LOVE LANGUAGE OF THE NORTH

Nunatsiarmiut Mother and Child, Baffin Island, Nunavut

Warm light bathes this lovely Nunatsiarmiut mother and child from Baffin Island, Nunavut. 

They speak Inuktitut, the mother tongue of the majority of the Nunatsiarmiut who call Baffin Island home. 

Baffin is the largest island in the Arctic Archipelago in the territory of Nunavut in Canada's far north—the chilliest region of Turtle Island. 

As part of the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, Baffin Island is home to a constellation of remote Inuit communities each with a deep cultural connection to the land—Iqaluit, Pond Inlet, Pangnirtung, Clyde River, Arctic Bay, Kimmirut and Nanisivik. 

The ratio of Inuit to non-Inuit here is roughly three to one and perhaps the reason why the Inuktitut language has remained intact and serves as the mother tongue for more than 36,000 residents. Inuktitut has several subdialects—these, along with a myriad of other languages—are spoken across the north.  

If you look at the helpful visual below you begin to get a feel for the diversity of these many tongues. The languages vary by region. There is the Iñupiaq of the Inupiatun/Inupiat; Inuvialuktun of the Inuinnaqtun, Natsilingmiutut, Kivallirmiutut, Aivilingmiutut, Qikiqtaaluk Uannanganii and Siglitun. Kalaallisut is spoken by many Greenlandic peoples though, in northwest Greenland, Inuktun is the language of the Inughuit.

We use the word Inuktitut when referring to a specific dialect and inuktut when referring to all the dialects of Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun.

Northern Language Map (Click to Enlarge)

Should you travel to the serene glacier-capped wilds and rolling tundra of our far north, you will want to dress for the weather and learn a few of the basics to put your best mukluk shod feet forward. 

The word for hello or welcome in Inuktitut is Atelihai—pronounced ahh-tee-lee-hi. And thank you is nakurmiik, pronounced na-kur-MIIK.  

Perhaps my favourite Inuktitut expression is Naglingniq qaikautigijunnaqtuq maannakautigi, pronounced NAG-ling-niq QAI-kau-ti-gi-jun-naqtuq MAAN-na-KAU-ti-gi. This tongue-twister is well worth the linguistic challenge as it translates to love can travel anywhere in an instant. Indeed it can. 

So much of our Indigenous culture is passed through stories, so language takes on special meaning in that context. It is true for all societies but especially true for the Inuit. Stories help connect the past to the present and future. They teach how to behave in society, engage with the world and how to survive in the environment. They also help to create a sense of belonging. 

You have likely seen or heard the word Eskimo used in older books to refer to the Inuit, Iñupiat, Kalaallit or Yupik. This misnomer is a colonial term derived from the Montagnais or Innu word ayas̆kimew—netter of snowshoes. 

It is a bit like meeting a whole new group of people who happen to wear shoes and referring to them all as cobblers—not as a nickname, but as a legal term to describe populations from diverse communities disregarding the way each self-refer. 

Inukshuk / Inuksuk Marker Cairn

For those who identify as Inupiaq or Yupik, the preferred term is Inuit meaning people—though some lingering use of the term Eskimo lives on. The Inuit as a group are made up of many smaller groups. 

The Inuit of Greenland self-refer as Kalaallit or Greenlanders when speaking Kalaallisut. 

The Tunumiit of Tunu (east Greenland), speak Tunumiit oraasiat ("East Greenlandic"); and the Inughuit of north Greenland, speak Inuktun "Polar Eskimo."

The Inupiat of Alaska, or real people, use Yupik as the singular for real person and yuk to simply mean person.

When taken all together, Inuit is used to mean all the peoples in reference to the Inuit, Iñupiat, Kalaallit and Yupik. Inuit is the plural of inuk or person. 

You likely recognize this word from inuksuk or inukshuk, pronounced ih-nook-suuk — the human-shaped stone cairns built by the Inuit, Iñupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of the Arctic regions of northern Canada, Greenland, and Alaska—as helpful reference markers for hunters and navigation. 

The word inuksuk means that which acts in the capacity of a human, combining inuk or person and suk, as a human substitute. 

A World of Confusion

You may be disappointed to learn that our northern friends do not live in igloos. I remember answering the phone as a child and the fellow calling was hoping to speak to my parents about some wonderful new invention perfect for use in an igloo. 

The call came while I was in the kitchen of our family home in Port Hardy. He was disappointed to hear that I was standing in a wooden house with the standard four walls to a room and a handy roof topping it off. 

I also had my own room with Scooby-Doo wallpaper, but he was having nothing of it.

"Well, what about your neighbours? Surely, a few of them live in igloos..." 

