You can download Atlas of Trace Fossils in Well Core ebook here.
- Title: Atlas of Trace Fossils in Well Core Appearance, Taxonomy and Interpretation
- Author: Dirk Knaust
- Publisher: Springer
- Pages: 219
It is not easy to tell which of the graduate students will become masters in their field. When I met Dirk Knaust in 1997 at the Fourth International Ichnofabric Workshop on San Salvador, he was just another graduate student, obviously very intelligent, but there were others with longer strings of publications. But as the years progressed, Dirk’s work in ichnology accelerated, and it became clear that he is a perfectionist whose body of work is ripening at last. Building on his doctoral study of the Muschelkalk, he expanded his range to the North Sea and many other regions, and as we all know, the best ichnologist is the one who has seen the most trace fossils.
Dirk’s most important effort in recent years has been, together with Richard G. Bromley, to organize and edit Trace Fossils as Indicators of Sedimentary Environments, a thick volume that brings ichnology to sedimentologists and other geologists—and sedimentology back to ichnologists (Knaust and Bromley 2012). He carried an advance copy of the book to Ichnia 2012, where it was a big hit among ichnologists on the long drives between field trip stops on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland. The copy passed slowly from hand to hand to the rear of the bus and back to the front again. I think he must have sold to forty people on the bus within a few hours.
Currently, Dirk is at work with me on leading a revision of the trace-fossil volume of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. As he pointed out in a keynote address at Ichnia 2016, the number of named invertebrate ichnogenera has more than doubled since Walter Häntzschel’s last revision in 1975. After Bertling et al. (2006) reached a consensus on which criteria were best for differentiating ichnotaxa, Dirk applied these ichnotaxobases systematically to the entire corpus of invertebrate trace fossils, using them to define categories within a key (Knaust 2012)—an effort that required consulting the diagnoses and major revisions of every ichnogenus.