- [Announcer] This program is supported by grants from the Solon and Martha Dickson Foundation, the Alabama Wildlife Federation, working for wildlife since 1935, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Alabama, providing educational and social opportunities for adults.

"Discovering Alabama" is a production of the Alabama Museum of Natural History.

(calm nature noise) (woman murmurs) - When I was a kid roaming he Alabama outdoors with my buddies, we were always coming across things that seemed a little bit unusual.

(water trickles) For many of us, that curiosity sparked by the unusual never left us.

My own quest to understand the world can be traced back to my childhood years, exploring the Alabama wilds.

(gentle music) And in the decades since I first roamed this countryside, I've had the good fortune to share my curiosity and conversation with numerous other educators and scientists.

And I've discovered that despite our differences, we often have one thing in common.

- At about age three, I started finding small shell fossils in the limestone gravel in the alleyway behind my house.

- So I liked collecting rocks.

I liked collecting shells and plants and things like that.

- My hobby, ever since I was a kid, has been hunting for fossils.

- And growing up in Chicago, they always took us to the Field Museum, and I was always fascinated by the dinosaurs.

- The curiosity that motivates scientists and educators today was more often than not formed when we were kids exploring the wonders of nature.

And many times that curiosity was first sparked by a specific object.

- A friend of my mother's gave her some sharks teeth that had been collected near Montgomery.

- While I was there, I actually discovered a juvenile Ceratopsian femur.

- From that point on, anytime anyone said, "What do you wanna be when you grow up?"

I always said, "I wanna be a paleontologist."

- Fossils, who among us doesn't delight in the idea of discovering a fossil?

(gentle music) Here in Alabama, fossils can be found just about anywhere.

South, where the sands meet the sea, there are fossils.

Across our state's mid section where ancient seas once bustled with life there are fossils.

In the coal country.

In the caves of North Alabama.

(gentle music) Fossils, fossils everywhere.

Hi, I'm Doug Phillips.

Today, we're going fossil hunting across the state.

We'll discover how Alabama is one of the significant places on the planet to uncover ancient life.

We will get acquainted with long ago life, both small and large.

(gentle music) Join me as we go on a fossil hunt that digs deeply into the past while seeking to shed light on a very modern day conundrum.

How is it that fossils lead so many a young person down the path to a life of grime?

(gentle music) (calm piano music) This program is about a land unknown to many people a land that in many ways has maintained its native, natural wonders, a place of bountiful back country, forests, streams, and wildlife, more diverse than can be found in much of the inhabited world.

Come along with me as we explore the wild wonders of this land.

Come along as we discover Alabama.

Welcome to "Discovering Alabama," and welcome to a land of lost worlds, worlds created by the rise and fall of ancient seas, created by the upsurge and the demise of mountains, worlds wants teeming with life now returned to the dust of the earth, or resurrected at the museum near you.

Fossils, the remains of ancient life preserved in geological layers of the earth and providing insights to the history of our earth.

Alabama, land of lost worlds, many worlds over many millions of years, and many periods of geological time as so wonderfully described in the popular book, "Lost Worlds in Alabama Rocks" by fellow fossil enthusiast, Dr. Jim Lacefield.

- Well, Alabama is special in several ways, but one of the main ones is that because of our location, right at the edge of the North American continent, we rocks from many different time periods.

So geologists can come to Alabama from different parts of the world, and they can study much of the geologic record of the types of changes over about the last half billion years that life has been through.

- [Doug] And the mini geological periods spanning more than 500 million years can be grouped into three major eras, from before the dinosaurs, during the dinosaurs, and after the dinosaurs.

What's unique about Alabama is that evidence of all three eras can be found in rocks and sediments across the state, actually taking us through time.

The rocks in Northern Alabama are often Paleozoic with fossils several hundred million years old.

Rocks from central parts of the state or Mesozoic, or from the time of the dinosaurs, with most fossils here between 100 million and 66 million years old.

And all the rocks in South Alabama are Cenozoic, meaning from the time after dinosaurs and since 66 million years ago.

Alabama's variety of geological regions, representing different geological periods, is the basis for scores of fossil areas across the state, too many to visit in one show, but let's take a firsthand look at several impressive sites.

