The footprints were discovered at a site called Mleisa 1 in the United Arab Emirates. The find was reported in a new study in the journal Royal Society Biology Letters.
Co-author Brian Kraatz told Discovery News that the trackway "shows the oldest evidence of complex social behavior within elephants."
"It's an amazing locality," added Kraatz, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy at the Western University of Health Sciences.
"Basically, this is fossilized behavior," Faysal Bibi, lead author and a researcher at the Institut International de Paléoprimatologie and the Museum für Naturkunde, was quoted as saying in a press release. "This is an absolutely unique site, a really rare opportunity in the fossil record that lets you see animal behavior in a way you couldn't otherwise do with bones or teeth."
Bibi, Kraatz and their colleagues can tell that the prehistoric elephant herd consisted of at least 13 individuals. They walked through mud and left tracks that hardened, were buried and then re-exposed by erosion. Analysis of trackway stride lengths reveals the herd contained a diversity of sizes, from adults to a young calf.
Among living elephants, adult females lead the herds while males disperse at sexual maturity and come back only to mate. This same type of behavior is also suggested at the Mleisa 1 site.
"The Mleisa 1 fossil trackways are the most extensive ever recorded for mammals," said William Sanders, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study. "Bibi et al.'s analysis is an exemplary and comprehensive example of what can be garnered from ancient footprints."
Read more at Discovery News
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