Cool book ! "Lost Worlds in Alabama Rocks" can't find one though , darn .
@Skovand
I think the fossil is a Lepidodendron tree I have seen , it is about 6 feet long in an arch along the top of a cave opening . At least I think a cave , I did not clear out leaves to be sure . Looks like a car tire track fossil almost .
We have some pretty cool natural history books for Alabama. One really good book is by Scot Duncan. It’s focused mostly on current biodiversity. Dives a good bit into freshwater mollusks too. He’s a marine biologist. He teaches in northern Alabama at college but lives down near Gulf Breeze in the off season. He’s big into birds and also fresh water wildlife. Because of the delta in Alabama, the beginning of the Appalachians and the brackish water leading into the gulf down south, coupled with the fact mobile/baldwin county gets more rain than almost anywhere else in USA leads to us having a massive amount of wildlife. It’s why I’m very passionate about trying to do what is possible to defend nature from irresponsibly and greed. It’s being chipped away at every year. I’m only 35 and when I was a kid, around 10, my road was still a dirt road , and we were surrounded by woods, and there was a lot of corn and watermelon crops too. The road I grew up on use to be covered in wild cherry, persimmons, farkleberries, blueberries and dewberries. We could go with baskets and collect literally 40lbs of fruit a day. Had two deep freezes set up just to it all For the year. That road is not twice as wide, paved and almost all the trees cut down. Almost all the crops having become subdivisions.
The water is bad. Most of the American eels here are gone. Can’t hardly find beavers in the wild. Use to be this spot that was 2500 acres that was terrific for hunting mushrooms in and just hiking. They cut it down to turn it into a Publix and subdivision.
Some like to argue that we are not overpopulated but the world they envision is a world where almost all wilderness has been turned into concrete and pavement and everyone lives into tall condos and only the very wealthy owns even 1/2 an acre. I much rather view sustainable human populations where we still can have small yards at the minimum and places to enjoy nature.
In 100 years I imagine how little wilderness will be left. I wonder how little wildlife will be left in those spaces. It can take decades to clean up a waterway that gets damaged by a single accident. Kids in a hundred years might not even have a forest to go to without traveling for hours.
For the books there is a chance your local public library may have them. I see Alabama Rocks in quite a few of them. When I travel to random places in Alabama I often check their libraries to see what they have about our state in them and it’s fairly common to see that book.
