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Steven C. Minkin Paleozoic Footprint Site, formerly the Union Chapel Mine, is a former coal mine that became an important fossil site in Alabama after an Oneonta High School science teacher discovered tracks in the rocks at the site while preparing for a school field trip. The mine belonged to a family member of one of the children in his class.
Based on the sedimentology of roof strata of surface and underground coal mines and cyclothems containing the fossils of upright and in situ tree trunks, geologists proposed that the flooding of coastal swamp by deglacial meltwater pulses resulted in the rapid flooding of coastal forests, particularly along preexisting coastal rivers and ...
Although the mining of brown coal in the Geiseltal can be traced back to the year 1698, [2] [148] the first fossils were discovered relatively late. The earliest fossil find dates back to 1908 and includes remains of the tapir relative Lophiodon, which were picked up rather by chance by a miner in the open-cast mine Cecilie. Further finds were ...
Fossils have been recovered from every rock type in the Llewellyn but are predominantly found in the siltstone, shale, and coal layers. The compression fossils from the Llewellyn formation are well known for the striking white color on the dark stone. An important location for these fossils is near St. Clair, Pennsylvania.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the process of mining coal has responsible for many discoveries of fossil trackways. Some have been discovered serendipitously in West Virginia. [18] Such discoveries frequently occur when the excavation of coal mines removes the rock underlying the trackway, leaving it exposed on the tunnel's ceiling. [18]
The Five Points cannel coal mine was first publicized as a fossil site by Robert Hook and Donald Baird in 1994, who collected tetrapod fossils comparable to those found at Linton. However, the mine at Five Points was reclaimed around the same time, so the fossiliferous spoil piles are no longer accessible for further collection. [10] [11]
The fossils consist mainly of Late Carboniferous seed ferns, lycopsids, horsetail, early tetrapods and sea life. The daily high tide erodes the cliff, the stone fossils fall out of the coal and are left on the shore when the tide recedes. Fossils have also been found in the area deep shaft mines and in drilling core samples hundreds of feet down.
The most abundant vertebrate fossils are the tracks of dinosaurs, including the blunt, three-toed hadrosaurs, long, slendered toed theropods, and the short-wide, four-toed ceratopsians. [7] [8] Most of these tracks are found in the mine roof when the coal is removed. They formed when the foot of the living animals pressed into the peat of the ...