Wednesday, October 11, 2017

101117c


Back in 1930, George Gaylord Simpson, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, collected some rare and fantastic reptile trackways in Alabama. The tracks were more than 300 million years old, but they disappeared, and were never seen again. Never, that is, until a present curator of the museum, Carl Mehling, looked at the book that Ron Buta and I wrote about the Alabama tracks, entitled "Footprints in Stone." He realized that the unlabeled crate of tracks he had found in a storeroom were the missing set from almost 90 years ago. A mystery from the last millennium: solved! I must confess that my contribution to this discovery was minimal: Ron did the historical research that went into the book.

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