Abstract
As attested by Gould (1998) in his book Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms from where the quote has been taken, da Vinci was probably the first ichnologist. The first to have observed that rocks may preserve traces of extinct animals. What is ichnology? It is the science that studies traces, mostly trace fossils, which are defined as morphologically recurrent structures (nests, burrows, trackways, etc.) resulting from the life activity of an individual organism modifying the substrate (Bertling et al. 2006). Rocks with trace fossils coming from the ancient past reflect how animals behaved. They are Rosetta stones to be interpreted by ichnologists (Genise 2006a, b).
“How between the various layers of stone are still to be found the tracks of worms that crawled about upon them when it was not yet dry”
(Leonardo da Vinci, 1510, The Leicester Codex)
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Genise, J.F. (2017). Introduction. In: Ichnoentomology. Topics in Geobiology, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28210-7_1
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