(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) Hi, I'm Brenda Ladun, and welcome to "Fossil Treasures of Alabama."

Jasper, Alabama, population approximately 14,500.

This is a great small town.

It's where you'll find a lot of Southern hospitality.

It's in towns like this one that are the backbone of America.

And here in Walker County, the backbone of the community was the coal mine.

In fact, just east of town, you'll find an old coal mine where a world, 315 million years old, was discovered by a teacher.

(bright music) (hammer thudding) So in 1999, that teacher from Oneonta split a rock and discovered history.

1999 was my second year at Oneonta High School.

Well, at that time, we had, you know, middle school through high school grades mixed in.

And I was showing my science class a couple of fossils from some coal mines I'd been in.

And I, yeah, I told him, I said, "I really would love to find a coal mine where we can take you guys out and you can find your own fossils instead of just passing one around."

And one of my students raised his hand and, "Okay, what you got, Jesse?"

He said, "Hey, my grandma owns a coal mine."

"Yeah, right, Jesse.

That's, that's, that's funny.

Okay, let's..." "No, really, really she does."

So he was insistent and it turns out Dolores Reed is his grandmother and she owned a couple of coal mines at the time and one of them was this site, Union Chapel Mine.

I ran across a slab that couple of feet long and it just, it was begging to be split.

Split it, open it up.

Now there's a little Calamondin little plant in there, but three Tetrapod trackways running across it.

There's no doubt it's some little four leg creature scampering about in the mud that left these trackways.

And so, you know, woo.

Yeah, I found something that I've been looking for, been searching for in this fantastic moment, you know.

And so I set that aside and found a couple more and showed some of the guys out here that were working at the site at the time and, you know, they probably thought I was a little crazy there.

I take some of these trackways to our paleo meeting, display them.

And you know, all of us paleo nerds, we're just wowing over them, just whoa, just geeking out because these trackways are so amazing.

I mean, you've got this fantastic set of circumstances where a creature, a little four leg creature, kind of like a salamander that we have today walks through the mud and that is recorded for, you know, for deep time.

And so everybody's all excited about this, "When are we going to go?

When are we going to go?"

[Brenda] And that was the beginning of exploration at the site.

-(hammer thudding) -Yeah, it's fracturing.

I told him when I'm looking through a lab like this, I'm really hoping to find another insight.

Exactly.

All right, let's see.

-Yep.

-(hammer thudding) This site was named after the late Steve Minkin for his work in bringing international attention right here to Union Chapel in Walker County, Alabama.

Steve Minkin was a geologist who was involved in our early effort to preserve this site.

And he was a member of our fossil society in Birmingham.

He really was probably the person that first came up with the notion after we'd been coming out here for a season or two and realized how important and how prolific this site was in all these different types of ancient fossils.

He was the one that really came up with the idea that we really ought to move to try to get the site preserved.

And so after the state acquired the site and preserved it from from reclamation in 2004, they named it after him.

It's the Steven C. Minkin Paleozoic Footprint Site.

The site is protected by an Act of Congress, thanks to Congressman Robert Aderholt.

That means it can be preserved for scientific research.

There are fossils that have been found here that have not been seen anywhere in the world.

(hammer thudding) (shutter clicking) It's so easy today to take pictures, but millions of years ago, not so much.

Here's how these imprints are with us today.

They're like snapshots in time.

This site is the incredible variety of fossils and what it can tell us about life 310, 312 million years ago.

You're seeing a moment, recorded of the life of a invertebrate fossil, an insect, even a, you know, a vertebrate fossil.

There were some early amphibians and reptiles.

And the fact that people can come out here and split a rock and open it up and see a trackway inside, right there in your hand, you're holding where this animal walked 312 million years ago.

I mean, that's just super powerful, in my mind.

[Brenda] The Alabama Paleontological Society has the approval of the state to supervise groups interested in fossil hunting.

One group invited here for track meets, as they call them, is from the Fresh Air Family Group.

Adults and children alike experience the thrill of the hunt.

So what they said over there was it was like a piece of a bigger plant that they found part of that big rock they're pulling apart.

And let's, which side?

It's this side.

And they said... I'm going to try and keep it apart.

They said that was one of the like pods that would like float around to plant more of the tree.

It's just really interesting.

I like learning about how things from the past lived and how it might have differed from our world today.

I couldn't believe it.

I was walking along after having been splitting open my rocks and everything.

And check this one out.

It was just staring at me as I was walking along.

So I'm so, I feel so, so happy and blessed to have found a fern.

(laughs) It's amazing.

