The code and software to identify putative trace makers of horizontal trace fossils: Palaeontology

These are the code ("CurveGithub.m") and the free software ("Curvesoftware.exe") that help you identify putative trace makers of horizontal trace fossils with frequency spectrum and autocorrelation function. You can also use it to study the frequency and size of self-repeating patterns in a horizontal trace. You can use the metrics to quantify ichnotaxonomy as well. An example of the coordinates of a horizontal trace is "A curve-Github.txt", which is output from Getdata Graph Digitizer, with the first describing sentence in the output file removed, leaving cooridnates only. Zero-value is not allowed in the coordinates. The paper is published in Palaeontology, with doi: 10.1111/pala.12686, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pala.12686 

IMPORTANT NOTICE !!!!!

MATLAB code Line 41:

"plot(ss,YY(M:M+99)/max(YY(M:M+99)),'r-'); " means plotting the autocorrelation over sampling steps;

If you would like to plot the autocorrelation over normalized length (as in both the manuscript and the free software), it should be

"plot(ss/Fs,YY(M:M+99)/max(YY(M:M+99)),'r-'); "

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The free software has been updated to Version 6, incorporating several new features and functionalities:

https://zenodo.org/records/20399534, which is appended to the bandwidth paper published in Palaeo3 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2026.113973).