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Mine Reclamation May Bury Ancient Fossil Footprints in Walker County, Ala.

Posted on: Tuesday, 9 September 2003, 06:00 CDT

Sep. 9--JASPER, Ala.--More than 300 million years ago, nature froze time in its tracks here --- leaving a legacy of fossil footprints that paleontologists say is now one of the richest records of coal age life in the world.

In the last three years, thin sheets of gray shale unearthed at the Union Chapel Coal Mine in Walker County have yielded thousands of perfectly preserved footprints of creatures that are older than the dinosaurs.

Had it not been for the coal mine, the trove of prehistoric amphibian and reptile prints --- a site scientists say qualifies as "one of the most important fossil trackway sites in the world" --- might never have been unearthed.

Had it not been for a small group of amateur Alabama paleontologists, the tracks might have been lost as abruptly as they were found. Although safe for the moment, the site remains endangered by the red tape of modern mining reclamation policies.

"Losing it would be a tragedy," said Prescott Atkinson, a Birmingham pediatrician who has led the Alabama Paleontological Society's effort to rescue thousands of exposed fossils and protect the site. "There aren't any other places where so many tracks from this time have been found in such good condition."

"Some of the more abundant trace fossils from this site have never been previously documented," he said. "The tracks, together with plant fossils, provide an unprecedented glimpse of an ancient Carboniferous swamp."

In three years, volunteers have collected more than 1,700 sets of prehistoric tracks, but Atkinson says the group has barely scratched the surface. "We could be hauling fossils out of here for 20 years," he said.

Eons ago, the part of Alabama known as the Black Warrior Basin was somewhere south of the equator, still part of Pangea, the landmass that eventually split into North America and the other continents.

In those days, the Union Chapel mine was a vast estuarine mud flat --- home to strange, now extinct creatures that preceded the dinosaurs by as much in geologic time as the dinosaurs preceded today's humans.

The creatures that skittered across the mud flats 310 million years ago were among the earliest ancestors of present-day salamanders, lizards and horseshoe crabs. As periodic tides covered the tracks with fine silt, layer upon layer of tracks were sealed in ancient mud. Today, as brittle shale, they can be pried apart like the pages in a book.

To the New Acton Coal Co., the shale was merely an obstacle to be removed to reach the Mary Lee coal seam, a layer of high quality, low sulfur coal beneath the region's rolling hills.

Three years ago, with reclamation of the mine already under way, a high school teacher leading a field trip discovered that the mine spoils were replete with riches of a different kind. Paleontologists have been racing against time to recover them ever since.

"We were totally oblivious to what was there," said Billy Orick, general manager of the coal mining company. Mining on the site ceased in 1999, but reclamation now looms as an even greater threat to the fossil tracks.

Under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, the coal company must restore the landscape to something resembling its original contours. Complying with the law, however, will require reburial of fossil-rich shale that was, before the mine opened, 100 feet below the surface.

The state of Alabama wants the land reclaimed. An adjoining property owner, hoping to expand his pasture land, wants it reclaimed. Paleontologists want it left alone.

For now, the coal company, which has been aiding the paleontologists' collecting efforts, is biding its time, waiting for a decision by the state mining commission that could come in the next few months. To provide more time for collecting, the company has appealed the state-ordered reclamation, but the appeals process is due to run out in October.

"Personally, I'd like to see the site preserved," Orick said. "But an order is an order. It's going to take somebody pretty high up to stop it."

U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.) has introduced legislation that would allow the coal company to donate the land to the Department of the Interior to exempt it from reclamation requirements. Interior Department officials have privately expressed support for preserving the site as a fossil reserve, but are reluctant to proceed while the state deliberates.

As the issue simmers, leading paleontologists --- specialists in a sub-specialty of the science called ichnology, the study of fossil tracks, trails and burrows --- have flocked to the site and reaffirmed its importance.

"The sheer quantity and exquisite preservation of this site makes this one of the best fossil trackways from the Pennsylvanian Period in the world," said Anthony Martin, an Emory University ichnologist.

"The material is world class in the sense that one would be hard-pressed to find a better site for abundance and quality of preservation," said Jerry MacDonald, head of a trackways project backed by the Smithsonian Institution, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and other institutions.

"This piece of our natural heritage will be lost forever if the Alabama Surface Mining Commission is allowed to proceed with their reclamation," said Hans-Dieter Sues, of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, and president of the 2,000-member Society for Vertebrate Paleontology.

Although non-scientists intuitively see the value of fossil bones and shells for their ability to reveal the anatomy of prehistoric creatures, the full value of tracks is not so easily appreciated.

Tracks provide a window on the environment in which ancient creatures lived, a record of how they lived and moved --- walking, turning, running, jumping and feeding. Because tracks are more ephemeral than bones, well-preserved footprints are a rare treasure. Footprints that predate the age of dinosaurs by 80 million years are even rarer.

In the three years since amateur paleontologists started working at the Alabama site, they have recovered an extensive variety of tracks --- ranging from some that are only a few millimeters across to tracks from an alligator-sized amphibian that the workers have nicknamed "frogzilla."

"What we've found in the spoil piles is just amazing," said amateur paleontologist Bruce Relihan, a curator at the Birmingham Zoo, gesturing toward a 100-foot vertical wall left where the mining stopped. "But the really neat stuff is still inside that mountain there, totally undisturbed."

The spectacular nature of the site persuaded the volunteers that they needed to do something more than merely collect the fossil treasures.

"A lot of amateur fossil hunters might take what they found and put it on their mantel at home or sell it on eBay to make a buck," explained Atkinson. "This site is so special, we knew we needed to do something different."

Using their own time and resources, the volunteers held several "track meets" during which they cleaned, catalogued and photographed the tracks.

"Then we created a database on the Internet so that we could share the information with scientists all over the world," said Ron Buta, an amateur paleontologist and astronomer at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. "It's something that's never been done by amateur paleontologists before."

Buta says more than 2,000 color images published on the Web site cover more than 95 percent of the tracks collected at the site. He says the effort could serve as a model for future cooperation between amateur and professional paleontologists.

"As amateurs, we obviously want to have fun doing what we do," said Atkinson. "But we also want to share what we find with as many people as possible."

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(c) 2003, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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