And these I think are 300 million years old, which to me, I always thought something that old would be so, so hard.

But to be able to come out here and split the shale and find new things really, is really fun.

I think this site is basically considered one of the top three Paleozoic Footprint Sites in the world.

This site's been looked at continuously for 25 years or more.

And there's huge collections in the state's museums and other museums from this site.

And yet, as recently as the last couple years, we have found new species that potentially are new to science, period.

From the wonder of the discovery at the site for the curious adults and children alike.

The scientific community around the world has already appreciated the unique richness of the discovery in Walker County, Alabama.

Some from other countries have come here to see for themselves the stories the fossils tell.

Some specimens from this site are housed at the Smithsonian Institution Museums in Washington, DC and here at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham.

So all of this is the Union Chapel Minkin site.

-It sure is.

-Amazing.

We, actually, here at McWane Science Center, we house the largest collection of Union Chapel Mine specimens.

For example, we have over 14,000 specimens that look like this.

This is a really great example to show the diversity of different types of fossils you can get at the site.

What's one of the first things that you see on the surface here?

[Brenda] I see claw marks.

-Is that right?

-Exactly.

Gigantic footprints here.

So I'm going to put my hand next to it.

You can see they're almost hand-sized footprints.

This is from a species called a Tenontosaurus.

So this is one of the most interesting time periods in evolutionary history where for the first time, things are able to start living on land.

So this is actually a land animal.

It's the largest land animal living at the time.

What does it look like?

[Jun] Think of like a wolf-sized salamander.

So gigantic, gigantic salamander with hand-sized tracts.

[Brenda] Okay, what's this here?

So here we have, this is very interesting where we have plants preserved on here.

Here's a big stem.

And then also over here, if you look very, very faint here.

-Mm-hmm.

-We have invertebrate tract.

This is from the millipede running across.

So here we have vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants all in the same slab.

Now you notice when you think of footprints, like your footprints on the beach, they're depressions, correct?

Well, run your finger over this.

They're raised.

-Oh, yeah.

-So what's interesting about the Minkin site is that these are layers of shale that we can peel back and see the different layers of time.

So for each set of tracks that we find or fossils that we find, we get impressions and counter impressions.

We get the actual depressed footprint, but then we get the mud that filled them.

So this is the counter impressions.

So they're actually raised up.

This is the mud that filled that footprint.

So it's a carbon copy (chuckles) -of all the living things -That is so neat.

that were running across the surface.

So why isn't the most important?

So from this particular time period, Union Chapel Mine is so significant, A, from the preservation.

We get these tiny, tiny little bug tracks where we can see their individual footprints to the big large things and the resolution on all the toes.

The sheer number that we get.

We have 14,000 specimens here in the McWane collection and there's tens of thousands of more in other museum collections and hundreds of thousands of more that we're still waiting to collect of significant things.

But the major thing is the diversity.

Here we have an entire terrestrial ecosystem.

So everything living at that time, we're getting their fossil evidence.

So whether it's their footprints or the plants, the bug traces, we get insect wings, we get fish fin traces.

If it was living, we're getting it preserved in these pieces of shale.

[Brenda] What is that?

These are fossil bark impressions.

So during this time period, we get these 200 to 300-foot trees all over the Birmingham area where this is what their bark looked like.

They call them scale trees because this looks like scales.

And so if you look at this, this is the actual bark impressions, so not the actual bark.

This is just a shape it made when it fell into the mud.

[Brenda] Was it related to some trees that we know today?

Not so much.

So these are called lycopod trees, so they're an extinct type of tree.

The closest thing would be, they were hollow on the inside.

They grew kind of like bamboo.

That would kind of be the closest thing to these.

[Brenda] Unlike most fossils which show how an animal died, this site depicts how animals and plants lived 315 million years ago.

Astronomer and former University of Alabama professor Ron Buta was an integral part of the discovery of life in the fossil find.

He and David Kopaska-Merkel documented his finds in his book, "Footprints in Stone."

Bones predict death, but life, but the tracks are called trace fossils and they're about life.

The animals were alive and they left their footprints in some wet mud, probably along an ancient shoreline.

And you can even map out where the shoreline would've been.

I got more interested in this as time went on.

Now, why would an astronomer write a book on such a subject?

(chuckles) Because it was interesting, because we were talking about ancient time.

Things that happened hundreds of millions of years ago to see a trail, footprints left behind by an ancient animal.

It's an interesting experience to see that.

And also because these are trace fossils, they always come in pairs.

You have an impression and a counter impression.

