Tsurugi Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Jon Ellison Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > No.....
> >
> > Dino Trax.
> >
> > But Trux Trax.
> >
> > Fossilised.
>
> I agree with you on the way the tracks were
> "fossilized"....just like animal tracks are
> fossilized.
>
> It's another thing that makes them strange,
> however. The vast majority of them are in
> limestone sediment. Malta is a relatively recent
> geological uplift(it's still tilting actually,
> that's why one side of the island ramps gradually
> down into the sea while the other side is a cliff
> coming straight up out of the water) so it is
> possible there were humans around to make tracks
> through the soft sediment atop a recently revealed
> Maltese archipelago.

True and many of the tracks lead down to the sea and continue on under the sea.
That all depends on the geology, the time it takes for a fossil to form and how long 'humans' have been around.
Or not human??




> But Turkey is another matter entirely. It has been
> so long since Turkey was underwater, I think it's
> much more likely that the sediment deposits those
> tracks were made in were dropped there by immense
> tidal waves. Someone came along and held a rally
> race(or whatever they were doing) in the fresh
> mud, only to be obliterated by another tidal wave.
>
> This second wave would actually have been the same
> wave that dropped the sediment earlier, after
> which it rolled back out to sea and all the way
> across to the opposite shoreline, bounced back and
> crossed again to hit Turkey a second time but with
> much reduced power, a few weeks after the first
> hit. The second time there wouldn't have been
> nearly as much sedimemt carried up onto shore,
> since the floor of the ocean would have been all
> but cleared of sediment deposits by the initial
> wave.... but there would have been enough to lay
> down new layers atop the tracks, they just
> wouldn't be nearly as substantial as the initial
> deposits.

It's sedimentary rock so therefore it was certainly at some time a soft sediment. Yes, for tracks made in soft sediment to be preserved, just like Dino tracks, it's necessary for the layer to be covered over and eventually eroded away revealing the exposed fossils.
That's how fossilisation works.
The Turkish tracks when viewed from the air are on an area of exposed sedimentary rock which is surrounded by layers and topsoil. The tracks continue on under these layers.
In Malta and Turkey among others, we may be just seeing localised areas where nature has fortuitously revealed the tracks for us to observe today.

The precise geological mechanism by which this occurred is a matter for debate.