequivocal evidence for the antiquity of bipedalism (cf., Napier 1967). Similarly the tracks of a running theropod allowed for direct estimates of the speed attained by dinosaurs (Farlow 1981), and the tracks of a herd of running theropods fueled debate about gregariousness and stampede behavior (Thulborn and Wade 1984).