On November 25, paleontologist Martin Lockley passed at the age of 73. PopSci spoke with Lockley about his career studying dinosaur tracks and footprints earlier this year.
Rows of razor-sharp teeth. Femur bones the size of telephone poles. The towering skeleton of an animal taller than a giraffe. The replicas of dinosaur bodies and giant fossils housed inside natural history museums around the world are usually our first exposure to the long-gone world of these extinct animals. Their sheer size draws people of all ages into the lost world of dinosaurs. However, for paleontologist Martin Lockley, it was their dinosaur footprints and tracks that stole the spotlight and launched his paleontology career.
“People found footprints interesting, but they had this perception that they were not very useful for interpretation of dinosaur activity. I don’t know why that was. You don’t have to be an expert to realize that tracks are made by animals,” Lockley told PopSci by phone in October.
[Related: A newly discovered sauropod dinosaur left behind some epic footprints.]
Born in Wales in 1950, Lockley was a pioneer in the study of the dinosaur tracks and footprints preserved in rock formations around the world. He taught for over 30 years at the University of Colorado and published more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers, wrote 17 books. The dinosaur ichnogenus Lockleypus was named in his honor in 2018. Along the way, he earned multiple awards, including the University of Colorado Student Generated Award for Teaching and the Korean Presidential Citation for Contribution to Cultural Heritage Protection in 2020.
Lockley was also the driving force behind the preservation track sites including the Dinosaur Ridge tracksite in Morrison, Colorado. The protected site is now one of the premier dinosaur track locations in North America. He also helped build the University of Colorado’s Fossil Tracks Collection of roughly 3,000…
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