SE GSA hosted a symposium on "Ichnology and Taphonomy," chaired by Andrew K. Rindsberg, Anthony J. Martin, and Ronald R. McDowell, and a field trip on coal geology (including ichnology) hosted by Ron Martino and others (1998). Both went well.

About 30 people, plus or minus 5, attended most of the talks in the Ichnology and Taphonomy symposium (Rindsberg, 1998). The meeting began very early, at 0740 hours, and the first two talks were poorly attended. As the first talk was my own and I scheduled it myself, I have to chalk this up as a learning experience. Talks were diverse, and most of them addressed both ichnology and taphonomy. As often happens, students gave some of the best talks (the most original, the best delivered, and the best illustrated): Gwen Daley and Andrew Bush on preservation of ligament in Plio-Pleistocene deposits, Susan Barbour on Pliocene naticid predation on bivalves, Allison Wahl and Tony Martin on Triassic coprophagy traces, J. C. Slone and Bob Gastaldo on taphonomy of palynomorphs in a Holocene delta. David Schwimmer gave a notable talk on bite traces of marine predators and scavengers on Cretaceous bones. Tony Martin spoke on a trace fossil whose discovery required the revision of the age of a Blue Ridge formation from Precambrian to lower Paleozoic, and Ron Diecchio and Jack Hall addressed new trace fossils from the lower Paleozoic of West Virginia and Maryland. Steve Henderson and Rob Wheatcroft gave a talk on the ichnology and taphonomy of Upper Cretaceous phosphatic concretions. Attendance doubled for Ron Martino, who capped off the symposium with a talk on the ichnology of the Pennsylvanian Kanawha Formation of West Virginia, one day after leading a field trip to see the real thing.

One of the students (S. White) cancelled her talk due to illness, so Tony Martin asked the speakers to provide one or two extra slides to discuss during that time instead. This turned out to be one of the most interesting parts of the symposium, and I recommend the format for other sessions.

We invited the participants to join us for dinner at a nearby seafood restaurant, and about a dozen came, including Bob Gastaldo, Jon Bryan, Steve Henderson, Michael Gibson, David Schwimmer (the vertebrate paleontologist, not the actor who plays a vertebrate paleontologist on Friends), and others. They included old friends and new acquaintances from all over the southeastern U.S., and it was gratifying to sit and joke together.

One of the field trips accompanying the meeting was partly on trace fossils and partly on coal geology and paleobotany in the Pennsylvanian Kanawha Formation, the greatest coal-producing unit in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia (Martino and others, 1998). The attendees enjoyed excellent weather, warm and not too humid, which relieved the leaders, because snow lay on the ground only a week earlier. The highway cuts are new and spectacular; this is mountainous terrain, with cities built in narrow floodplains. They had to flatten a mountaintop to build the Charleston airport, and it can be terrifying to fly there.

To our delight, Ron Martino showed us very well-preserved Olivellites in a large bedding plane. Fortunately, our van broke down briefly at this stop, so we had time to sweep 2 or 3 square meters of bedding plane with a broom. The people passing by on the highway must have wondered about this odd behavior. In one of the burrows, an Olivellites apparently turned over to become a Nereites, which gave us our own cause to wonder about odd behavior.

At another outcrop in the Kanawha, Ron showed us the odd spiral Rhizocorallium uliarense along with other interesting trace fossils: more cause to wonder. Why would an animal build a spiraling spreiten U-burrow?

The coal geologists and paleobotanists, led by Cortland Eble and others, were quite happy with the field trip as well. Generally the ichnologists would head for one part of the outcrop, the coal geologists another, and return with smiles all around: two field trips in one.

I look forward to the next SE GSA meeting in March 1999. This will be held in Athens, Georgia, where we plan to honor the memory of Bob Frey with another symposium and field trips to Sapelo Island and Ringgold, Georgia, as announced by A. J. Martin elsewhere in this issue.

Back to the main Introduction to Ichnology Page