On February 26-29, twenty-three paleontologists, stratigraphers, and sedimentologists participated in a field workshop on the paleoecology and sedimentation of the Mississippian Fort Payne Formation in southcentral Kentucky and adjacent Tennessee. The group stayed at Sulphur Creek Resort on an arm of Dale Hollow Reservoir and examined Fort Payne outcrops in the Cumberland Saddle region from Columbia, Kentucky, to Celina, Tennessee, 45 miles to the south. South-central Kentucky and adjacent Tennessee lie in the Cumberland Saddle, so named for the Cumberland River, which flows to the west and southwest through the gentle structural sag between the Lexington and Nashville Domes each exposing Middle and Upper Ordovician strata (Fig. 1). In the Cumberland Saddle itself, however, a thin section of deepwater Devonian Chattanooga Shale caps these rocks and above it lies a very well exposed Lower to Middle Mississippian section including the Fort Payne Formation (lowest), Warsaw Formation, St. Louis Formation, and the St. Genevieve (Monteagle) Limestone, capped on the margins of the saddle by basal Pennsylvanian sandstones and shales. The most widespread and best exposed of these units are the Fort Payne and Warsaw Formations, largely because the PlioPleistocene entrenchment of the Cumberland River has produced sharp, local relief of 150 to almost 300 feet with a dense pattern of dendritic drainage so that outcrops abound. Here one can see exceptionally well in a small area a complex marine clinoform, commonly 250-290 feet thick, that contains diverse terrigenous and carbonate facies (Fig. 2). Although the Cumberland Saddle itself covers more than eight counties, it is small in comparison to all the Fort Payne, which extends from the Black Warrior Basin of Alabama through Tennessee and Kentucky into the Illinois Basin. In Kentucky and adjacent states Fort Payne deposition occurred after and to the southwest of the fine-grained sandstones, siltstones, and shales of the Borden Formation, which also has a clinoform structure. The two are separated by a widespread glauconite, the Floyds Knob Glauconite, which can be traced up the clinoform onto shelf beds. Plentiful shallow wells and complete geologic quadrangle mapping add to the attractions of the Cumberland Saddle as a field laboratory. From the viewpoint of paleoecology the Fort Payne Formation has special interest, because it is a marine clinoform (Fig. 2) rich in diverse lithologies: at least three types of shales (black silty shale, medium, dark gray, silty dolomitic shale, and fossiliferous green shale) plus a diverse array of limestones most of which have a predominant pelmatozoan echino-