October 7, 2005

 LIVINGSTON, Ala.—Science teachers wanting to earn Continuing Education Units (CEUs) can sign up for Fossils of the Black Belt VII, a hands-on field workshop offered Oct. 25 at the University of West Alabama. This one-day paleontology workshop provides teachers of every grade level the opportunity to visit several sites, collecting fossils to take back to their own classrooms.

The workshop, now in its seventh year, is divided into three parts. First, the teacher will spend time in a UWA classroom learning the principles of field study in earth science. Next, the group will head out to a variety of Sumter County sites to find their own marine fossil specimens. The rest of the afternoon will be spent properly identifying and labeling the collected fossils.

Dr. Doug Wymer, an environmental scientist and Assistant Professor at UWA, is helping lead this workshop for the third year. He said the Black Belt area of Alabama is a wonderful place for fossil hunting.

“We find specimens from 65-70 million years ago when this part of Alabama was a shallow tropical sea,” Wymer said. “Some places have numerous fossils lying on the ground, ready to be picked up.”

The visited sites contain diverse marine fossils from the Cretaceous period, including oysters, casts of snail shells, bryozoa, worm tubes and shark teeth. On these excursions, fossil hunters have also found vertebrae or teeth from an extinct marine reptile called a Mosasaur.   

Dr. David Kopaska-Merkel, head of the Stratigraphy and Coastal Geology Unit at the Geological Survey of Alabama, Dr. Andrew Rindsberg, curator of the Geological Survey’s Paleontological Collection, and Dr. John Hall, curator of the new Black Belt Museum at UWA will also lead the workshop.

Teachers from across the Southeast are expected to attend. The participants will earn 8 hours of CEU credit and receive a field guidebook, a geologic map of Alabama, Lost Worlds in Alabama Rocks, their own fossil kits from specimens they collected and more. Participation is limited to 38 teachers and a pre-registration fee of $15 is required. For more information or to register for the fossil workshop, contact Dr. Kopaska-Merkel at (205) 553-2284 or davidkm@gsa.state.al.us.