The Collaborative International Dictionary
Trackway \Track"way`\, n. Any of two or more narrow paths, of steel, smooth stone, or the like, laid in a public roadway otherwise formed of an inferior pavement, as cobblestones, to provide an easy way for wheels.
Wiktionary
n. 1 A set of footprints left in soft ground by a human or animal, especially if fossilized. 2 Any of two or more narrow paths, of steel, smooth stone, or similar, laid in a public roadway otherwise formed of an inferior pavement, such as cobblestones, to provide an easy way for wheeled vehicles.
Wikipedia
A trackway is an ancient route of travel for people or animals. In biology, a trackway can be a set of impressions in the soft earth, usually a set of footprints, left by an animal. A fossil trackway is the fossilized imprint of a trackway. Trackways have been found all over the world. They are especially valuable for determining some characteristics of life-forms, such as behavior. Thus some trackways for hominids in Africa showed that they lived together and were not solitary. The study of trackways is an aspect of ichnology, the study of marks left by living organisms. Since identifying the makers of trackways has not ordinarily proved possible, trackway-makers are given the conventional genus name Ichniotherium, "marking creature".
A possible first connection of a trackway with the vertebrate that left it was published by Drs. Sebastian Voigt and David Berman and Amy Henrici in the 12 September 2007 issue of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The paleontologists who made the connection were aided by unusually detailed trackways left in fine-grained Lower Permian mud of the Tambach Formation in central Germany, together with exceptionally complete fossilised skeletons in the same 290-million-year-old strata. They matched the two most common trackways with the two most common fossils, two reptile-like herbivores known as Diadectes absitus (with the trackway pseudonym Ichniotherium cottae) and Orobates pabsti (with the trackway pseudonym of Orobates pabsti).
Usage examples of "trackway".
Safe on the other side, a blast of horn soon brought Hasting and our steeds to the trackway which leads from the river to the forest paths.
So, telling Hasting to make for the church green at Eldersfield by the horse trackway, we at once took the footpaths by Chaseley in the same direction.
I was horrified to find that Calverley had been seized by these miscreant outlaws, as he was riding along to our Manor, across the Swineyard pass, by an obscure forest trackway.
Instead of individual switched sidings, the architect who laid out the tramway on realside used these two fifty-meter tails of trackway to store empties.
Brutus along a raised and well-graded trackway that wound through the wide mudflats and marshes abutting the river.
The feet of the foemen struck the trackways, and our hidden glen was invaded.
The patches of soft mud among the tendrils are covered with looping, crazily intersecting animal trackways, each consisting of a subcircular double row of small crescent-shaped indentations that come out of the water, describe a loop, and return to the water.
A few shadowy, spectral figures appeared from the various side trackways, paying the group little heed.
Woetjans and her riggers had straightened the trackways as best they could with jacks and sledge hammers, but they hadn't even tried to do more than a quick and dirty job.
His self-confidence was rewarded within the first half mile when they came out upon one of the link trackways, its beaten surface testifying to constant use.
Paleontology was essentially detective work, searching for clues in the fossil bones and the trackways of the long-vanished giants.