It seems that some atlases in circulation at the time, and certainly the one he was looking at, simply blanketed everything north of the 49th parallel in a snowy white. His clearly showed an igloo sitting proudly in the centre of the province.

Interestingly, I only learned this morning (thank you, Jen) that that type of playful map is called a Counter Map and can be used in delightful ways to draw the reader in to the mapping of a landscape, region, people or culture—often out of scale and with many wonderful images added to give you a beautiful sense of the people, plants, animals and topography of a place.

My cousin Shawn brought one such simplified book back from his elementary school in California. British Columbia had a nice image of a grizzly bear and a wee bit further up, a polar bear grinned smugly. 

British Columbia's beaver population would be sad to know that they did not inhabit the province though there were two chipper beavers with big bright smiles—one in Ontario and another gracing the province of Quebec. Further north, where folk do build igloos, their icy domes were curiously lacking. 

Igloos are used for winter hunting trips much the same way we use tents for camping. The Inuit do not have fifty words for snow—you can thank the ethnographer Franz Boas for that wee fabrication—but within the collective languages of the frozen north there are more than fifty words to describe it. And kisses are not nose-to-nose. To give a tender kiss or kunik to a loved one, you press your nose and upper lip to their forehead or cheek and rub gently. 

Fancy trying a wee bit of Inuktitut yourself? This link will bring you to a great place to start: https://inhabitmedia.com/inuitnipingit/

Inuit Language Map:  By Noahedits - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0. If you want to the image full size, head to this link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85587388

MEGACAUDA: THE FURRY HUNTER OF JURASSIC WATERS

Megacauda sungei

I was speaking with my friend Lori yesterday about mammals in a world dominated by dinosaurs. It is easy to picture the giants and overlook the smaller, furry creatures living alongside them. 

Yet those little animals had lives every bit as interesting as the dinosaurs that so often command our attention.

A newly described fossil gives us a wonderful reason to look more closely.

Meet Megacauda sungei, a mammal relative that lived approximately 165 million years ago in what is now China. Described in research published in Nature on 7 October 2026, this remarkably preserved animal had a broad, flattened tail and limbs suited to swimming. Its fossil also preserves clues to something less obvious, but deeply familiar: the way mammals swallow their food.

Imagine pausing beside Jurassic water. Let your eyes move away from the great animals on the horizon and settle on the bank. A small, furry shape approaches the shallows. It is here, close to the ground and water, that our story begins.

Megacauda measured roughly half a metre from nose to tail tip. Its name combines a reference to its large tail with an honour for palaeontologist Sun Ge. It belonged to the docodonts, an extinct group of early mammal relatives. Comparisons with living swimming mammals help us picture its lifestyle, though they should not be mistaken for a close family relationship.

The pleasure of a fossil like this lies in how many separate clues it offers.

Its broad tail and powerful hind limbs support the interpretation that it moved through water. Tiny vertebrate bones preserved in its stomach provide a more intimate glimpse of its life: evidence of a meal. Salamanders occur abundantly in the same fossil beds, making them plausible prey, although the stomach contents should not automatically be treated as a complete menu.

Its tooth cusps curve backwards, a useful arrangement for holding slippery prey. Together, these features suggest an animal equipped to hunt in water. We cannot watch it pursue a meal, but we can examine the equipment it carried. That distinction is part of what makes palaeontology so fascinating: a reconstruction grows from evidence, one anatomical detail at a time.

Then there is its throat.

Most of us give little thought to swallowing until something goes down the wrong way. Yet moving food safely from the mouth towards the stomach requires a carefully coordinated system.

In Megacauda, researchers identified delicate throat bones and structures beneath the skull that help reconstruct that system. The anatomy suggests that important features supporting mammal-like swallowing—and potentially drinking and suckling—were already present in these early relatives. These are conclusions drawn from anatomical evidence; the fossil does not preserve the animal nursing or swallowing.

There is something lovely about finding such a familiar connection in an unfamiliar animal. A tail catches our eye. Teeth tell us about feeding. Tiny bones near the throat open a window onto an evolutionary story we carry within our own bodies.

The discovery also adds to a richer picture of Jurassic life. Docodonts included animals adapted to different settings, including trees, underground habitats and water. Their world offered opportunities for more than one way of living, even while dinosaurs dominated many terrestrial ecosystems.

That brings me back to my conversation with Lori. When we picture the past, scale can steer our attention. The biggest skeletons fill museum halls and our imaginations. It takes a deliberate change of focus to notice the smaller lives around them.

