HUNTERS OF PANTHALASSAN SEAS: SHONISAURUS

Shonisaurus sikanni / Sikanni Chief River

More than 200 million years ago, when the supercontinent Pangaea was still knitting the world together, a leviathan moved through the warm Panthalassan seas that covered what is now northeastern British Columbia. 

Shonisaurus sikanniensis was colossal. At an estimated 21 metres (about 70 feet) in length, it rivals or exceeds the largest whales alive today. 

This was no scaly sea dragon but an ichthyosaur: a dolphin-shaped marine reptile with immense paddle-like limbs, a long, tapering snout, and eyes built for the dim light of deep water. 

Its vertebrae alone are the size of dinner plates. When it swam, it would have moved with powerful sweeps of its crescent tail, master of a Late Triassic ocean teeming with ammonites and early marine reptiles.

The type specimen of Shonisaurus sikanniensis was discovered along the banks of the Sikanni Chief River and painstakingly excavated over three ambitious field seasons led by Dr. Betsy Nicholls of the Royal Tyrrell Museum. 

A Rolex Laureate and one of Canada’s most respected vertebrate palaeontologists, Dr. Nicholls undertook what remains one of the most formidable fossil excavations ever attempted in this country. 

The animal lay entombed in limestone, and freeing it required extraordinary logistics, teamwork, and resolve over many field seasons.  

That immense skeleton — the largest marine reptile ever described — reshaped our understanding of just how big ichthyosaurs could become.

Many dedicated researchers have contributed to expanding the story of Shonisaurus and its kin. Scholars such as Dean Lomax and Sven Sachs, among others, continue to refine our understanding of ichthyosaur anatomy, growth patterns, and evolutionary relationships. 

Recent work on giant ichthyosaurs from the Triassic of Europe and North America suggests that extreme body size evolved rapidly after the end-Permian mass extinction. New discoveries of enormous jaw fragments and vertebrae hint that multiple lineages independently pushed the limits of marine reptile gigantism. 

These animals were likely deep-diving specialists, feeding on abundant soft-bodied cephalopods and fish, filling ecological roles that whales would not occupy for another 150 million years.

The Sikanni Chief River flows through the traditional territory of the Kaska Dena, whose stewardship of these lands spans countless generations. Any scientific work in this region exists within that broader and much older human story, and it is important to acknowledge the enduring relationship between the land, the river, and the people who know it best.

Today, the bones of Shonisaurus sikanniensis rest in Alberta, but its story stretches far beyond a museum gallery. It is a tale of deep time, bold fieldwork, collaboration across continents, and the simple human wonder that arises when we uncover something vast and ancient from stone. 

From the warm Triassic seas to the careful hands of modern researchers, the story of Shonisaurus reminds us that our planet has always been capable of producing giants — and that with patience, teamwork, and curiosity, we can bring their stories joyfully back into the light.

FRACTAL BUILDING: AMMONITES

Argonauticeras besairei, Collection of José Juárez Ruiz.

An exceptional example of fractal building of an ammonite septum, in this clytoceratid Argonauticeras besairei from the awesome José Juárez Ruiz.

Ammonites were predatory, squid-like creatures that lived inside coil-shaped shells.

Like other cephalopods, ammonites had sharp, beak-like jaws inside a ring of squid-like tentacles that extended from their shells. They used these tentacles to snare prey, — plankton, vegetation, fish and crustaceans — similar to the way a squid or octopus hunt today.

Catching a fish with your hands is no easy feat, as I'm sure you know. But the Ammonites were skilled and successful hunters. They caught their prey while swimming and floating in the water column. Within their shells, they had a number of chambers, called septa, filled with gas or fluid that were interconnected by a wee air tube. By pushing air in or out, they were able to control their buoyancy in the water column.

They lived in the last chamber of their shells, continuously building new shell material as they grew. As each new chamber was added, the squid-like body of the ammonite would move down to occupy the final outside chamber.

They were a group of extinct marine mollusc animals in the subclass Ammonoidea of the class Cephalopoda. These molluscs, commonly referred to as ammonites, are more closely related to living coleoids — octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish) than they are to shelled nautiloids such as the living Nautilus species.

The Ammonoidea can be divided into six orders:

• Agoniatitida, Lower Devonian - Middle Devonian
• Clymeniida, Upper Devonian
• Goniatitida, Middle Devonian - Upper Permian
• Prolecanitida, Upper Devonian - Upper Triassic
• Ceratitida, Upper Permian - Upper Triassic
• Ammonitida, Lower Jurassic - Upper Cretaceous

Ammonites have intricate and complex patterns on their shells called sutures. The suture patterns differ across species and tell us what time period the ammonite is from. If they are geometric with numerous undivided lobes and saddles and eight lobes around the conch, we refer to their pattern as goniatitic, a characteristic of Paleozoic ammonites.

If they are ceratitic with lobes that have subdivided tips; giving them a saw-toothed appearance and rounded undivided saddles, they are likely Triassic. For some lovely Triassic ammonites, take a look at the specimens that come out of Hallstatt, Austria and from the outcrops in the Humboldt Mountains of Nevada.

Hoplites bennettiana (Sowby, 1826).

If they have lobes and saddles that are fluted, with rounded subdivisions instead of saw-toothed, they are likely Jurassic or Cretaceous. If you'd like to see a particularly beautiful Lower Jurassic ammonite, take a peek at Apodoceras. Wonderful ridging in that species.

One of my favourite Cretaceous ammonites is the ammonite, Hoplites bennettiana (Sowby, 1826). This beauty is from Albian deposits near Carrière de Courcelles, Villemoyenne, near la région de Troyes (Aube) Champagne in northeastern France.

At the time that this fellow was swimming in our oceans, ankylosaurs were strolling about Mongolia and stomping through the foliage in Utah, Kansas and Texas. Bony fish were swimming over what would become the strata making up Canada, the Czech Republic and Australia. Cartilaginous fish were prowling the western interior seaway of North America and a strange extinct herbivorous mammal, Eobaatar, was snuffling through Mongolia, Spain and England.

In some classifications, these are left as suborders, included in only three orders: Goniatitida, Ceratitida, and Ammonitida. Once you get to know them, ammonites in their various shapes and suturing patterns make it much easier to date an ammonite and the rock formation where is was found at a glance.

Ammonites first appeared about 240 million years ago, though they descended from straight-shelled cephalopods called bacrites that date back to the Devonian, about 415 million years ago, and the last species vanished in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.

They were prolific breeders that evolved rapidly. If you could cast a fishing line into our ancient seas, it is likely that you would hook an ammonite, not a fish. They were prolific back in the day, living (and sometimes dying) in schools in oceans around the globe. We find ammonite fossils (and plenty of them) in sedimentary rock from all over the world.

In some cases, we find rock beds where we can see evidence of a new species that evolved, lived and died out in such a short time span that we can walk through time, following the course of evolution using ammonites as a window into the past.

For this reason, they make excellent index fossils. An index fossil is a species that allows us to link a particular rock formation, layered in time with a particular species or genus found there. Generally, deeper is older, so we use the sedimentary layers rock to match up to specific geologic time periods, rather the way we use tree-rings to date trees. A handy way to compare fossils and date strata across the globe.

References: Inoue, S., Kondo, S. Suture pattern formation in ammonites and the unknown rear mantle structure. Sci Rep 6, 33689 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep33689
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33689?fbclid=IwAR1BhBrDqhv8LDjqF60EXdfLR7wPE4zDivwGORTUEgCd2GghD5W7KOfg6Co#citeas

Photo: Hoplites Bennettiana from near Troyes, France. Collection de Christophe Marot

MAMMOTH AT THE MUSEUM

Mammoths are a personal favourite of mine and there is a particularly fetching specimen in the Natural History Museum, London. 

