Birmingham Paleontological Society

This month BPS members took a long weekend, from June 15-17, driving to several quarries near Wilmington, North Carolina where Ashley had made arrangements to collect. There were numerous shells found at these sites, many in almost perfect condition. If one didn't know better, they could be mistaken for recent material.

(Photos courtesy Vicki Lais)

On June 9-10, BPS members spent the weekend in Loundes County, Alabama, where they found Cretaceous fossils. Numerous fossilized crabs and shark teeth were collected on this field trip. The crab nodules and exogyra below are from a resident near the site, who helped us gain permission to collect on the property.

BPS took several trips to an abandoned strip mine, where numerous nodules containing fern spore pods were found.  This was on a trip with a visiting paleontologist.

Track Meet III and the concurrent PlantFest was held on May 12, at the Anniston Museum of Natural History.  We spent the day documenting especially fine, well-preserved, interesting plant fossil specimens and previously unphotographed tracks collected at the Union Chapel Mine.  We were fortunate enough to have 2 visiting paleobotanists at this Meet.  Thanks to all of the organizers and parti

BPS members visited two late Cretaceous sites in Montgomery County, Alabama, where we collected primarily shark teeth and echinoids.  A pycnodont tooth (rare in Alabama) was found by Vicki Lais. 

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.