Cuties like Megacauda invite us to make that change. Look towards the water’s edge. Consider the ripples, the bank and the possibility of a furry hunter moving through the shallows, and delight in what we discover. This little fellow, in comparison to his peers, is a critter we might easily have missed. 

Where I live on Vancouver Island, we can watch sea otter dive through kelp or a river otters slip beneath the surface. Both offer a lovely way to imagine Megacauda in motion. 

Sea otters and river otters are related to one another—both belong to the weasel family, Mustelidae—but Megacauda belonged to the extinct docodont lineage and is not a known ancestor of either. 

Their similarities reflect convergent evolution: separate branches of the mammalian family tree developing adaptations to life in water. Familiar ripples, very different histories.

BARNACLES: CUVIER TO DARWIN

Barnacles All Closed Up

One of the most interesting and enigmatic little critters we find at the seashore are barnacles. 

They cling to rocks at the waters' edge, closed to our curiosity, their domed mounds like little closed beaks shut to the water and the world.

They choose their permanent homes as larvae, sticking to hard substrates that will become their permanent homes for the rest of their lives. 

It has taken us a long time to find how they actually stick or what kind of "glue" they were using.

A clever fellow from Duke University's Marine Laboratory in Durhan, North Carolina finally cracked that puzzle. Instead of chopping up barnacles to see what makes them stick, he observed and collected the oozing glue from some Amphibalanus amphitrite as they secreted it.

Remarkably, the barnacle glue sticks to rocks in a similar way to how red cells bind together. Red blood cells bind and clot with a little help from some enzymes. 

These work to create long protein fibres that first blind, clot then form a scab. The mechanism barnacles use, right down to the enzyme, is very similar. That's especially interesting as about a billion years separate our evolutionary path from theirs.

So, with the help of their clever enzymes, they can affix to most anything – ship hulls, rocks, and even the skin of whales. If you find them in tidepools, you begin to see their true nature as they open up, their delicate feathery finger-like projections flowing back and forth in the surf.

Barnacle Cirri Seeking Tasty Plankton

Those wee feather-like bits you see are called cirri. Eight pairs of these thoracic limbs help barnacles to filter tasty bits of plankton from the surrounding water into their mouths.

Barnacles are cirripedes, a kind of crustacean that is covered with hard plates of calcium carbonate. Named for their cirri, they live stuck to hard surfaces in and around our world's oceans. 

While they do not look like crustaceans, they are definitely part of this taxonomic grouping that includes crab, lobster, crayfish, prawn, krill, and woodlice.

BARNACLES IN KWAK'WALA

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, barnacles are known as k̕wit̕a̱'a and broken barnacle shells are known as t̕sut̕su'ma.

BARNACLES IN THE FOSSIL RECORD

They have an old history. Their ancestors can be traced back to animals such as Priscansermarinus that lived during the Middle Cambrian – some 510 to 500 million years ago. I found my first barnacle fossil at a fossil site called Muir Creek on the south end of Vancouver Island. 

The wonderfully accessible foreshore fossil exposures at Muir are Oligocene, 20-25 million years old. This is about the time that barnacles can be found more readily as skeletal remains.

One of the reasons for the limited number of barnacle remains in the fossil record is their preferred habitat – high energy, shallow ocean environments. These tend to see a lot of tidal action that leads to erosion and barnacles being broken apart, slowly eroded down to bits too small to recognize for what they are.

One of the fossil remains we do find are not the barnacles themselves, but trace fossils of acrothoracican barnacle borings from Rogerella. These are commonly found in the fossil record beginning in the Devonian right up to today. Rogerella is a small pouch-shaped boring (a type of trace fossil) with a slit-like aperture currently produced by acrothoracican barnacles. 

These crustaceans extrude their legs upwards through the opening for filter-feeding (Seilacher, 1969; Lambers and Boekschoten, 1986). They are known in the fossil record as borings in carbonate substrates (shells and hardgrounds) from the Devonian to the Recent (Taylor and Wilson, 2003).

Barnacle Ancestry Goes Back to the Middle Cambrian

FROM MOLLUSCA TO ARTICULATA

For those of you who enjoy leaning into the geeky history of how we came to understand barnacles, I shall indulge you.

Barnacles were originally classified by Linnaeus and Cuvier as Mollusca, but in 1830 John Vaughan Thompson published observations showing the metamorphosis of the nauplius and cypris larvae into adult barnacles. He noted how these larvae were similar to those of crustaceans.

In 1834 Hermann Burmeister published further information, reinterpreting these findings. The effect was to move barnacles from the phylum of Mollusca to Articulata, showing naturalists that detailed study was needed to reevaluate their taxonomy.

