Homewood residents discover 300 million-year-old fossils

Normal rocks don’t come with scales.

That’s what Brent McCormick and his son, Thomas, thought when they were laying riverbed rocks for landscaping at their house. 

The strange scale-like pattern on some of the rocks was similar to fish or snake scales. Thinking the rocks might be fossils, McCormick and his son began collecting and researching them.

“For about 12 hours, I was on the computer,” McCormick said. “I had nailed it down to the Paleozoic period; it was a lumpfish.”

With curiosity growing, McCormick decided to follow up his home research with a professional’s opinion. He consulted Scott Brande, a UAB chemistry professor specializing in paleontology. Brande recognized that the fossils were not, in fact, from a lumpfish; they were imprints from the trunk of a scale tree that lived approximately 300 million years ago.

So far, the McCormicks have collected about 15 fossils from a few different kinds of scale trees. Some of these were found by neighborhood children, whom McCormick paid a quarter for each fossil they discovered. Thomas also took some of the fossils to show to his second-grade classmates at Edgewood Elementary. 

Scale trees flourished in prehistoric Alabama, but the McCormicks’ particular fossils came from a riverbed near the Kentucky-Tennessee border. 

“Becoming a fossil is not a sure thing. Most things that live and die disappear without a trace,” Brande said. “When you find a fossil, you’re actually finding something very uncommon.”

The scale tree predates dinosaurs to the time when the earth’s landmasses were coming together to form one enormous continent, Pangaea. At the time, Red Mountain might have been as tall as today’s Rocky Mountains before it was eroded to create sedimentary rock that now sits under the city of Homewood.

While the fossils might not be economically valuable, the McCormicks appreciate their find because they “absolutely stumbled into” a chance to learn about the prehistoric world and hunt for treasures in their own front yard. The discovery has made them more observant of what is under their own feet, and they plan to keep hunting for fossils in their remaining landscaping rocks.

Stories like the McCormicks’ are not common, but Homewood residents actually walk and drive past fossils nearly every day. Brande said that 100 million years before the scale trees existed, Birmingham was the floor of a warm, shallow sea. This sea was teeming with life, from microscopic plants and animals to the whale that created Alabama’s state fossil, the Basilosaurus. The larger sea creatures did not frequently leave remains, but Brande said today’s shale and limestone rocks are often “built of a billion microfossils” that cannot be seen with the naked eye.

The remains of Birmingham’s sea are easiest to see in the Red Mountain Expressway Cut, which was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1987. The cut exposes layers of rock showing corals, skeleton fragments and the shells of clam-like brachiopods, among other creatures.

“The gray rock of Red Mountain today, when they were being formed, represented an environment more like Florida or the Bahamas. What you’re actually standing on is an ancient sea floor. A sea floor that was deposited when North America and Alabama in particular were much nearer the equator,” Brande said. “You’re really walking on a mountain of fossils.”

For aspiring fossil hunters, Brande suggested contacting the Birmingham or Alabama Paleontological Societies and reading Jim Lacefield’s Lost Worlds in Alabama Rocks, which provides photos and an introductory guide to Alabama geology. The McWane Science Center also has a collection of Alabama fossils on display, including a skeleton of the Appalachiosaurus, a relative of the famous Tyrannosaurus rex.

Fossils might not show up in everyone’s front yard, but sharp-eyed and curious Homewood residents still have plenty of opportunities to see millions of years of Alabama’s life and geology.