Amongst its Ice Age treasures stands the mighty woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius — a shaggy titan of the Pleistocene whose kind roamed the frozen steppes of Europe, Asia, and North America until just 4,000 years ago.

The museum’s mammoth skeleton, with its great spiralled tusks curving forward like ivory crescents, is both imposing and oddly elegant. 

These animals were close cousins of modern elephants, adapted for cold with thick insulating fur, a layer of fat beneath the skin, and small ears to conserve heat. 

Their molars — massive, ridged grinding plates — were built for chewing tough Ice Age grasses across windswept tundra.

Britain itself once hosted mammoths during colder phases of the last Ice Age. As glaciers advanced and retreated, herds wandered across what is now the North Sea basin — then dry land known as Doggerland — and into southern England. 

Fossils dredged from gravel pits and offshore sediments remind us that mammoths were not exotic strangers but part of Britain’s own prehistoric fauna.

Standing beneath those sweeping tusks in the museum, you can almost feel the cold breath of the Ice Age. It is a wonderful place to spend the afternoon. If you go, wear comfortable shoes!

LOOPS, LURCHES AND LATE CRETACEOUS SEAS: MEET AUDOULICERAS

Audouliceras Heteromorph Ammonite

There are sensible ammonites… and then there are the heteromorphs.

Audouliceras belongs firmly in the second camp.

This wonderfully eccentric Cretaceous ammonite abandoned the classic tight spiral that most of its kin wore so elegantly and instead opted for something that looks, at first glance, like a shell having second thoughts. 

Its whorls uncoil, loop, and flare in ways that feel almost rebellious — as though the blueprint for “proper ammonite” was politely ignored.

Audouliceras lived during the Late Cretaceous, roughly 100–90 million years ago, when warm epicontinental seas flooded vast stretches of the globe. 

In North America, its fossils are found in marine sediments laid down by the Western Interior Seaway — that immense inland ocean that once split the continent in two. 

Beautiful specimens have turned up in Cretaceous deposits of Alberta, British Columbia, Montana, and the U.S. Great Plains, preserved in shales and sandstones that were once quiet seafloors.

Across the Atlantic realm, relatives occur in European Cretaceous deposits as well, reflecting the broad distribution of ammonites in the world’s warm, shallow seas. 

These were not shoreline creatures; Audouliceras drifted or swam in open marine environments, buoyed by gas-filled chambers within its shell. Like other ammonites, it controlled its position in the water column through a siphuncle — a delicate tube threading through its chambers, regulating buoyancy with remarkable precision.

What did it eat? Likely small crustaceans, plankton, and other tiny drifting life. Its soft body would have extended from the final chamber, equipped with tentacles and a beak-like mouth similar to that of modern squids and nautiluses. 

Heteromorph ammonites are often interpreted as slower, more vertical drifters compared to their tightly coiled cousins — perhaps hovering, bobbing, or gently pulsing through the water column rather than actively cruising.

And the seas they inhabited? Oh, they were anything but quiet.

Audouliceras shared its world with formidable predators and strange contemporaries. Giant marine reptiles patrolled the waters — long-necked plesiosaurs, sleek mosasaurs, and swift ichthyosaurs in earlier intervals. 

Sharks like Cretoxyrhina cruised the depths. Teleost fishes flashed through sunlit waters. Other ammonites — some tightly coiled, some extravagantly uncoiled — drifted alongside them, along with belemnites and rudist bivalves building reef-like structures on the seafloor.

In the fossil record, Audouliceras appears in Upper Cretaceous marine strata, often serving as a useful biostratigraphic marker. Ammonites evolved rapidly and had wide geographic ranges, making them excellent timekeepers for geologists. 

When you find Audouliceras in a rock layer, you are almost certainly standing in the Late Cretaceous.

Heteromorph ammonites like this one remind us that evolution is not a straight line toward efficiency or elegance. It experiments. It loops. It spirals outward and occasionally lets go of symmetry altogether.

And then — at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago — they vanished with the non-avian dinosaurs, casualties of the mass extinction that closed the chapter on the Mesozoic.

What remains are these curious, uncoiled shells in stone — records of a warm sea long gone, and of a lineage that was never afraid to look a little different.

MEET THE NIGER RIVER'S TOP PREDATOR: SUCHOMINUS

Here is a fellow to strike terror into your heart. 

Meet Suchomimus tenerensis, a large, long-snouted spinosaurid theropod who prowled what is now Niger during the Early Cretaceous, roughly 125 million years ago. 

If you imagine a T. rex that fell headfirst into a river ecosystem and decided fish were the future, you’re getting close. 

This was no blunt-faced bone-crusher. Suchomimus had a narrow, crocodile-like snout lined with over a hundred slender, conical teeth perfectly suited for gripping slippery prey.

The fossils come primarily from the Elrhaz Formation in the Ténéré Desert of the Sahara. Today, it is an expanse of sand and heat shimmer. In the Early Cretaceous, it was a lush floodplain threaded with rivers, swamps, and seasonal lakes. Think mangroves, ferns, and conifers rather than dunes. It was discovered in the 1990s by a team led by Paul Sereno, and its name fittingly means “crocodile mimic.”

Suchomimus shared this watery paradise with a lively cast of characters. The sail-backed Ouranosaurus browsed on vegetation nearby. 

The stocky, heavily armored Nigersaurus grazed low-growing plants with its astonishing vacuum-cleaner jaw. Small, nimble theropods darted through the undergrowth. And lurking in the water were giant crocodyliforms like Sarcosuchus imperator, the so-called “SuperCroc,” who could grow over 11 metres long. Imagine the tension at the riverbank. You go fishing and something bigger than your canoe is watching you fish.

Diet-wise, Suchomimus was likely a specialized piscivore, meaning fish were firmly on the menu. Its long jaws, studded with conical teeth and a subtle rosette at the tip, were built for snapping shut on struggling prey. The teeth lack the serrations you see in typical meat-slicing theropods, suggesting it wasn’t primarily designed for tearing chunks from large dinosaurs. 

That said, it was still a 10–11 metre predator with powerful forelimbs and a thumb claw that could make an impression. Fish may have been the specialty, but opportunism is practically a dinosaur hobby. Small terrestrial prey would not have been safe if they wandered too close.

Hunting probably involved a patient, semi-aquatic strategy. Its long snout allowed it to dip into shallow water with minimal disturbance, and the conical teeth helped trap wriggling fish. 

Some spinosaurids show evidence of sensory pits in their snouts, similar to modern crocodilians, suggesting they could detect movement in water. While direct evidence for this in Suchomimus is still debated, the resemblance is striking enough to make you wonder whether it had a similar trick up its sleeve. Or, more accurately, up its snout.

Unlike its later and more extreme cousin Spinosaurus, Suchomimus does not appear to have had a towering sail. Instead, it sported a low ridge of elongated neural spines along its back, perhaps forming a modest hump or ridge. Stylish, but not showy. Think understated riverbank chic.

One of the fun quirks of Suchomimus is its place in the spinosaurid family tree. It sits in the Baryonychinae, closely related to Baryonyx from England. Yes, England. So while one cousin stalked Early Cretaceous river systems in what is now West Africa, another was doing much the same in Surrey. Spinosaurids, it seems, were cosmopolitan anglers.

And then there are those arms. Strong, well-developed forelimbs with large claws, including a prominent thumb claw, suggest it could grapple with prey or perhaps haul itself along muddy banks. It was not the tiny-armed stereotype of later theropods. 

If Suchomimus reached out to grab something, it likely succeeded.