Charles Darwin took up this challenge in 1846 and developed his initial interest in a major study published as a series of monographs in 1851 and 1854. Darwin undertook this study, at the suggestion of his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker, to thoroughly understand at least one species before making the generalizations needed for his theory of evolution by natural selection.

BARNACLES IN A NUT SHELL

Barnacles live life with unwavering commitment. Once they find the perfect spot on a rock, pier, whale, ship's hull, or unsuspecting sea turtle, they glue themselves down with one of the strongest natural cements known and settle in for good. There are no second thoughts, no moving to a nicer neighbourhood with a better view. Home is home.

These remarkable little crustaceans are suspension feeders, rhythmically sweeping tiny morsels of plankton and organic debris into their mouths using feathery, jointed legs called cirri. Those waving "feet" you see flicking through the water are actually highly specialized feeding appendages, tirelessly combing the sea for dinner. When the tide retreats, they pull those cirri safely inside and clamp their tough calcareous plates shut, waiting patiently for the ocean to return.

Now, about romance... barnacles have perhaps the most awkward dating life in the animal kingdom. 

Being permanently glued to a rock makes meeting new partners something of a logistical challenge. 

Evolution solved this problem in spectacular fashion: barnacles possess the longest penis relative to body size of any animal on Earth—sometimes extending eight times their own body length. It is an extraordinary adaptation that allows them to reach neighbouring barnacles without anyone having to leave home. 

If your love life depended on never moving from your favourite rock, you'd probably evolve some creative solutions too. I was speaking with friend and colleague, Adrienne Schmidt about this just today. 

After mating, fertilized eggs develop into tiny free-swimming nauplius larvae that drift through the plankton. As they grow, they transform into the cypris stage—a curious little explorer whose sole mission is to find the perfect place to settle. 

Once it chooses its forever home, it secretes its remarkable natural cement, attaches for life, builds its protective shell, and begins the whole wonderfully peculiar cycle again.

For creatures that spend their adult lives going absolutely nowhere, barnacles have evolved one of the most fascinating lifestyles in the sea.

KELP FORESTS AND CARBON SINKS

Walk along any rocky beach on the Pacific coast after a storm, and you’ll likely find a treasure trove of kelp washed ashore—long ribbons of glossy brown seaweed, glistening in the sunlight like strands of mermaid hair. 

Some pieces stretch for meters, still tangled with small shells and bits of driftwood, while others hold tight, bulbous floats that once kept them buoyant in the underwater forests just offshore. 

When the tide recedes, the air fills with the unmistakable scent of iodine and salt—an ancient perfume carried by the sea.

Kelp is a brown alga, part of the group Phaeophyceae, which evolved roughly 150 to 200 million years ago. 

While kelp itself doesn’t fossilize easily (it’s soft-bodied and decomposes quickly), its ancient lineage can be traced through molecular and microfossil evidence. The earliest relatives of kelp likely appeared in the Jurassic seas, when dinosaurs ruled the land and the oceans teemed with ammonites. 

Microscopic spores and chemical biomarkers in sedimentary rocks tell scientists that brown algae were already photosynthesizing in shallow coastal waters long before the first mammals appeared.

Giant kelp, Macrocystis pyrifera, holds the title for the fastest-growing marine organism on Earth—it can shoot up more than half a meter a day under ideal conditions! 

These towering underwater forests provide shelter and food for thousands of marine creatures, from tiny snails to sea otters, who wrap themselves in the fronds to sleep without drifting away.

Back when I used to scuba drive a lot around Vancouver Island, they were one of my favourite places to explore as those underwater forests were teeming with life.

If you’re beachcombing in British Columbia, Alaska, or California, you might find bull kelp, Nereocystis luetkeana, recognizable by its long, whip-like stipe and single round float. It’s edible and surprisingly tasty. The blades can be dried and used like seaweed chips, while the bulb can be sliced thin and pickled—an oceanic delicacy with a salty, citrusy crunch. 

Other edible seaweeds you might encounter include sugar kelp, Saccharina latissima, which has a slightly sweet flavor, and ribbon kelp, Alaria marginata, often used in soups and salads.

On the foreshore near where I live on Vancouver Island, we have loads of sea lettuce. Sea lettuce, Ulva spp., is one of the ocean’s most vibrant and inviting greens—a delicate, translucent seaweed that looks like bright green tissue paper fluttering in the tide. 

Sea Otter in a Kelp Bed

When you find it washed ashore or swaying just below the surface, it shines an almost neon hue, catching the sunlight in shimmering waves of jade. 

Its thin, ruffled fronds are only a few cells thick, soft to the touch, and often cling to rocks, shells, or docks in intertidal zones where saltwater and freshwater mingle.

