Although this article was ostensibly about coprolites and ichnolithology, Edward Hitchcock used it to further defend his case in his priority dispute with James Deane in Volume 47 of the American Journal of Science in 1844. This article ran on pages 292-322, but the dispute proper was laid out in three successive articles on pages 381-401. Hitchcock studiously avoided mentioning Deane, building his case that many other men had seen the fossil footmarks before Deane had. The frustrated Deane fulminated that he had never thought himself the first merely to see the tracks, but the first to theorize about their origins in writing.