At the risk of irritating those who keep discussing the guy in a suit, here's some more pertinent observations about the basics of footprints and casting artifacts:
Below are photos of a track cast (whole specimen and close up of the central portion) I made by pouring hydrostone plaster on top of a recently poured (still damp) plaster cast of roughly BF-proportions. The pseudo-dermals are quite a bit smaller than those seen in the "Onion Mountain" and other prints, and in fact, are just about the correct size to be human or ape dermatoglyphics. But they're dessication ridges,
not dermals. They are clearly visible on the perimeters of the larger, more obvious pour boundaries of the casting material.
The importance of this specimen, in my mind is that it shows that dessication can occur even in a
damp substrate (not-yet-cured plaster), as long as there is enought of a
chemical reaction to draw water out. Gypsum is a great mineral for doing this, as are clays of many types (as Tube and I have both discussed before).
This specimen adds yet one more example of very convincing-looking pseudo-dermals forming completely in absence of real features. The case for any BF print showing real dermals is even weaker now (actually, dead in my opinion), since these pseud-dermals are apparently
a lot more common and
a lot easier to produce than many would have us believe.
Sorry for injecting science into the topic of BF.
Carry on with debating the rubber gloves and clown shoes...
