My work is full of fossilised poop, but ichnology is not an icky study

Ichnologists examining an area with trace fossils - a way to reconstruct ancient life even in the absence of body fossils. Jurassica Museum. [The Conversation]

If you had told 18-year-old me that I would, one day, be an ichnologist I wouldn’t have believed you – or even known what that was. But, more than 15 years later, I get to introduce myself as an ichnologist.

Like my teenage self, many people outside the discipline don’t know, or have a limited understanding of, what ichnology is. It’s the study of the tracks and traces made by animals and plants in the fossil record, also called trace fossils. These can range from animal footprints, invertebrate trails, feeding traces on fossil leaves, fossilised faeces, tooth traces on bone/wood, to burrows and borings all preserved in the sedimentary rock record. When someone mentions seeing a “dinosaur footprint” they are talking about ichnology.