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John Cooke's siblings teased him for four decades, saying he had - well -- rocks in his head.

Because he had rocks everywhere else. He had rocks in most every room of his Pleasant Grove house, and rocks piling up in his storage building out back - the one he was supposed to share with his late wife.

He had rocks in his backyard and rocks in his pockets and rocks - we're really talking about coal-aged fossils from the Pennsylvanian period of geologic time here - on his mind.

All the time.

Now after all those years of gathering impressions of 300 million year-old Alabama plant life, Cooke has put together a collection so large and impressive - hundreds of fossils of primitive plant species called lycopods, some the size of tree trunks - that it can hardly be contained.

Those siblings had begun to worry.

John Cooke holds a fossil similar to the ones headed for the Smithsonian. (Frank Couch\fcouch@al.com

What if something happened to John? What if, heaven forbid, he stumbled while retrieving a boulder-sized fossil from one of those old coal mines he explores. What if - oh my. As his sister, Judy Cooke Armstrong put it, "I'd hate to have to haul them to the dump."

But now the whole family - Cooke most of all - is breathing in the relief. Because these days people aren't telling Cooke he has rocks in his head. These days paleontologists and academics across the country are buzzing about the "John Cooke Collection." These days the Department of Paleobiology at none other than the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History is preparing to take his collection for important research. And for posterity.

After all this time and all that effort, Cooke knows his life's passion will be shared by those who understand and appreciate what he has gathered.

And it sure won't go to the dump.

It turns out his collection is not just big and heavy and voluminous. It is important. At least two of the specimens of ancient plants have never been seen at all. They contain never-before-seen growth patterns that make the paleobiologists giddy.

Sure, Cooke's discoveries may look like snakes to the layman, rather than the seed ferns they are. But they hold brand new clues to Alabama's ancient forests. They don't even have a name, so Cooke might someday get to put his name on them.

Cookesonite sounds good. Or Cookeomium.

Cooke just laughs, and launches into an excited discussion of how the mold-and-cast type of fossils he has collected differ from petrified wood - his latest passion -- which is created when every cell of the plant is replaced by silica.

Two van-loads of his fossils have already been carried away by academics from Presbyterian College in South Carolina, and the Smithsonian will take even more.

Michael Rischbieter, a Biology professor at Presbyterian, said part of the collection will be going to the Smithsonian for research and display, and part will stay in Alabama for the same purposes.

"It is the best of both worlds," he said.

Rischbieter still marvels at the way it all came together. He calls it serendipity.

It was last spring that Ashley Allen, president of the Alabama Paleontological Society, posted a picture of a rare fossil lycopod called Paralycopodites, Rischbieter said. He was intrigued, and set up a trip to the Alabama site because he really wanted to see the Paralycopodites.

Allen suggested he might also look at Cooke's collection, and so he did.

"From the very first minute I met John, I knew I had a kindred spirit in our shared love of fossil plants...a very rare thing indeed," Rischbieter said.

Rischbieter then sent pictures of Cooke's fossil specimens to Bill DiMichele at the Smithsonian, who became interested in Cooke's collection when he spotted a significant number of - you guessed it -- Paralycopodites.

"The most amazing part of all of this is I never actually got to see the original Paralycopodites that had drawn me to Alabama on this particular trip," Rischbieter said. "But in fact I hit a jackpot of another whole kind."

Rischbieter and his wife, Diane, have worked together to help the collection get the attention it deserves.

"It makes me feel good," Cooke said. "I'm glad it means something."

Cooke has spent a lifetime infatuated by stone, and working with it in one way or another. He has been a stonemason, and for years worked as masonry supervisor at the University of Montevallo. He traces his love of fossils to a geology class he took at Montevallo in the '60s, under a professor named James Connell.

"He really lit my fire," Cooke said. "I had never heard of eons and millions of years. I learned at an early age we're not quite as important as we think we are."

It never left him. So he spent a life scrambling through the refuse at strip mines (with permission, of course), clambering over stones in Pea Ridge, West Blocton and Abernant (where the Paralycopodites were found), picking through the relics of the world itself.

He can't pick a favorite find, because they all made him feel - well, like a sportsman might feel.

"Every time I go out and find something I get a rush, and the adrenalin starts flowing," he said. "It's the same feeling a bass fisherman might get when he lands a trophy bass."

And now his "catches" will go to the Smithsonian. And he can only smile.

Perhaps the best part of it - besides the friends and the rock talk and the flush of prestige -- is that moving all those fossils leaves him free to pursue his new passion: petrified wood.

At least he'll have a place to put it.

But no. That's not the best part. The best part is seeing how his sister Judy looks when he talks about the rocks. They aren't in his head. Not anymore. They are bound for the most prestigious natural history museum in the country, where they will be studied, seen, and safely revered by generations.

"I've teased John a lot," Judy Armstrong said. "But I am real proud of him."

Like we couldn't tell.