A History of Ideas in Ichnology - Trace Fossils as Indicators of Sedimentary Environments - page 24

of the Senckenberg School of researchers, including Richter, H¨ntzschel,
Sch¨fer, Seilacher, and Reineck ( Pollard, 2007 ).
2. Seilacher's visit in 1962 and subsequent publication of his work in English.
During the 1960s, Roland Goldring, George Farrow, Peter Crimes, James
Harper, Richard Bromley, and J. I. Chisholm gave a new impulse to ichnol-
ogy, applying trace fossils to sedimentology, facies analysis, stratigraphical
correlation, study of hardgrounds, and core analysis (Supplementary
Material: http://booksite.elsevier.com/9780444538130 ).
3. The First International Trace Fossil Meeting (Liverpool, 1970), which
resulted in the volume Trace Fossils ( Crimes and Harper, 1970 ), provided
a great stimulus to British ichnologists.
The seminal publications of Adolf Seilacher in Germany and Jacques Lessertis-
seur in France during the 1950s did not have as immediate an impact in North
America as they did in Europe, though Ager, Goldring, Simpson, and others were
inspired by it in England. When the new ideas were presented in English, geol-
ogists in North America began to pay attention. It was Seilacher's demonstration
that trace fossils could be used as bathymetric indicators, presented at the Annual
Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Cincinnati in 1962, that seized
the attention of American researchers. This was a seminal talk indeed, for Seila-
cher inspired Richard Osgood to begin his innovative dissertation, published in
1970 as Trace Fossils of the Cincinnati Area . This work emphasized the relation-
ship of formal ichnotaxa to behavior as opposed to morphology and still ranks as
one of the most influential ichnological studies ever performed.
Geologists of the Humble Petroleum Company (later Exxon) invited Seila-
cher to return to the United States for a summer to explore trace fossils in critical
outcrops and core. Graduate student James D. Howard accompanied him and was
inspired to conduct his own research in ichnology; and he inspired C. Kent
Chamberlain. Seilacher's report was proprietary, but similar work was published
(e.g., Seilacher, 1964 : fig. 7). To place the significance of the bathymetric use of
trace fossils in context, one must recall that until the work of Kuenen and Bouma,
flysch was thought by many geologists to be of intertidal origin. Seilacher's
research, along with that of micropaleontologists, sedimentologists, and structural
geologists, allowed the discovery of vast resources of petroleum.
9.3 The Golden Age of North American Ichnology
The 1970s were a golden age for ichnology, and Robert W. Frey stands out as the
most important ichnologist in North America, for he inspired a generation of
researchers ( Pemberton, 1992 ). Frey ascribed his initial inspiration in trace fossils
to reading Derek Ager's Principles of Paleoecology ( Rindsberg, 1999 ). Frey
began his research in the Cretaceous chalk of the Western Interior Basin. Realiz-
ing that he needed experience with modern processes, he took a course in 1965 at
the marine station at Beaufort, North Carolina, where he heard of James Howard