In the fossil record, Suchomimus helps us understand the early evolution of spinosaurids before they became even more specialized. It represents a moment when dinosaurs were experimenting with ecological niches beyond the classic terrestrial predator role. River margins were not just crocodile territory. They were contested real estate.

So picture it: 125 million years ago, on a warm Cretaceous floodplain in what is now the Sahara, a long-snouted predator stands at the water’s edge. 

Fish scatter beneath the surface. A distant Ouranosaurus snorts. Somewhere, a SuperCroc slides silently into the river. 

And Suchomimus waits, patient and perfectly adapted, the elegant angler of the dinosaur world.

Not every theropod needed to rule the land. Some were quite happy ruling the river.

CREAMY APORRHAIS FOSSIL GASTROPOD

This creamy, beige specimen of Aporrhais sp., is a fossil marine gastropod from the Goodland Formation of Fort Worth, Texas, a limestone unit laid down during the Lower Cretaceous (Albian), roughly 113–100 million years ago. 

At that time, north-central Texas lay beneath a warm, shallow epicontinental sea connected to the broader Western Interior Seaway, an environment ideal for shelled invertebrates to flourish.

Aporrhais is a thick-shelled sea snail, part of a lineage well adapted to life on carbonate seafloors. Its inflated, smoothly rounded whorls and robust form suggest a slow-moving grazer or detritivore, creeping across soft sediments in calm, sunlit waters. 

The pale colouration you see today reflects mineral replacement during burial, with the original aragonitic shell long since altered to limestone.

The Goodland Formation is famous for its diverse fossil assemblage. Alongside gastropods, collectors and researchers regularly find ammonites (including forms such as Douvilleiceras), bivalves like oysters and rudists, echinoids (sea urchins), corals, and occasional crustaceans. Together, these fossils paint a vivid picture of a thriving Cretaceous reef-adjacent ecosystem.

Exposures of the Goodland around Fort Worth have been known and collected since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often through quarrying and construction cuts. Early geological and paleontological work in the region was carried out by figures such as Robert T. Hill, W. S. Adkins, and T. W. Stanton, whose studies helped establish the stratigraphy and fossil content of the Texas Cretaceous. 

Since then, generations of professional paleontologists and dedicated local collectors have continued to document and refine our understanding of this richly fossiliferous formation.

This specimen was collected by Jack Whittles in the 1990s, shared with the Pacific Museum of the Earth (the precursor museum to the one now at UBC, and then shared with me...)

ARMADILLOS: NATURE'S TINY TANK

Armadillos, part tank, part roly-poly

If you’ve ever seen an armadillo, you know they look like something straight out of a prehistoric cartoon—part mouse, part tank, part roly-poly. 

I saw my first of these tiny tanks while in Mexico and was instantly entranced!

These fascinating creatures didn’t just roll into the scene yesterday; their ancestors have been roaming Earth for tens of millions of years! 

Let’s dig into the story of armadillos, from fossil giants to today’s armor-clad adventurers.

Armadillos belong to a family of mammals called Xenarthrans, which includes sloths and anteaters. 

Their ancient relatives first show up in the fossil record around 60 million years ago, not long after the dinosaurs vanished.

Back then, South America was an isolated continent—like a giant tropical island—and it became the perfect place for armadillos’ ancestors to evolve. 

One of the most impressive was the Glyptodon, a prehistoric giant that lived about 2.5 million years ago during the Ice Age. Picture an armadillo the size of a small car, with a bony shell thick enough to deflect the bite of a sabre-toothed cat! Glyptodons even had spiked tails, a bit like medieval maces.

When the Panama land bridge formed about 3 million years ago, armadillos and their relatives marched north into North America. 

That’s why today you can find their descendants, like the Nine-Banded Armadillo, as far north as the southern United States—and they’re still creeping slowly farther north each year.

Today, there are 21 species of armadillos, most living in Central and South America. 

The Nine-Banded Armadillo is the most widespread and is famous for its habit of jumping straight up when startled—sometimes up to 1.5 metres into the air! (It’s a funny trick, though not always helpful when cars are involved.)

Armadillos live in grasslands, rainforests, deserts, and scrublands, where they dig burrows to sleep during the day and come out at night to hunt for food. 

Their name comes from Spanish and means “little armoured one”—a perfect fit for their bony shell made of osteoderms, plates of bone covered by keratin (the same stuff in your fingernails).

Armadillos are expert insect-hunters. They use their super-sensitive noses and long, sticky tongues to sniff out and slurp up ants, termites, beetles, and grubs. Some species also eat fruit, small amphibians, and even carrion (dead animals). Their clawed forefeet are perfect for digging through soil, logs, and leaf litter to find a crunchy snack.

And get this—armadillos can hold their breath for up to six minutes and even walk underwater across small streams in search of food. When they reach deeper water, they just inflate their stomach and intestines like balloons and float across!

Baby Armadillos and Family Life — Armadillo families are just as curious as their armour. Most species give birth once a year, after a long nap-like period called delayed implantation, where the fertilised egg just hangs out for months before growing into an embryo.

The Nine-Banded Armadillo is especially famous for giving birth to identical quadruplets—four baby armadillos from one egg, each a perfect genetic copy of the others! The babies, called pups, are born with soft, pink shells that harden as they grow. Mothers care for them in cozy burrows until they’re ready to explore on their own.

Cool Armadillo Facts — 

• Armadillos can roll into a ball—well, some can! Only the Three-Banded Armadillo can fully curl up and seal itself tight like a living pinball.
• Their low body temperature and slow metabolism make them less likely to get sick, but they can catch diseases like leprosy (which scientists study carefully—don’t worry, they’re not spreading it around your backyard).
• Armadillos are important for ecosystems: their digging helps aerate soil and spread plant seeds.
• Fossils of ancient armadillos have been found across both Americas, showing how they survived massive climate changes, Ice Ages, and the rise of humans.

From Fossils to Forests — From the car-sized Glyptodon to the jumpy Nine-Banded Armadillo, these armoured mammals have been Earth’s quiet diggers for millions of years. 

They’ve crossed continents, survived predators, and evolved into some of the most unique animals alive today. If you happen to be lucky enough to see an armadillo waddling beside the road or across a field—or just a photo of one—you’re looking at the tiny descendant of an Ice Age tank. 

And that’s one seriously cool survivor.

COILED PERFECTION: LYTOCERAS

A superbly prepped and extremely rare Lytoceras (Suess, 1865) ammonite found as a green ammonite nodule by Matt Cape in the Lower Lias of Dorset. 

Lytoceras are rare in the Lower Lias of Dorset — apart from the Belemnite Stone horizon — so much so that Paul Davis, whose skilled prep work you see here, initially thought it might be a Becheiceras hidden within the large, lumpy nodule. 

One of the reasons these lovelies are rarely found from here is that they are a Mediterranean Tethyian genus. The fossil fauna we find in the United Kingdom are dominated by Boreal Tethyian genera. 

We do find Lytoceras sp. in the Luridum subzone of the Pliensbachian showing that there was an influx of species from the Mediterranean realm during this time. This is the first occurrence of a Lytoceras that he has ever seen in a green nodule and Paul's seen quite a few. 

This absolutely cracking specimen was found and is in the collections of the awesome Matt Cape. Matt recognized that whatever was hidden in the nodule would take skilled and careful preparation using air scribes. Indeed it did. It took more than five hours of time and skill to unveil the lovely museum-worthy specimen you see here. 

We find Lytoceras in more than 1,000 outcrops around the globe ranging from the Jurassic through to the Cretaceous, some 189.6 to 109.00 million years ago. Once this specimen is fully prepped with the nodule material cut or scraped away, you can see the detailed crinkly growth lines or riblets on the shell and none of the expected coarse ribbing. 