And if you split a rock with tracks inside the layers, you're the first person to ever see them.

And that's also a interesting experience.

I stumbled on another surface mine near Carbon Hill and that Carbon Hill surface mine and so for 14 years I collected the fossils in that area.

And there were 5,200 specimens.

[Brenda] Ron Buta's finds from two sites in Walker County, Alabama are also housed at the McWane Science Center.

Jun Ebersole explains how Alabama is one of the most fossil rich states in the nation.

This is the geologic map of Alabama where this essentially shows the geological layers that we have laying on the surface.

So you don't have to dig deep to see these particular rock layers.

These are the layers of rocks or sediments that if you go outside, you see laying on the surface.

For example, if you drive up and down I-65, the big rock walls you see on the side of the highway, or if you go behind the galleria at Patton Creek, you'll see those rock walls.

That's what this is showing where each color represents a different rock formation, a different type of rock or sediment from the geological past.

Those laid down a different time period.

[Brenda] What are the different time periods we're seeing here?

So Alabama has the most diverse geological record in North America, meaning we have just about every time period imaginable laying on the surface.

So all the rock layers you see up here are from before the time of the dinosaurs, right?

It's from an era called the Paleozoic.

When you get down to our black belt region, this is Mesozoic.

These are our dinosaur age rocks and sediments here.

If you're driving down I-65 and you get to Priester's Pecans.

That marks the extinction of the dinosaurs.

If you go south, this is every single time period after the dinosaurs from an era called the Cenozoic.

So just going down I-65, you're driving through rocks and sediments from before the dinosaurs, during the dinosaurs, and after the dinosaurs in order.

Fascinating.

Well, we're talking about the Union Chapel Minkin site.

Show me that on this map.

Yeah, so the Minkin site is right around over here in Walker County.

So just outside of Birmingham.

And so if you notice that this whole area here is this light blue color.

So here all the way up to the northern parts of the state is from a time period called the Carboniferous, also known by some people as the coal age.

This is where we get our coal deposits.

So it's interesting about Alabama and North America in general from this time period is that, you know, these rocks in our particular area here with our coal fields are about 315 million years old.

When you get to the ones in the north, they get up as old as 350 million years old.

In other parts of the world, the carboniferous is all shallow marine, right?

These areas were underwater.

So that you find sharks' teeth, you find shells and those types of things.

In North America, we get the carboniferous divided into two sub-periods.

And so we get what's called the Mississippian period, which is those shallow ocean.

That our limestones up here in the northern part of the state.

These sort of darker colors, the northern part of this map.

It's where we have all our caves in Alabama and such cutting through these ancient limestones.

As you start driving down I-65, you'll start seeing those big rock walls up there, Priceville and near Lake (indistinct) and such.

All that dates to that, what's called the Mississippian sub-period.

You come south where the mountains start to flatten out, that's when you get into our coal fields, what used to be called the Black Warrior Basin, coal swamps.

This is where we're getting our coal deposits from.

It's from a sub-period called the Pennsylvania named for same rock layers that you get all the way up in Pennsylvania.

And so this is the time period that the Minkin site rests in.

And so it's a big layer of rock called the Pottsville.

So the Pottsville formation, sometimes it's sandstones, but mostly it's shale.

And these shales, you can peel them apart, just kind of layers in the earth and you can find all sorts of fossils.

It's one of the primary things that makes the Minkin site so unique.

But this site was really special.

Most coal mines that we go to were really collecting plant fossils.

They're abundant, just gorgeous fossils from the Carboniferous era about 310 million years ago or so.

But this site happened to have a particular environment that preserved tracts and it's the best by far.

And it's been called the most prolific carboniferous tract site in the world, actually right here in Walker County.

All kinds of animals, four-footed animals, and all kinds of insects and other kinds of invertebrate tracts have been found here.

So this is from a part of the ancient rocks that's called the carboniferous.

And it's the time period when there were many coal seams being laid down.

And so it's the time period the Pennsylvanian, to be specific, it's the time period when many of the coal deposits were laid down here and across the country because there were these forests that had grown up and then would be buried by rising sea levels, which the sea levels during that time rose and fell over hundreds of thousands of years many times and would drown, periodically drown these coastal forests.

And what was left there when they were covered with mud from the continuing deposits of sediments on top, they were compressed into the material that we call coal that is so valuable as a fuel source.

The abundance of plant material here, of all different kinds of species of plants that were around at that time and the incredible diversity of tracts, it allows us to kind of begin reconstructing the ecosystem that was here in a way that's really not possible without these types of trace fossils and plant fossils because these types of deposits never or almost never preserve bone or teeth.