No, this is not a moonscape from far across the reaches of space, but it is a landscape revealing a world from far back in time.

This location, known as Harrell Station, is a chalky saw outcropping in middle Alabama that like much of lower Alabama was once covered by prehistoric seas of the Cretaceous period.

Fortunately, for science and education, the site is today owned by the University of Alabama and managed by UA's Alabama Museum of Natural History.

- We have students that that go there as part of their courses, researchers that go there.

Alabama Museum of Natural History has actually had numerous expeditions during the summers out at Harrell Station, which have resulted in many wonderful discoveries out there that then end up in our collections.

- It's a great place to have fossils for people that we've had a lot of school groups and children and adults out here, just introducing them to a type of activity that they may never have been able to experience.

So, this is an area where an ancient sea bottom, ancient dinosaur age sea bottom is exposed, and you can find fossils of vertebrates like Mosasaurus, a swimming lizard-like animal.

Sometimes even dinosaur remains here, as well as a whole host of invertebrates that were alive at time.

- [Doug] At Harrell station, nature's weathering has eroded Alabama's surface to uncover the ancient layers of the past.

(birds tweet) In other places, the forces of nature have worked from beneath the surface.

In North Alabama, for example, fossils can be found in deep layers from geological periods dating back several hundred million years.

One such site is the famous cave, Cathedral Caverns, today accessible to the public as one of Alabama's great state parks.

- Alabama is one of the best states in the US for caves.

All the caves are cutting through limestones.

All these limestones would represent ancient seabeds.

All of them contain fossils.

I've never been to a single cave in Northern Alabama that was not full of fossils.

What a lot of people don't realize is when you're walking through the caverns, if you look in the walls and look in the ceilings, you can still see fossils from ancient organisms in the walls and in the ceiling.

- See that thing?

- Oh yeah.

- [Jun] So this is all the Mississippian period here, so these sharks teeth are some of the earliest ones you'll find in the state, and really even in North America.

These are about 325 million year old sharks, so very, very, very primitive.

- It's easy to see, pretty easy to identify.

- [Jun] Yeah, so this is a species here from the Mississippi.

It's called Saivodus striatus.

It's actually one of the larger sharks you can find from this time period.

You can see a lot of evidence of other fossils around here.

You'll see some seemingly Crinoid stems and such, so it could be some of the things that these early sharks were eating.

- Now, of course, nature isn't the only force that uncovers hidden history.

Wherever we humans move large areas of earth, very likely opportunities are uncovered to find fossils.

- We are at St. Stephen's Quarry.

And what this is is we're standing in a 30 million year old seabed.

What we're doing today is we're fossil hunting.

Vertebrate and invertebrate remains of all kinds of different sea creatures that lived once long ago make up this limestone.

The animals are where they died, or where the teeth fell out of the shark.

So, we're not gonna find a big concentration of these animals.

We're gonna have to spread out and look for them, 'cause they're just gonna be where they dropped in the soft mud back some 30 million years ago.

- Look at that shark tooth.

- So our only window into these certain times, and these certain areas are gonna be through some sort of disturbance.

These are a treasure trove of information for scientists.

- Excavation sites, road cuts, even quarries can at times yield evidence of life's long past.

Even in Alabama's coal mines, coal was not the only thing often uncovered.

- Well did the tree go down and it just got stuck right there?

- Nope, it grew up like this.

And when the tree fell over like that, it squished into the mud and the leaf scars that were on the trunk of the tree, that's what's preserved right there.

That is a clam.

It's a scallop, kind of like scallops we got today in the ocean.

If you like seafood, you've probably eaten scallops at a seafood restaurant.

And this is a ancestor of those scallops, only this thing was around 310 million years ago.

(hammer and chisel clink) - [Doug] Alabama fossil sites include some of the world's best records of creatures that once walked, flew, or swam across the face of the earth.

For example, what's known as the old Union Chapel Mine site, the Steven C. Minkin paleontological site in Northwest Alabama today is a world famous site with uniquely abundant fossilized tracks and trackway paths from roughly 280 million years ago.

- This is extremely important.

