Title: Message
Dear
All,
I have a lot of good
news to report this time. The Union Chapel
tracksite has been preserved. A television show about the site has been
produced. The book has been published. And there's more to come. I hasten
to add that all this is the hard work of more than a hundred different
people. I'm just one of them.
The much anticipated
book on the Union Chapel tracksite, "Pennsylvanian Footprints in the Black
Warrior Basin of Alabama", edited by Ronald J. Buta, Andrew K. Rindsberg, and
David C. Kopaska-Merkel, has been published and made available in hardcopy and
online. The book is 390 pages long and about 300 specimens are illlustrated,
including tetrapod trackways, swimming traces (Undichna), invertebrate trackways
and burrows, plants, and even a few insects. The stratigraphic and social
contexts of the site are also discussed. Of particular interest
are early examples of group behavior in fishes and amphibians.
The hardcopy version
(an edition of ~500 copies) can be ordered from the Alabama Paleontological
Society, a nonprofit organization. For information, see:
and click on the
book title.
PDF versions of the
articles are available for downloading at this website through the courtesy of
Ron Buta:
The PDFs are at
lower resolution than the hardcopy, but they are free.
Enjoy!
The photographic
database of ~2400 images can be viewed at:
Ron Buta is working
to publish his database in DVD format.
The educational
series "Discovering Alabama" produced a television show on Union Chapel.
Videotapes of "Tracks Across Time" are available from Discovering
Alabama, though the show is so new that it has not been posted on their website
yet:
Collections are
currently in a state of flux but some are available for study and others will be
sorted out soon. Specimens are held in several museums including the Alabama
Museum of Natural History (Tuscaloosa, Alabama), Anniston Museum of Natural
History (Anniston, Alabama), McWane Center (Birmingham, Alabama), Florida Museum
of Natural History (plants; Gainesville, Florida), and New Mexico Museum of
Natural History and Science (Albuquerque, New Mexico), as well as in private
collections. Specimens held in trust by the Geological Survey of Alabama are
being cataloged and transferred to the Alabama Museum of Natural History and the
McWane Center this summer. The McWane Center in downtown Birmingham will
probably be the main repository for future collections and donations.
The Union Chapel
tracksite, which was discovered in December 1999, has been purchased by the
state and is now administered by the Alabama Department of Conservation and
Natural Resources as the Steven C. Minkin Paleozoic Footprint Site. The site is
currently open by appointment with the Alabama Paleontological Society, which
holds occasional field trips during which limited collecting is possible. See
http://www.alabamapaleo.org/ for
information.
New research and new researchers are welcome. This book
is not the last word on the taxonomy and behavior of Carboniferous
tetrapods, which turns out to be a difficult subject -- three sets of
researchers each offer a different classification of the trackways that now can
be tested by fresh finds and methods. And Union Chapel is not the only tracksite
in eastern North America! But all in all, it's a fair
beginning.
All the best,
Andy
Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of
Alabama
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