010417c

When the dead babies
are horseshoe crabs
we find beauty in extermination
collect their shells for our shelves
don't look too closely
at what this might mean
when the aliens come

Steven C Minkin Paleozoic footprint site update

Ron Buta has restored his interactive website, which includes thousands of photographs of Pennsylvanian trace fossils from the Minkin site:

http://bama.ua.edu/~rbuta/scm/

Users of this site can propose tentative IDs for the fossils in the photographs, and can estimate or measure other characteristics of the fossils based on examination of the photographs. All of your comments are recorded and you can see comments previously made by other people. So many specimens have been collected from this site, that many of them have not yet been studied in any detail, or even at all.

If you don't want to record your observations, that's fine. You can still look at the amazing pictures of this astoundingly diverse trace fossil fauna from more than 300 million years ago.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I had nothing to do with putting the website together, but Ron and I have a book about the site, due out in a couple of weeks. It is possible to preorder the book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Footprints-Stone-Fossil-Coal-Age-Tetrapods/dp/0817358447/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1460989262&sr=1-1&keywords=%22footprints+in+stone%22