New Books by Fossil Club Members

Dallas Paleontological Society members Mark McKinzie and John McLeod’s book Color Guide to Pennsylvanian Fossils of North Texas is now available on amazon.com. The book identifies Pennsylvanian-age plant, invertebrate, vertebrate, and trace fossils of north Texas. There are over 200 high resolution color illustrations with complete descriptions and collecting localities. Some of the specimens are reported and illustrated for the first time.

Alabama Paleontological Society members Ron Buta and David Kopaska-Merkel recently published Footprints in Stone: Fossil Traces of Coal-Age Tetrapods (forward by Dana Ehret). The authors recount the accidental discovery of the Steven C. Minkin Paleozoic Footprint Site (Union Chapel Mine) by a high school science teacher. More than 300 million years ago, the site was a swampy tropical forest next to a tidal flat. Today, the site’s coal beds house the fossilized footprints of our planet’s earliest reptiles as well as amphibians, fish, horseshoe crabs, spiders, jumping insects, among other organisms. The study of fossil trackways is a burgeoning area in modern paleontology, and the Minkin site is the first and largest in the eastern U.S. This volume is also available on amazon.com.