It was not any exaggeration to say that this is the most important Carboniferous trackway site in the world in terms of the number of species represented and specimens that have been found.

- We see that fossils, you have two main groups.

So body fossils are remains of animals that lived in the past, but trace fossil is a completely other group of fossils.

They are activities of organisms, so what they produced when they were alive, locomotion activities like feeding, nesting.

So these are life activities.

This is the dead remains, both very useful in different senses.

(calm music) (waves crash) - [Doug] Some of Alabama's more recent fossil explorations are being conducted in the coastal area.

- [Jun] Right now, we're standing on Dolphin Island.

What we're standing on right now is Alabama's newest fossil site.

We're finding all sorts of sharks' teeth and vertebrate fossils and crabs fossils.

(tool scrapes) - So, how is it that you find these teeth that are 10,000 years old along with teeth that could have popped out of a shark yesterday.

- The sand that we're standing on right now on the beach, this is actually sand that was dredged from off shore and dumped right here on land.

And so, what's happening is that when they're dredging, they're digging down to these older ice age deposits where all these teeth are there.

These are from deposits that are higher up.

So, again, this could have been a shark just from three weeks ago or something that shed its teeth.

There's digging down to lower deposits, so you get a mix here on the beach.

The lower ones are t-shaped.

Being one of our younger fossil sites in the state, it's actually telling us what the Gulf of Mexico was like three and a half million years ago.

We're looking at the origins of these recent species that we have in the Gulf of Mexico, but we're also finding extinct things, telling us that the environment is slightly different than it was today.

(gentle music) - [Doug] From where the coastal lowlands meet the sea up through her rolling hills and prairie lands to her mountainous region, fossil evidence of lost worlds is a defining part of Alabama's past.

Lying in the layers of ancient rocks with changing geological periods down through time and rugged wilds and hidden meanders and fascinating outcroppings from North to South across the state.

(gentle music) Fossils and the whole area of paleontology are part of what we call natural history, the study of the history of earth and all the natural creatures and features of earth.

- Paleontologists study of ancient life, what animals were there in the past on land and in the sea, and how did he animals interact with one another, and how the climate change and the changes on the earth affect life and vice versa.

- Paleontology does give us a unique perspective on human existence that we do see way back into time the changes that life has been through over tens of millions and hundreds of millions and even billions of years.

And what that allows us to do is understand that the earth of the future is going to be different than our earth at the present.

Life is gonna continue to change.

The landscape is gonna continue to change.

The continental positions will continue to change.

And this progression that we've seen through time is going to continue way into the future, perhaps long after humans are no longer around to take note of it.

- Of course, evidence of the history of the earth and the record of life on earth is there to be explored all around the world.

But in my opinion, not always as accessible is right here in our own backyard.

So, let's say you're an Alabama youngster and you want to explore fossils, or, heck, let's say you're a big kid, a grownup with a keen interest in fossils.

Well, you're lucky.

Alabama is home to a number of wonderful education and science centers with opportunities for fossil study.

And a sampling of these places will take us to different parts of the state, way up to Decatur, for example, to see the many interesting items on display at Cook Natural Science Museum.

- But specifically we wanted to engage, excite, and educate people about what's outside of their door right here in North Alabama.

That's why we do everything we do.

We want people to fall in love with learning.

- So on this side, we've got the gopher tortoise.

And, of course, this one lives on land.

- [Doug] Or down to Flomaton for some nature study and to examine the fossil collections at Turtle Point Environmental Science Center.

- We have got a large donation of different types of fossils that came from rivers right around this area.

So this just gives them a chance to kind of understand the history of Alabama.

And that's an exciting thing for them to realize.

- [Doug] And throughout Alabama are exceptional opportunities for public enjoyment of natural history.

- We're a very non-traditional museum where we're a science center, a children's museum, an IMAX theater, aquarium, and a natural history museum all in one building.

And it's a wonderful venue where we can not only do the cutting edge research describing new fossil species and what it means, but at the same time having the exhibits at McWane, we can interpret these things and disseminate the scientific information very easily to the general public.

- When you first walk in our museum, you're gonna see a true to scale Pteranodon hanging from the ceiling.