Lytoceras sp. Photo: Craig Chivers

If you imagine running your finger along these, you would be tracing the work of decades of growth of these cephalopods. 

While we cannot know their actual lifespans, but we can make a healthy guess. 

The nautilus, their closest living cousins live upwards of 20 years — gods be good — and less than three years if conditions are poor.

The flanges, projecting flat ribs or collars, develop at the edge of the mouth border on the animal's mantle as they grow each new chamber. 

Each delicate flange grows over the course of the ammonites life, marking various points in time and life stages as the ammonite grew. There is a large variation within Lytoceras with regards to flanges. They provide both ornamentation and strength to the shell to protect it from water pressure as they moved into deeper seas.

The concretion prior to prep

This distinctive genus with its evolute shells are found in the Cretaceous marine deposits of: 

Antarctica (5 collections), Austria (19), Colombia (1), the Czech Republic (3), Egypt (2), France (194), Greenland (16), Hungary (25), Italy (11), Madagascar (2), Mexico (1), Morocco (4), Mozambique (1), Poland (2), Portugal (1), Romania (1), the Russian Federation (2), Slovakia (3), South Africa (1), Spain (24), Tanzania (1), Trinidad and Tobago (1), Tunisia (25); and the United States of America (17: Alaska, California, North Carolina, Oregon).

We also find them in Jurassic marine outcrops in:

Austria (15), Canada (9: British Columbia), Chile (6), France (181), Germany (11), Greenland (1), Hungary (189), India (1), Indonesia (1), Iran (1), Italy (50), Japan (14), Kenya (2), Luxembourg (4), Madagascar (2), Mexico (1), Morocco (43), New Zealand (15), Portugal (1), Romania (5), the Russian Federation (1), Slovakia (1), Spain (6), Switzerland (2), Tunisia (11), Turkey (12), Turkmenistan (1), Ukraine (5), the United Kingdom (12), United States (11: Alaska, California) — in at least 977 known collections. 

References:

Sepkoski, Jack (2002). "A compendium of fossil marine animal genera (Cephalopoda entry)". Bulletins of American Paleontology. 363: 1–560. Archived from the original on 2008-05-07. Retrieved 2017-10-18.

Paleobiology Database - Lytoceras. 2017-10-19.

Systematic descriptions, Mesozoic Ammonoidea, by W.J Arkell, Bernhard Kummel, and C.W. Wright. 1957. Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology, Part L. Geological Society of America and University of Kansas press.

LURKING IN THE LATE CRETACEOUS: RAJASAURUS

Rajasaurus narmadensis

In the humid, fern-thick forests of Late Cretaceous India — about 67 million years ago — a flash of red moves between the tree trunks.

Think oxidized iron and dried blood — deep crimson-orange broken by pale white striping and bold black bands along the flanks and tail. 

In dappled forest light, those stripes would fracture the animal’s outline, a trick modern tigers use to unnerving effect. Camouflage is not new. Evolution figured that out long before mammals started prowling.

This is Rajasaurus narmadensis, the “king lizard of the Narmada,” known from the Lameta Formation of central India. 

At roughly 6–7 meters long and weighing perhaps a metric ton, it was not the largest theropod of its time — but it did not need to be. It was built for hunting.

Rajasaurus belongs to the Abelisauridae, a clade of short-snouted, deep-skulled theropods that dominated the southern continents of Gondwana. If you squint, you can see its relatives in Madagascar’s Majungasaurus, Argentina’s Carnotaurus, and Africa’s Rugops. These animals were the southern answer to the tyrannosaurs of the north.

Unlike the long-snouted, banana-toothed elegance of Tyrannosaurus rex, abelisaurids had blunt, boxy skulls and often elaborate cranial ornamentation. Rajasaurus sported a single low horn or dome on its forehead — not a unicorn spike, but a thickened bony crest. 

It likely served for display, species recognition, or perhaps ritualized head-shoving contests. Theropods were dramatic. This is not speculation; this is pattern recognition across deep time.

Its forelimbs? Tiny. Comically so. Abelisaurids doubled down on arm reduction — evolution looked at the T. rex blueprint and said, “Let’s go smaller.” The arms were functionally irrelevant in prey capture. This was a head-driven predator. And what a head it was.

Rajasaurus lived in interesting times. Late Cretaceous India was not yet welded to Asia. It was a drifting island continent, sliding northward across the Tethys Ocean. The climate was warm, seasonally dry, punctuated by monsoonal rains. River systems braided across floodplains. Forests of conifers, palms, and flowering plants thickened along waterways. Ferns and horsetails crowded the understory.

Sharing that forest were enormous titanosaurian sauropods, including forms like Isisaurus and Jainosaurus. Long-necked, barrel-bodied giants moved in herds, stripping vegetation and reshaping the landscape as they fed. Their hatchlings and juveniles would have been very much on Rajasaurus’s radar.

Small ornithischian dinosaurs darted through the brush. Crocodyliforms basked along muddy riverbanks. Turtles paddled in oxbow lakes. Mammals — small, mostly nocturnal insectivores — kept wisely out of sight.

Pterosaurs likely wheeled overhead. Insects buzzed. The forest was noisy, layered, alive.

And somewhere within it, Rajasaurus was listening.

Abelisaurids had thick necks and reinforced skulls. Biomechanical studies of relatives like Majungasaurus suggest a predatory style focused less on bone-crushing bite force and more on repeated, slashing bites combined with powerful neck musculature. Think controlled violence rather than single catastrophic impact.

Rajasaurus likely relied on ambush. In dense forest cover, speed over short distances would matter more than marathon endurance. Its hind limbs were strong and proportioned for bursts of acceleration.

Picture it waiting — body low, tail held rigid for balance. A subadult titanosaur lingers near the herd’s edge. A misstep. A moment of distraction. The red-and-white predator explodes from cover.

The jaws close around soft tissue — flank, neck, perhaps hind limb — and then release. Another strike. And another. Blood loss and shock do the rest. Abelisaurids may not have grappled like dromaeosaurs or crushed like tyrannosaurs, but they were efficient.

And they were persistent.

There is even evidence of cannibalism among some abelisaurids (looking at you, Majungasaurus), so it’s not unreasonable to suspect Rajasaurus would not waste protein when opportunity presented itself. 

The predators of the Late Cretaceous were not sentimental.

Phylogenetically, Rajasaurus sits within Abelisaurinae, closely related to Majungasaurus of Madagascar and South American forms such as Carnotaurus sastrei. This distribution tells a broader tectonic story — these predators evolved across the southern fragments of Gondwana before continental breakup isolated their lineages.

India’s northward drift preserved a snapshot of this southern evolutionary experiment just before the asteroid impact that would end the non-avian dinosaurs.

Rajasaurus lived within a few million years of that event. Which means this red-striped hunter walked forests that would soon vanish under global firestorms, impact winter, and ecological collapse.

The gorgeous illustration you see here is by the supremely talented Daniel Eskridge, licensed for use. Appreciate you, Daniel. 

Timing, as ever, is everything.

ALBERTONIA FROM THE CRANBROOK MUSEUM COLLECTION

Albertonia sp., Cranbrook Museum Collection

This beauty, with its graceful sail-like fins and armour of lustrous, diamond-shaped scales, is Albertonia sp., an Early Triassic ganoid fish from the ancient seas of what is now British Columbia and Alberta. 

Belonging to the family Parasemionotidae—among the most advanced and abundant of the Triassic subholosteans—Albertonia is one of the real showstoppers of Canada’s Early Triassic fossil record.

