Neoichnology II: Revenge of the Scorpion

While organizing my geo-picture collection, I ran across a Death Valley picture I hadn’t shared that ALSO tied in with the whole neoichnology trend from yesterday. The picture below is from the dune field in Death Valley, and shows a scorpion track left in a fine-grained sand substrate:


You can see the somewhat confusing scratch marks along either side of the trail; I guess having several pairs of legs skittering away all at once makes for some convoluted footprints. The central furrow in the trackway is from the tail. I’ve been told, though I’d have to look up a cite to be sure, that scorpions commonly only produce tail-dragging marks at night (or when it’s cool and shady), and will hold their tails up off the ground during the day. Thus, in SOME cases, you might be able to tell whether it’s night/day in the rock record depending on the scorpion trace fossil.

Seeing this picture again reminded me of a paper I had read a while back. Davis et al. (2007) wrote up a pretty nice summary paper of some experimental work on the neoichnology of some modern terrestrial arthropods. The point of their work was to investigate the effect of substrate conditions on both the morphology and taphonomy of the resultant traces. They used a variety of trace-making bugs (including Giant African Millipedes, Cockroaches, Tarantulas, Woodlice, and some Emperor Scorpions) to investigate the generalized range of bug bauplans, and they used a range of grain-sizes and moisture content to simulate varying substrate conditions, producing two taphoseries: A dry- to dampground series, meant to mimic fully subaerial conditions, and a soft- to firmground, meant to mimic a transitional state similar to a recently flooded overbank setting.

The approach used to produce the substrates was one I had never encountered in the literature before, and seemed fairly rigorous. For the subaerial setting, they simply sprayed an amount of water onto the substrate, and then the critter walked across it. For the transitional setting, though, they put 2 cm of sediment into the tray, removed it, filled the tray with 2.5 cm of water, and then sprinkled the sediment back into the tray. After allowing it to stand overnight, the siphoned off the water, and then proceeded to dump the animals into the experimental setup at regular intervals after the siphoning (0 mins, 60-75 min, 120-150 min).

The picture below is taken from Davis et al (2007; p. 292), and shows the dry to damp series for the Scorpion:


This picture is from Davis et al (2007; p. 293) and shows the soft- to firmground series:


The authors conclude that the increasing firmness of the substrate, related mostly to moisture content, exerted the largest control on the resultant morphologies. Overall, the authors saw a decrease in track width (or track row width) with increasing moisture. They also found, unsurprisingly, that big heavy animals make the best, most preservable trackways in these conditions.

The potential utility of the work is pretty interesting: maybe we could make interpretations of substrate moisture content, qualitatively at least, in some very special trackway settings, letting us get into some nitty gritty paleoenvironmental interpretations. Of course, all the old caveats would apply, least of which not being the fact that we don’t really KNOW how big the animal was or its specific physiology. Still, Davis et al. (2007) suggest a good starting point for this sort of work, and I think make a good case for the importance of careful neoichnological research and its potential impact to sedimentary geology.

WORKS CITED:

Davis, R.B., Minter, N.J., Braddy, S.J., 2007, The neoichnology of terrestrial arthropods: Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, v. 255, p. 284-307.