Alabama Paleontological Society meeting

I think about 25 people attended the lecture Ron Buta and I gave about Footprints in Stone, our new book about the Steven C Minkin Paleozoic Footprint site in north Alabama. Most members of the group know all about the site, but most had not yet seen the book, which only came out a week ago. We went through the history of the site, which was discovered in 1999 and preserved for posterity in 2005, and talked about the major players involved. We ended with a discussion of some of the unanswered questions, such as population dynamics of the organisms that made the common trace fossils (amphibian and reptile trackways, and trackways and Burrows made by invertebrates), and group behavior in vertebrates and (possibly) invertebrates, demonstrated by trace fossils from the site. Everybody seemed to be very interested and we all had a good time.