Specimens of this lovely are known from the Vega-Phroso Siltstone Member of the Sulphur Mountain Formation near Wapiti Lake in northeastern British Columbia, as well as from the Lower Triassic Montney Formation of Alberta. These units are part of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin, a region that preserves some of the finest Early Triassic fish faunas anywhere on Earth.

The Wapiti Lake exposures, in particular, are world-class. Here, a rich assemblage of exquisitely preserved bony fishes—armoured in heavy ganoid and cosmoid scales—has been uncovered. Four genera dominate these ancient marine beds: the ray-finned actinopterygians Albertonia, Bobasatrania, and Boreosomus, alongside the lobe-finned coelacanth Whiteia. 

Together, they form a window into life during a time of ecological recovery following the end-Permian mass extinction.

Albertonia is easily one of my favourites. Most specimens measure around 35–40 cm in length and display a striking, streamlined silhouette. The most distinctive feature is the tall, sail-shaped dorsal fin, paired with long, elegant pectoral fins that also flare like miniature sails. The ventral fins are comparatively small, giving the fish a unique balance and profile unlike anything in today’s oceans.

These fishes inhabited deeper marine waters, feeding on plankton and other small organisms drifting through the Early Triassic seas. 

The extraordinary preservation of many specimens—right down to the crisp geometry of each square-shaped ganoid scale—suggests rapid burial in calm, anoxic seafloor sediments where scavengers and decay could not disturb them. In some fossils, the sculptural quality of the ganoine coating is still visible, each scale a tiny gleaming tessera in a mosaic more than 245 million years old.

Together, Albertonia and its Triassic companions help tell a story of resilience and renewal. In the wake of Earth’s greatest extinction event, life returned to the oceans with new forms, new strategies, and unexpected beauty. And in the fine-grained rocks of Wapiti Lake and the Montney Formation, that beauty has been preserved in breathtaking detail, scale by scale, fin by fin, across deep time.

WHALE REMAINS AT JOUGLA POINT, PORT LOCKROY

Blue Whale Remains, Balaenoptera musculus

Along the stony shore of Jougla Point, near Port Lockroy on the Antarctic Peninsula, a scatter of great bones lies open to the wind. 

The skeleton is that of a blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, the largest animal ever known to have lived on Earth, though the assemblage may include bones from other baleen whales discarded during the industrial whaling era. 

Visitors approach in Zodiacs to find vertebrae the size of millstones, jaw elements curved like crossed oars, and ribs arcing across the gravel. 

It is a stark and unsentimental record of the 20th-century hunt that once emptied Antarctic waters of their giants.

Blue whales are baleen mysticetes within the rorqual family, engineered for long migrations and high-volume filter feeding. 

Adults can exceed 30 meters in length and reach masses over 150 tonnes — a scale that eclipses even the largest dinosaurs. Their fossil record is surprisingly young. 

Although whale ancestors arose in the Eocene (~50 million years ago), the lineage leading to modern rorquals, including blue whales, diversifies during the Miocene and Pliocene (roughly 23–2.6 million years ago). 

Fossil mysticetes from California, Italy, Peru, and New Zealand document that transition: from toothed baleen ancestors to fully edentulous filter feeders with vaulting skulls and expandable throats built for krill-rich seas. 

True “blue whale–like” forms appear only in the Pleistocene and Holocene, making these colossal cetaceans a relatively recent evolutionary experiment.

In life today, blue whales occupy vast swaths of the global ocean, moving seasonally between high-latitude feeding grounds and lower-latitude calving areas. Major populations persist in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, eastern tropical Pacific, Southern Ocean, and waters off Australia and New Zealand. 

Their preferred summer feeding grounds lie in zones of upwelling and krill abundance — places like the California Current, the Subantarctic Front, and the Scotia Sea.

The industrial era nearly erased them. 

Prior to commercial hunting, global numbers likely exceeded 250,000 individuals. By the 1970s, after decades of relentless Antarctic whaling, their numbers crashed to less than 1% of pre-exploitation levels. 

With international protections in place, blue whales are recovering slowly but unevenly. 

Current estimates hover around 10,000–25,000 animals worldwide — still critically small for a species of such enormous ecological footprint.

Despite their rarity, blue whales remain visible to those who seek them. They are encountered off California and Baja, around Sri Lanka, in the Gulf of Corcovado, the Tasman Sea, the Kerguelen Plateau, and sporadically across the Southern Ocean. 

In these places, the sea shines with plankton and the long low blows of a whale may hang in the air like cold breath.

At Jougla Point, the story is told through bones weathering in chilly silence — a natural museum without walls. I am generally in search of fossil remains, but these hit all those same emotions. Barring our intervention and natural disaster, these great beasts can live to be more than 100 years old. What they must see over those long years.   

And, how do we know how old they are? We can estimate age by reading earplug layers (like tree rings) in deceased whales — each waxy layer marks a period of life, helping confirm those long lifespans.

HIGH-NOSED ON THE CRETACEOUS PLAINS: THE RISE OF ALTIRHINUS

This Early Cretaceous herbivore—living about 113 to 100 million years ago during the Albian—roamed what is now Mongolia. 

Its name means “high nose,” and once you see the skull, you understand why. 

The nasal bones rise into a tall, arched crest, giving Altirhinus a profile that looks like it’s perpetually catching a good breeze across the ancient floodplains.

Altirhinus kurzanovi is what happens when evolution decides to experiment with architecture.

Altirhinus belongs to the iguanodontians, a group of ornithopod dinosaurs that sit evolutionarily between the earlier, more lightly built Jurassic forms and the later, highly specialized duck-billed hadrosaurs. 

It still carried the classic iguanodontian thumb spike—likely useful for defense or perhaps a bit of pointed persuasion during intraspecies disagreements—but it also shows early hints of the sophisticated chewing system that would later make hadrosaurs the undisputed salad bar champions of the Late Cretaceous.

In the fossil record, Altirhinus appears in the Khuren Dukh Formation of southeastern Mongolia. The sediments there were laid down in river channels and floodplains—lush, seasonally wet environments ideal for large plant-eaters. Several well-preserved skeletons have been recovered, including remarkably complete skull material that lets paleontologists appreciate that lofty nasal arch in detail. The crest was probably soft-tissue enhanced in life and may have functioned in display, species recognition, or vocal resonance. It’s hard not to imagine a low, booming call rolling across the Cretaceous wetlands.

If you'd like to see the bones found from Altirhinus, you will want to head to Mongolia. Most of the fossils found to date are housed in Mongolian institutions and have been studied internationally, particularly following expeditions in the 1990s that helped clarify its anatomy and evolutionary position. 

Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, which now feels stark and wind-scoured, continues to yield beautifully preserved dinosaur remains—proof that deserts can be excellent librarians of deep time.

Altirhinus did not live alone. Its ecosystem included predatory theropods such as dromaeosaurids—swift, feathered carnivores with a talent for coordinated hunting—and larger theropods that would have regarded a juvenile Altirhinus as an opportunity rather than a neighbor. 

Early ceratopsians, ankylosaurs armored like ambulatory fortresses, and other ornithopods shared the same landscapes. It was a dynamic, competitive world of herds, hunters, and seasonal change.

What makes Altirhinus particularly interesting is its timing. It lived during a pivotal evolutionary interval when ornithopods were refining their skulls and dental batteries. 

Its elevated nasal region and increasingly complex chewing apparatus foreshadow the full-blown hadrosaur condition that would dominate later in the Cretaceous. In that sense, Altirhinus is both a character in its own right and a transitional figure in a much larger story.

So while Tyrannosaurus tends to steal the spotlight, spare a thought for Altirhinus—the high-nosed grazer of Cretaceous Mongolia. 

