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My latest publication, a science fiction poem in Devilfish Review, co-authored with Ann K. Schwader

https://devilfishreview.com/issue-twenty/it-took-some-time-by-david-c-kopaska-merkel-and-ann-k-schwader/

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https://www.amazon.com/Footprints-Stone-Fossil-Coal-Age-Tetrapods/dp/0817358447/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=

Footprints in Stone, my book about Pennsylvanian tracks in Alabama, is now pretty cheap on Amazon (less than $30). If you are interested in trace fossils made by some of the earliest reptiles, and critters that lived with them, now is your chance.

Alabama Paleontological Society

The APS (link below) is an amateur organization of fossil enthusiasts based in Birmingham, Alabama. They have monthly meetings in field trips. They also discovered the Steven C Minkin Paleozoic Footprint site, the most important trace fossil site of its age in the world, and made sure that it was preserved for posterity. Without their work, my new book about the site (co-authored with Ron Buta) could not have existed.

Fossils at the site are abundant and diverse, but one of the best things about it is that you can visit the site, with the APS, and keep most or all of the wonderful fossils that you find

http://alabamapaleo.org/Alabama_Paleontological_Society.html

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

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Maybe Her Cousin

She would have been our ancestor,
all reptiles, all mammals,
all that is to come,
but one of her primitive relatives.
with big teeth,
ran across her at lunchtime.
one day back in the early Pennsylvanian.

"Footprints in Stone" update

This is the book that I wrote with a colleague of mine about an important fossil trackway site in Alabama. Thousands of specimens of trace fossils including footprints of some of the earliest reptiles, fin traces made by fish, jumping and walking traces of insects, and many more have been collected here.

We have a publisher, but the publisher needs to raise some money for the first printing. We have now finally gotten past the halfway point on committed funds. We are working on a Kickstarter project to raise the part we still need. Students from a local documentary film class are putting that together for us. I am starting to believe this might really come to pass.