And when you look up, and you're maybe three and a half feet tall and you see those huge Pteranodon in the ceiling, that's terrifying, but it's impactful.

And then they're like, oh my gosh, but what's next?

So here at the Auburn University Museums we are all the research collection.

So when you get a chance to visit here, you get to actually see this is the heart of what a museum is.

It's curators that go out, collect specimens, understand our biodiversity on this planet, and find ways of conserving it.

- And of all the great places to learn about fossils in Alabama, I'd be remiss not to return to the home base of "Discovering Alabama," the Alabama Museum of Natural History.

The Alabama Museum of Natural History is one of the earliest museums of natural history in the nation.

A visit to its exhibit gallery is quite an experience including a very close encounter with the awesome size of Alabama's state fossil, Basilosaurus cetoides, an ancient toothed whale that lived in the sea waters over lower Alabama millions of years ago.

Indeed, the Alabama Museum of Natural History is home for one of the best scientific collections of fossils in the South, providing exceptional resource for paleontological research.

- Yeah, the museum stores over half a million fossils, mostly from the state of Alabama.

And those falls are extremely important, because they form the basis for lots of scientific research each year.

They're being used for teaching.

They're being used for making public exhibits, either permanent or semi-permanent.

- So in the paleontology collections, we have some great strengths, in particular, we have one of the finest collections of Mosasaurus, these aquatic creatures that lived over 75 million years ago, and we manage them in a way that makes them very accessible for research.

And so scientists sometimes come from all over the country to study our fossil collections.

And the same can be said for our archeological collections.

We have very rich collections, and scientists come from all over to study those as well.

- [Doug] But scientific collections and research are not all of the important functions of the Alabama Museum of Natural History.

- So we have, obviously, in addition to the public exhibits we have here in our museum and Smith Hall, we offer a variety of programs.

We go out to schools.

We have educational programs.

We've serve up a very broad spectrum of the population, everything from school kids.

We have pre-K programs where parents will bring their kids in to do crafts that are tied into natural history and learning about plants and animals in the state.

- Very fragile.

- I think we're lucky to work at a natural history museum, because I feel like no matter what, we have something that people are really into.

So, maybe when they were kids, they were really into dinosaurs.

We've got dinosaur stuff.

Maybe they were really into fossils.

We've got fossil things.

Maybe they were really into history.

We've got historical content too.

So I think we're fortunate in the content that we have in the museum that, no matter what, you'll find something.

We have lots of kids.

Very fortunate to have lots of kids that have grown up through the programs.

So we've gotten to see them come from age, I don't know, maybe 10 all the way up through graduating high school, and then go on to four year degrees that are in that same vein or that same content area, which is kind of incredible.

- You have to have educated citizens, school kids that come through here that take pride in their environment.

And given a venue like the museum here, its exhibits and programs produce the content, which I think is hopefully attractive and interesting and engaging to a general public.

- [Woman] You gotta come visit us.

Basilosaurus, that's that one.

- We can create some great interdisciplinary experiences for the general public.

In addition, we can connect the important academic work of the University of Alabama to the general public in ways that no other academic units at the University of Alabama can.

- In addition to visiting any of Alabama's many science and natural history centers, those wanting to explore Alabama's lost world can join the members of Alabama's amateur paleontological organizations, the Alabama Paleontological Society and the Birmingham Paleontological Society.

The fossil realm in Alabama is so rich.

No wonder so many are drawn by the intrigue by the mysteries.

No wonder so many are drawn to a life of grime, searching for the evidence of lost worlds and ancient life.

And opportunities for that intrigue for exploring and learning about those mysteries are especially abundant right here at home in Alabama.

(gentle music) (hammer and chisel clinks) (calm acoustic music) - [Announcer] "Discovering Alabama" is produced in partnership with the University of Alabama College of Continuing Studies.

"Discovering Alabama" is produced in partnership with Alabama Public Television.

"Discovering Alabama" is a production of the Alabama Museum of Natural History.

This program is supported by grants from the Solon and Martha Dixon Foundation, the Alabama Wildlife Federation, working for wildlife since 1935, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Alabama, providing educational and social opportunities for adults.