It may not have had the teeth of a super-predator, but it carried itself with a certain cranial confidence, grazing its way through history and quietly shaping the future of duck-billed dinosaurs.

Image credit: The gorgeous illustration you see here is by the supremely talented Daniel Eskridge, licensed for use. Appreciate you, Daniel. 

FOSSILS, TEXTILES AND URINE: YORKSHIRE HISTORY

Yorkshire Coast

You may recall the eight-metre Type Specimen of the ichthyosaur, Temnodontosaurus crassimanus, found in an alum quarry in Yorkshire, northern England.

The Yorkshire Museum was given this important ichthyosaur fossil back in 1857 when alum production was still a necessary staple of the textile industry. Without that industry, many wonderful specimens would likely never have been unearthed.

These quarries are an interesting bit of British history as they helped shape the Yorkshire Coast, created an entirely new industry and gave us more than a fixative for dyes. 

With them came the discovery of many remarkable fossil specimens and, oddly, local employment in the collection of urine.

In the 16th century, alum was essential in the textile industry as a fixative for dyes. 

By the first half of the 16th century, the clothing of the Low Countries, German states, and Scandinavia had developed in a different direction than that of England, France, and Italy, although all absorbed the sobering and formal influence of Spanish dress after the mid-1520s. Those fashions held true until the Inquisition when religious persecution, politics and fashion underwent a much-needed overhaul to something lighter.

Fashion in Medieval Livonia (1521): Albrecht Dürer

Elaborate slashing was popular, especially in Germany. In the depiction you see here, an artist pokes a bit of fun at Germanic fashion from the time. Bobbin lace arose from passementerie in the mid-16th century in Flanders, the Flemish Dutch-speaking northern portion of Belgium. Black was increasingly worn for the most formal occasions.

This century saw the rise of the ruff, which grew from a mere ruffle at the neckline to immense, slightly silly, cartwheel shapes. They adorned the necklines of the ultra-wealthy and uber-stylish men and women of the age.

At their most extravagant, ruffs required wire supports and were made of fine Italian reticella, a cutwork linen lace. You can imagine the many hours of skill and patience that would have gone into each piece to create the artful framework of these showy lace collars.

16th Century Fashion / Ruff Collars and Finery

In contrast to all that ruff, lace and cutwork linen, folk needed dyed fabrics. And to fix those dyes, they needed Alum. For a time, Italy was the source of that alum.

The Pope held a tidy monopoly on the industry, supplying both alum and the best dyes. He also did a nice trade in colourful and rare pigments for painting. And for a time, all was well with dandy's strutting their finery to the local fops in Britain.

All that changed during the Reformation. Great Britain, heathens as they were, were cut off from their Papal source and needed to fend for themselves.

The good Thomas Challoner took up the charge and set up Britain's first Alum works in Guisborough. Challoner looked to palaeontology for inspiration. Noticing that the fossils found on the Yorkshire coast were very similar to those found in the Alum quarries in Europe, he hatched a plan to set-up an alum industry on home soil. 

As the industry grew, sites along the coast were favoured as access to the shales and subsequent transportation was much easier.

Alum House, Photo: Joyce Dobson and Keith Bowers

Alum was extracted from quarried shales through a large scale and complicated process which took months to complete. 

The process involved extracting then burning huge piles of shale for 9 months, before transferring it to leaching pits to extract an aluminium sulphate liquor. This was sent along channels to the alum works where human urine was added.

At the peak of alum production, the industry required 200 tonnes of urine every year. That's the equivalent of all the potty visits of more than 1,000 people. Yes, strange but true.

The steady demand was hard to keep up with and urine became an imported resource from markets as far away as London and Newcastle upon Tyne in the northeast of England. Wooden buckets were left on street corners for folk to do their business then carted back to the south to complete the alum extraction process. The urine and alum would be mixed into a thick liquid. Once mixed, the aromatic slosh was left to settle and then the alum crystals were removed.

I'm not sure if this is a folktale or plain truth, but as the story goes, one knows when the optimum amount of alum had been extracted as you can pop an egg in the bucket and it floats on its own.

Alum House. Photo: Ann Wedgewood and Keith Bowers

The last Alum works on the Yorkshire Coast closed in 1871. This was due to the invention of manufacturing synthetic alum in 1855, then subsequently the creation of aniline dyes that contained their own fixative.

Many sites along the Yorkshire Coast bear evidence of the alum industry. These include Loftus Alum Quarries where the cliff profile is drastically changed by extraction and huge shale tips remain.

Further South are the Ravenscar Alum Works, which are well-preserved and enable visitors to visualize the processes which took place. The photos you see here are of Alum House at Hummersea. The first shows the ruin of Alum House printed on a postcard from 1906. The second (bottom) image shows the same ruin from on high with Cattersty Point in the background.

The good folk at the National Trust in Swindon are to thank for much of the background shared here. If you'd like to learn more about the Yorkshire area or donate to a very worthy charity, follow their link below.

Reference: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/yorkshire-coast/features/how-alum-shaped-the-yorkshire-coast

TEMNODONTOSAURUS CRASSIMANUS

Temnodontosaurus crassimanus

Meet Temnodontosaurus crassimanus — the sea monster that looked like someone asked nature to weld a dolphin to a speed-boat and then crank the dial to “chaos.” 

This big Jurassic unit was patrolling the ancient oceans some 180 million years ago, back when Britain was less tea-and-crumpets and more sharks, ammonites, and unsupervised evolutionary experimentation.

Our lad here carries a rather posh pedigree. Temnodontosaurus crassimanus was first named by none other than Sir Richard “Coined-the-Word-Dinosaur” Owen — the Victorian gentleman naturalist, master of self-promotion, and inaugural superintendent of what would become the Natural History Museum in London. 

Owen had a long habit of tussling with ideas and people (poor Darwin), but to his credit, the man knew a good fossil when he saw one. And this brute was a standout.

Fast-forward a century and a bit and the ever-industrious Dean Lomax (palaeontologist, author, and Yorkshire’s own fossil whisperer) rolled up to study this celebrity specimen as part of his research leading into his PhD. When future palaeontologists write the social history of ichthyosaur fandom, Lomax will certainly get his own chapter. He's a boy about town in a vocation filled with dusty fossil filled cases and muddy field work.

So, is Temnodontosaurus crassimanus a big deal? Yeppers. The Yorkshire specimen isn’t just a Temnodontosaurus. He’s the Temnodontosaurus. The Type Specimen. The gold standard. The reference fossil. The one all wannabes must measure up to before they earn the name. If ichthyosaur taxonomy were a Regency romance, this fellow is the Duke of Diagnostic Features. Everyone else gets compared to him.

He lives today in respectable comfort at the Yorkshire Museum, a stately resident amid ammonites, plesiosaurs, and other Jurassic goodies. 

But his road to fame was… inelegant.

Back in 1857, workmen quarrying alum shale near Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast started turning up chunks of gigantic reptile bones. No one blinked an eye at digging giant holes into cliffs (Victorian industry was chaos incarnate), but thirty-foot prehistoric reptiles were another matter. 

Word got passed up the chain of command, and eventually Sir Richard Owen himself was summoned, presumably with much whisker-stroking and Latin.

Recovering the fossil was a scene straight out of an industrial novel. More than fifty slabs. Massive shale blocks. Quarry operations thundering around. Men shouting. Someone trying not to drop a vertebra the size of a teapot. 

All while alum production hummed away — an industry that had made Yorkshire indispensable to the textile world since the 1500s. Synthetic chemistry ultimately doomed the trade; by the 1860s it was sputtering, and by 1871 it was gone entirely. But in those twilight years, the alum quarries gifted paleontology an eight-metre aquatic missile — one of the largest ichthyosaurs ever discovered in the UK.

