Prehistoric Trackways National Monument

This is what I did this morning. The day was a little cool and it made for a really nice hike, especially since I didn't know where they were and I had to walk around for a bit. Anyway in the end I found them.

At first I didn't even know exactly where to drive. Once I saw this sign I thought I was in good shape.

The next sign gave me the boundary of the National Monument, always a good clue.

The five "fingers" in the one below give it away as a Dimetropus (the animal is the Dimetrodon the print is Dimetropus.

 This is not a huge footprint but not tiny either.

In this shot you have five footprints of Dimetrodon.

A set of much smaller footprints.

..and smaller yet.

I should say that these are NOT a dinosaur prints. These tracks are Permian in age, and in the Permian there were no dinosaurs. Just to get us out of the circular argument, "Are they not dinosaurs just because there are no dinosaurs in the Permian, or could they be used to show that in fact there WAS dinosaurs in the Permian since they are there and they are in Permian rocks" I want to add right away that dinosaurs do not have five fingers, wrong lineage.
I know the same circular argument can be made again "did dinosaurs not have 5 fingers or do those show that some of them did". In truth unless you want to get down to the absolute nity gritty geology takes a little bit of faith and I believe....mostly because I know part of the nity gritty.
In a way I found that chemistry was also like that. It took to get into third year university chemistry to actually really make sense of the first two years. the first two years felt to me more like accepting than understanding.

If you click on the photo below it will get larger and you can read about it.

The carbonates (limestones in this case) are full of fossils shells, crinoids etc but themudstone also has some plant remains. what I saw was mostly in small pieces but there was one very good example.
These are remains of Walchia, a conifer believed to be very similar to modern Norfolk Pine. I can't beleive I did not take a picture with something for scale. The fossils are about 20 centimeters (8 inches) long each.