Birmingham Paleontological Society

ANCIENT ALABAMA ANIMAL TRACKS INSPIRE AMATEUR FOSSIL COLLECTORS

TO DOCUMENT FINDS

"The handprints, which include long, curving toes with easily-distinguished pads on the tips, are nearly as big as my own," exclaimed Dr. Jim Lacefield of Tuscumbia. "This was a huge beast. Although I had read that some amphibians reached rather large size in the Pennsylvanian, in all my collecting in Coal Age rocks in Alabama I have never seen any that were anywhere nearly this large," he said.

BPS members collected in Cherokee County, Alabama. This site is the Conasauga Formation of the Cambrian, and numerous trilobites were found.

NOTE: We lost server access due to the illness of the administrator of our host server. It was over a year before he was back at work, and no field trip reports were created during that time period. These brief memos are simply place-holders for the trip. Periodically, old photos do turn up and get scanned in.

University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, Alabama

The Union Chapel Mine is now known to be one of the best Lower Pennsylvanian track sites in North America. During December, the mine was in the process of reclamation, and the BPS returned one more time as a group to search for trackways among turned-over spoil piles in one of the most productive areas of the site. About 15 BPS members and several newcomers attended the field trip on a pleasant mid-December day.

The publication of Jim Lacefield's new book, "Lost Worlds in Alabama Rocks: A Guide to the State's Ancient Life and Landscapes" led the BPS to this new site for a field trip this month. In previous BPS field trip reports, I have noted the abundant plant fossils that we have found at various surface mines in Walker and Jefferson Counties. These sites include plants from the Coal Age in Alabama, dating back to about 310 million years. It was interesting, therefore, to learn from Jim's book that it was possible to find plant fossils in Alabama from a much later period, the Cretaceous period.

The New River Mine is a surface mine which was spotted by Jim Lacefield in early February this year, and shortly thereafter Jim and I scouted the site out. As expected, the site included plant fossils, but one difference compared to other sites that Jim noticed was an abundance of fossils of Artisia, the pith of the gymnospermous tree known as Cordaites. The only other sites where I have seen Artisia fossils are the Kimberly surface mine (see

Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Every year, the BPS visits a lake in Franklin County, Alabama when the lake level is down from normal, exposing rocks from the Bangor Limestone dating back to the late Mississipian Period of geological history (about 320 million years). About 25 BPS members and guests attended the field trip, which took place on a beautiful, sunny, and pleasantly warm day.