Not a bad parting present, really.

Today we look at Temnodontosaurus and think sleek marine super-predator — a creature built for speed, crushing jaws, and a diet that likely included belemnites, fish, and anything else foolish enough to loom into view. 

But in the early 1800s, these beasts were still rewriting natural history. Mary Anning’s discoveries at Lyme Regis had upended old ideas, and ichthyosaurs became one of the first fossil groups to teach Victorian Britain that extinction was real and the Earth had been home to worlds utterly unlike our own.

So, should you happen by the museum to take a gander at that big Yorkshire slab of Jurassic muscle, give him a little nod. He survived catastrophic oceans, industrial quarrying, and the politics of Victorian science — and still looks fabulous for it.

Paleo-coordinates: 54.5° N, 0.6° W: paleocoordinates 42.4° N, 9.3° E

FOSSIL DIG AT DINOSAUR PROVINCIAL PARK

Dinosaur Provincial Park Fossil Dig

Ohh yes — Dinosaur Provincial Park is one of those places where time just… refuses to mind its manners. 

It sprawls across the badlands of southeastern Alberta, a sunburned maze of hoodoos, gullies, bentonite clays, and wide, silent coulees where the Late Cretaceous still feels startlingly close. 

If you know your dinosaurs — and I know you do — this is one of Earth’s most important bonebeds, rivaled only by the Gobi Desert and a few select pockets of Montana and Patagonia.

Roughly 75–77 million years ago, this region lay at the edge of a warm coastal plain along the interior Western Interior Seaway. 

Think slow, looping rivers; cypress and fern marshes; balmy summers; and a very high probability of running into hadrosaurs (Corythosaurus, Lambeosaurus, Parasaurolophus), horned dinosaurs (Centrosaurus, Styracosaurus), tyrannosaurs, ankylosaurs, troodontids, turtles, champsosaurs, crocodilians, and freshwater fish. 

Floods, storms, and meandering river channels buried carcasses in mud and silt, and nature did the rest — compacting and lithifying them into the Oldman and Dinosaur Park formations we know today.

How They Dig

Excavating in the park is old-school science at its most tactile. Crews begin by scouting — sometimes guided by erosion, sometimes by bone fragments that weather out of the hillsides. Once they’ve identified promising exposures, they get down on hands and knees with rock hammers, awls, brushes, and dental picks.

The key is going slow. These sediments are soft but unpredictable; a single Centrosaurus femur can shear if you rush. Bones are consolidated with glue-like hardeners as they’re exposed. For larger finds, crews build plaster jackets — soaked burlap dipped in plaster, wrapped around the fossil and supporting matrix like an orthopedic cast — then transport the slab out of the coulees by hand, ATV, helicopter, or small cart. 

The jackets then head to prep labs in Drumheller or museums worldwide for meticulous cleaning under microscopes.

What They Find

The park is a jackpot for both skeletal and taphonomic diversity. Here you'll find:

• Bonebeds — catastrophic mass-death deposits, especially of Centrosaurus, interpreted as herd drownings during river floods or tropical storms.
• Articulated skeletons and partial individuals — gorgeous, curled-up hadrosaurs or ankylosaurs preserved in river channel sands.
• Microfossil sites — turtle shell, crocodile scutes, fish scales, tiny dinosaur teeth, and delicate vertebrae that tell the story of small-bodied fauna and paleoecology.
• Plant impressions — the background greenery of the Cretaceous world, from conifers to broad-leaved angiosperms.

It’s not uncommon for field seasons here to recover multiple new individuals, and historically the park has yielded more than 50 dinosaur species and thousands of catalogued specimens — a staggering contribution to paleontology.

The Visitor Experience

• What’s beautifully unique is that Dinosaur Provincial Park is both a research landscape and a public one. You can:
• Walk the badlands trails and stumble across weathering bone fragments (strictly look, no collecting).
• Join guided interpretive tours that take you into active restricted dig zones — a rare privilege, since most world-class bonebeds are off-limits.
• Visit the field stations where staff show plaster jackets, exposed bones, and explain how digs work.
• See fossils in situ at special display sites, where the bones are left exactly where they were found and protected under viewing shelters. It’s like peeking through a window into deep time.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum also runs programs out of the park — including multi-day paleontology experiences where visitors learn to prospect, excavate, and identify fossils under expert supervision. For many, that’s the closest they’ll ever come to being a field paleontologist.

Aside from being visually stunning (cinematographers love the badlands light), the park preserves one of the most detailed snapshots of Late Cretaceous continental ecosystems in the world. 

Because the formations are stacked and time-resolved, researchers can read shifts in faunal communities, climate patterns, environments, and extinction pressures across a few million years — essentially watching ecosystems change in slow motion.

Can Folk Visit?

• Absolutely. It’s open to the public (with seasonal restrictions), but with a few courtesies:
• Stay on trails in open areas — the sediments are fragile and erosion is an active process.
• No fossil collecting — everything stays on the landscape for science.
• Book ahead for guided digs — they fill fast, especially in summer.
• Prepare for heat — badlands are oven-like in July and August.

It’s a place that manages to feel both ancient and alive. The silence carries, the rocks crumble under hand, and sometimes — if you’re lucky — a chip of bone glints from a slope where a Centrosaurus weathered out just last winter.

UPPER CAMBRIAN TRILOBITE PROCERATOPYGE

Proceratopyge rectispinata

A lovely creamy brown Proceratopyge rectispinata trilobite from Upper Cambrian deposits in the McKay Group near Cranbrook, British Columbia. 

Trilobites, as you no doubt already know, are extinct marine arthropods that lived in Earth’s oceans for over 270 million years, first appearing in the Early Cambrian and disappearing at the end of the Permian. 

They are named for their three-lobed, segmented exoskeleton, which is divided lengthwise into a central axis and two pleural lobes.

The Upper Cambrian strata of the McKay Group near Cranbrook, southeastern British Columbia, preserve a modest but scientifically important assemblage of trilobites that record life along the western margin of Laurentia roughly 497–485 million years ago. 

During this interval, the region lay beneath a warm, shallow epicontinental sea, where fine-grained siliciclastic sediments accumulated on a broad continental shelf.

The trilobite faunas from the McKay Group are dominated by polymerid trilobites typical of Upper Cambrian shelf environments, including representatives of the families Pterocephaliidae and Elviniidae, with taxa comparable to Pterocephalia, Elvinia, and allied genera documented elsewhere in the Cordilleran margin. 

They are characterised by well-developed cephalic borders, pronounced glabellar furrows, and reduced or effaced pygidia—morphological features commonly associated with soft-substrate, low-energy settings.

Preservation is generally as disarticulated sclerites—isolated cephala, thoracic segments, and pygidia—suggesting post-mortem transport or periodic storm reworking on the Cambrian seafloor. 

As a guest of Chris New and Chris Jenkins (and collecting with great friends from the VIPS & VanPS) I have gleefully explored these Upper Cambrian exposures. 

Most of my earlier travels in the area focused on the Lower Cambrian Eager Formation, and it was only in the early 2000s that I first explored the bounty nearby. 

The McKay group offers a tantalizing selection of fauna and vastly different preservation than what we find in the Eager Formation. 

Much of my collecting benefited from natural erosion, leaving the fossils sitting pretty on the surface. Excavation did yield some finds, including my best specimen of all my trips. I'll find that lovely and share a photo with all of you.   

The assemblage provides valuable biostratigraphic control, allowing correlation of the McKay Group with coeval Upper Cambrian successions in the western United States and other parts of British Columbia.

