Victoria Gill is a science correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Dr Alison Burns points to a perfectly preserved human footprint on Formby Beach.
Hundreds of ancient footprints have been found here.
There is a large collection of prehistoric animal tracks on the north-west England coast.
The oldest prints were formed much earlier than thought.
The oldest of the prints are from 1000 years ago.
The story of a coastal environment that changed over thousands of years as sea levels rose is told in these findings.
The shape and size of the footprint suggest that it was a young man. This foot had a big toe on its small toe.
Dr Burns says it's a tailor's foot. The little toe was rubbed on the ground when they sat down.
The mud was baked in the sun and buried for thousands of years.
Prof Jamie Woodward said that the oldest ones date to a time when the coastline was 30 km away and the tidal muds were teeming with animals.
They verified the ages of the tracks by using carbon-dating seeds from the cores of the ancient mud.
A period of dramatic change can be seen in the number of footprint beds. Prof Woodward says that there was a lot of animals up to 6,000 years ago. After about 5,500 years ago, we saw a lot of human footprints, but not much else.
The landscape is changing with sea-level rise and the arrival of agriculture puts a lot more pressure on the environment.
As the sea erodes away the ancient mud, it can reveal new footprints. The earlier they were formed the deeper they were.
Scientists have been able to find and study the tracks left on the UK's coastline by people who walked thousands of years ago.
In May of last year, a storm exposed some footprints that were 900,000-year-old. Trackways left by the largest dinosaurs ever to walk the Earth were discovered by Edinburgh University researchers.
The Formby footprints are vulnerable.
Within weeks of being exposed they can be washed away. Some of them are going to be reburied and preserved for a long time.
Formby's coast is rapidly changing, with its famous dunes rolling inland by 4m every year. The remnants of the old visitor's car park can be seen at one location on the beach.
There is no bones or fossils in the footprint record that we can look at to track a major change.
Prof Woodward says that the picture could be painted for the future of the coastal biodiversity.
The coastal environment is home to many of the hotspots. There are lessons we can learn about how habitats can become degraded and disconnected as a result of rapid sea-level rise.
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