The gypsum dune field itself has attracted research attention because of its unusual composition and the sedimentary processes that produced it.

Paleontological surveys documented Pleistocene megafauna remains — mammoth, ground sloth, camel, horse — in the basin sediments, providing evidence of the rich Ice Age fauna that had lived there before the extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene.

What was not recognized, or not prioritized, for much of this period of investigation was the potential of the exposed lakebed surfaces to preserve human trackways.

This is partly a matter of disciplinary boundaries — geologists studying gypsum formation and glacial lake hydrology are not necessarily looking for human footprints, while archaeologists focused on the Clovis horizon and later cultural periods were not expecting to find evidence of human presence in Last Glacial Maximum sediments.

The intellectual framework determined, to a significant degree, what could be seen.

David Bustos’s recognition of the trackways as potentially significant represented a crossing of that disciplinary boundary — someone at the intersection of resource management, paleontology, and archaeology, working in a specific landscape with enough intimate knowledge of it to notice something that did not fit the expected pattern.