So we don't have any skeletons from the animals.

There's no remnant of the animals that's left behind if you can't find trace fossils, which are the tracks, the remnants of their activity, actual little animals crawling across a mudflat and leaving their tracks and traces behind.

Activity.

It's an animal in action.

That's kind of what's so exciting about it.

You find a skeleton, that's what you've got.

You've got the bones.

You can't really tell how it moved or what it did without sort of conjecture.

But when you see the tracks, you can actually reconstruct its activities much, much better.

Sometimes see predation.

You can see one animal, two tracks converge, one set of tracks leaves.

Yeah, things like that.

So it's pretty cool.

It adds to our knowledge of the development of life over the ages.

I mean, that's part of what it can tell us.

We've made discoveries here of new species, particularly in invertebrate fossils that haven't been found anywhere else.

And new species, almost any invertebrate body fossil that we find here, we found insects as well as scorpion and spiders.

Those are all new to science.

That's how rare these fossils are in these sediments.

So it adds to knowledge.

But from our standpoint, it's just delightful.

It's fun to get out and find something that no one else has seen before.

Open a rock and see a fossil there that hasn't seen the light of day for hundreds of millions of years.

It's just a thrill that never gets old.

One of the finds that's come out of here in addition to, we found a little scorpion that looks a fossil that looks amazingly like the little scorpions you can find under rocks here occasionally still running around today.

It's amazing, how well that body shape has been preserved over the ages.

So Brenda, not everything from the Union Chapel Mine is small.

This is perhaps the largest fossil ever we recover from the site.

If you take a close look over here, [Brenda] Wow.

Do you see these impressions?

[Brenda] Mm-hmm.

These were formed by what's called a Eurypterid, commonly known as a sea scorpion.

This seems to be one of the largest sea scorpion tracks ever found.

Right now, there's scientists in New Mexico who are describing this as a new species, a new species of track, what we call a new ichnospecies.

[Brenda] And explain icno.

Icno means we don't get the actual organism that produced the track.

We eat only the footprints themselves.

About three or four years ago, a couple of our members, a father and son were working on a big boulder here and uncovered a trackway of an animal we had no idea.

We'd been actually finding little pieces of the tracks of this and we weren't sure what it was, but once they uncovered this trackway, it became evident that it was what's called a sea scorpion or a eurypterid, which is a giant invertebrate.

Would've been a top predator in the area.

Coming up the waterways from the ocean where these sediments were moving from the mountains in the distance.

The Appalachians, at that time, they think could have been as high as the Himalayas.

Enormously elevated.

Now mostly eroded down, but this animal was moving into these probably brackish waterways and it's actually moving up.

We can see it's actually moving up on the bank where it's probably preying on small vertebrates and invertebrates and everything you can just imagine, everything scattering when this animal came up.

It was probably six or eight feet long.

Huge scorpion-like marine animal.

This site can be a valuable resource for geoscience education for students of all ages as well as just for the fun of collecting.

Sometimes sites like the Minkin Fossil site can create a debate between faith and science, but adjacent landowner, Mr.

Southard says, "They both come together."

(gentle music) (paper rustling) The Bible says in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

It says, "And the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep."

Well, the fossils was made by God.

They was made for the purpose of God in due time with God.

Anything that was ever made was made by Him without question.

Because in the beginning, He had no materials.

He made it.

He created it.

He didn't just make it.

He created it from nothing by the spoken word.

The fossils are educational.

Always remember that as von Braun once said, "True science and the word of God goes hand in hand."

When we find true science in the fossil fields, it corresponds with God's word.

There's no conflict in God's word or His creation.

There's no mistakes in God's creation.

He did it for a time and a season and for a purpose.

[Prescott] But we do find a lot of little activity tracks (Prescott faintly speaking) Oh yeah, look at that.

That's beautiful.

Yeah, look, that's a beautiful leaf.

Yeah.

-It's near the stem.

-Probably, the stem that's running out this way, do you think?

[Jim] No, maybe, not sure, yeah.

[Prescott] Yeah.

[Jim] It almost looks like it's a continuation.

It's broken right there, but same leaf.

That's really nice.

Yeah, I love the impression on the opposite rock too, where it came off.

-[Prescott] Yeah.

-(gentle music) No matter how old you get, never let your curiosity die.

From a science teacher's curiosity that discovered this site to international attention to the Minkin Fossil Site right here in Alabama, you never know what you might discover beneath your feet.

I'm Brenda Ladun.

Keep exploring.

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