A huge thank you to Dan Bowden and Chris Jenkins (who are both deeply awesome) for their help with the ID!  Appreciate you two!

A MASSIVE AMMONITE THE SIZE OF A CAR: THE FERNIE AMMONITE

Titanites occidentalis, Fernie Ammonite

The Fernie ammonite—long known as Titanites occidentalis—has officially been given a new name: Corbinites occidentalis, a fresh genus erected after a meticulous re-evaluation of this Western Giant’s anatomy and lineage. 

What hasn’t changed is its breathtaking presence high on Coal Mountain near Fernie, British Columbia, where this colossal cephalopod has rested for roughly 150 million years.

This extraordinary fossil belongs to the family Lithacoceratinae within the ataxioceratid ammonites. 

Once thought to be a close cousin of the great Titanites of Dorset, new material—including two additional large specimens discovered at nearby mine sites—reveals ribbing patterns and growth-stage features that simply didn’t match Titanites. 

With these multiple overlapping growth stages finally available, paleontologists had the missing pieces needed to correct its identity.

So, Titanites occidentalis no more—meet Corbinites occidentalis, a giant ammonite likely endemic to the relatively isolated early Alberta foreland basin of the Late Jurassic.

Fernie, British Columbia, Canada

The Fernie ammonite is a carnivorous cephalopod from the latest Jurassic (Tithonian). 

The spectacular individual on Coal Mountain measures 1.4 metres across—about the size of a small car tire and absolutely staggering when you first see it hugged by the mountainside.

The first specimen, discovered in 1947 by a British Columbia Geophysical Society mapping team at Coal Creek, was initially mistaken for a “fossil truck tire.” 

Fair enough—if a truck tire had been forged in the Jurassic and left on a mountaintop. It was later described by GSC paleontologist Hans Frebold, who gave it the name Titanites occidentalis, inspired by the giant ammonites of Dorset. 

For decades, that name stuck, even though paleontologists suspected the attribution was shaky due to poor preservation of the holotype’s inner whorls.

Recent discoveries of two additional specimens at Teck Resources’ Coal Mountain Mine finally provided the evidence needed for reassessment. 

With intact inner whorls and beautifully preserved ribbing—including hallmark variocostate and ataxioceratoid ornamentation—researchers Terence P. Poulton and colleagues demonstrated that the Canadian ammonite does not belong in Titanites. 

Their work (Volumina Jurassica, 2023) established Corbinites as a brand-new genus, with C. occidentalis as its type and only known species.

These specimens—one exceeding a metre, another about 64 cm—confirm a resident ammonite population within this basin. And as of now, these giants are unique to Western Canada.

A Journey Up Coal Mountain

If you’re keen to meet Corbinites occidentalis in the wild, you’ll want to head to Fernie, in southeastern British Columbia, close to the Alberta border. 

As your feet move up the hillside, you can imagine this land 10,000 years ago, rising above great glaciers. Where footfalls trace the steps of those that came before you. This land has been home to the Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi ‘it First Nation and Ktunaxa or Kukin ʔamakis First Nations whose oral history have them living here since time immemorial. Like them, take only what you need and no more than the land offers — packing out anything that you packed in. 

Active logging in the area since 2021 means that older directions are now unreliable—trailheads have shifted, and a fair bit of bushwhacking is the price of admission. Though clear-cutting reshaped the slope, loggers at CanWel showed admirable restraint: they worked around the fossil, leaving it untouched.

The non-profit Wildsight has been championing efforts to protect the ammonite, hoping to establish an educational trail with provincial support and possible inclusion under the Heritage Conservation Act—where the fossil’s stewardship could be formally recognised.

HIKING TO THE FERNIE AMMONITE (IMPORTANT UPDATE: TRAIL CLOSED)

From the town of Fernie, British Columbia, you would traditionally head east along Coal Creek Road toward Coal Creek, with the ammonite site sitting 3.81 km from the road’s base as the crow flies. 

The classic approach begins at a roadside exposure of dark grey to black Cretaceous plant fossils, followed by a creek crossing and a steep, bushwhacking ascent.

However — and this is critical — the trail is currently closed.

The entire access route runs straight through an area of active logging, and conditions on the slope are extremely dangerous. Between heavy equipment, unstable cutblocks, and altered drainages, this is not a safe place for hikers right now.

Conservation groups, including Wildsight, continue working toward restoring safe public access and formalising the site under the Heritage Conservation Act. 

Their long-term goal is to reopen the trail as a designated educational hike with proper signage, but at present, the route should not be attempted. 

Once logging operations move out of the area and safety assessments are done, the possibility of reopening may return.

For now, the safest—and strongly recommended—way to view this iconic fossil is via the excellent cast on display at the Courtenay & District Museum on Vancouver Island, or at the Visitor Information Centre in Sparwood.

Photo credit: Vince Mo Media. Vince is an awesome photographer and drone operator based in Fernie, BC. Check out his work (and hire him!) by visiting his website at vmmedia.ca.

FOSSIL DOLPHIN VERTEBRAE FROM THE NORTH SEA

Dolphin Fossil Vertebrae

Pulled from the cold, turbid bottom of the North Sea, a fossil dolphin vertebra is a small but eloquent survivor of a very different ocean. 

Today, the North Sea is shallow, busy, and heavily worked by trawlers, dredges, and offshore infrastructure. Beneath that modern churn lies a remarkable archive of Cenozoic life, quietly releasing its fossils when nets and dredges scrape sediments that have not seen daylight for millions of years.

Fossil cetacean bones—vertebrae, ribs, mandibles, and the occasional ear bone—are among the most evocative finds recovered from the seafloor. 

Dolphin vertebrae are especially common compared to skulls, as their dense, spool-shaped centra survive transport and burial better than more delicate skeletal elements. 

These fossils are typically dark brown to black, stained by long exposure to iron-rich sediments and phosphates, and often bear the polished surfaces and rounded edges that speak to a history of reworking by currents before final burial.

The North Sea is famous for yielding a mixed assemblage of fossils spanning multiple ice ages and interglacial periods, but many marine mammal remains originate from Miocene deposits, roughly 23 to 5 million years old. During the Miocene, this region was not the marginal, shallow sea we know today. It formed part of a broad, warm to temperate epicontinental sea connected to the Atlantic, rich in plankton, fish, sharks, and early whales and dolphins. 

This was a critical chapter in cetacean evolution, when modern groups of toothed whales, including early delphinids and their close relatives, were diversifying and refining the echolocation-based hunting strategies that define dolphins today.

Most North Sea cetacean fossils are found accidentally rather than through targeted excavation. Commercial fishing trawls, aggregate dredging for sand and gravel, and construction linked to wind farms and pipelines routinely disturb Miocene and Pliocene sediments. 

Fossils are hauled up tangled in nets or mixed with shell hash and glacial debris, often far from their original point of burial. As a result, precise stratigraphic context is usually lost, and age estimates rely on sediment still adhering to the bone, associated microfossils, or comparison with well-dated onshore Miocene marine deposits in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and eastern England.

A dolphin vertebra from this setting tells a story of both life and loss. In life, it was part of a flexible, powerful spine built for speed and agility, driving rapid tail beats through warm Miocene waters. 

After death, the carcass likely sank to the seafloor, where scavengers stripped it and currents scattered the bones. Over time, burial in sand and silt allowed mineral-rich waters to replace organic material with stone, locking the bone into the geological record. 

Much later, Ice Age glaciers reshaped the seafloor, reworking older sediments and concentrating fossils into lag deposits that modern dredges now disturb.

Though often found in isolation, these vertebrae are scientifically valuable. They confirm the long presence of dolphins in northern European seas and help refine our understanding of Miocene marine ecosystems, biogeography, and climate.