Unlike the giant brown kelps that form towering underwater forests, sea lettuce is part of the green algae group (Chlorophyta), sharing pigments more closely related to land plants. 

It grows worldwide in temperate and tropical waters and thrives wherever nutrient-rich water flows—estuaries, tide pools, and shallow bays. When the tide goes out, you might see it draped over rocks like sheets of emerald silk, drying slightly in the sun and releasing a faint, oceanic scent.

Sea lettuce is entirely edible and a favourite among foragers and coastal chefs. Fresh from the sea, it has a mild, slightly salty flavour with a hint of sweetness—similar to spinach or nori. It can be eaten raw in salads, lightly fried until crisp, or dried into flakes and used as a natural salt substitute. 

In many coastal cultures, from Ireland to Japan, Ulva has long been part of traditional cuisine. It’s also rich in vitamins A, C, and B12, along with iron and calcium—proof that sea greens can be as nutritious as they are beautiful. When my little sister was living in County Cork, she shared pictures of folk bathing in tubs of icy sea water and seaweed as a briny health spa treatment.

From a scientific perspective, sea lettuce plays an important ecological role. It provides shelter for small marine creatures like snails, shrimp, and juvenile fish, and it helps absorb excess nutrients from the water, which can help reduce harmful algal blooms. 

However, when too many nutrients enter the ocean—often from agricultural runoff—sea lettuce can grow explosively, creating dense “green tides” that blanket shorelines.

Its lineage stretches deep into the fossil record as well. While soft-bodied algae like Ulva rarely fossilize, green algal relatives appear in rocks over 1.6 billion years old, making them some of Earth’s earliest photosynthesizers.

Beyond their culinary and ecological roles, kelp forests act as powerful carbon sinks, pulling CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it in the deep ocean. They also buffer coastlines from storms and provide nurseries for fish populations that support global fisheries.

As you stroll the shoreline and your toes brush against that slippery tangle of golden-brown ribbons, remember—you’re touching the living descendant of an ancient lineage that’s been swaying in Earth’s oceans since the age of dinosaurs—beautiful, ancient and tasty!

NUMMULITES FORAMINIFERA OF THE PYRAMIDS

Built to endure the tests of time, the pyramids of Giza were built of limestone, granite, basalt, gypsum (mortar), and baked mud bricks quarried at Giza and sites further up the river Nile at Aswan.

Together they form some of the oldest (and last remaining) wonders of the ancient world. 

The great pyramids of Giza, with their smooth exteriors carved from fine grain white limestone quarried at Tura on the Giza-plateau, are built from stone that speaks of Egypt's much older geologic history.

The limestone from Tura was the finest and whitest of all the Egyptian quarries and chosen for the facing stones for the richest tombs. It is interesting in that it is made up almost entirely of Nummulites, a lovely single-celled organism. 

Nummulites (Lamarck, 1801) are the calcareous chambered shells (tests) of extinct forms of marine, amoeba-like organisms  — protozoans or protists — called foraminifera that accumulated in huge quantities during the early Cenozoic. They look very much like little white, round crackers or cross-sections of plants with their concentric rings.

Imagine millions of them with their wee calcium carbonate skeletons living, dying and sinking to the seafloor. Over time, these little lovelies gathered in layers, pressure and time doing the rest. They became cemented together and helped form some of the most beautiful limestones we have today. It is remarkable to think that Khufu or Cheops, the Great Pyramid of Egypt, the oldest and largest of the pyramids at Giza built back in the 4th dynasty golden age and the only remaining wonder of the ancient world, is made up of teeny, tiny single-celled fossils — mindblowing!

They are commonly found as fossils in Eocene to Miocene marine rocks, particularly around southwest Asia and the Mediterranean — including the Eocene limestones of Egypt that lived in the Tethys sea.

Fossil Nummulites / Urbasa, Navarre

Foraminifera are still alive in our oceans, though none quite as large as Nummulites. Nummulites vary in diameter from very small, just 1.3 cm (0.5 inches) to 5 cm (2 inches) but grew much larger, up to six inches wide back in the Middle Eocene.

The small size of most cells has to do with how they move the nutrients they need across their cell membrane — a process called diffusion. 

Nummulites grew much larger, six inches is mighty big for a single-celled organism, because of their overall design. They evolved to increase their surface area and create a greater opportunity for diffusion. Clever.

In our modern Nummulites, we see a symbiotic relationship with algae that allowed them to grow much larger. Each of these little fellows has a community of them living with him. Lorraine Casazza, a University of California at Berkeley paleontologist did some great work on the nummulites from Egypt.

For the central chamber, with the sarcophagus of the pharaoh, lovely reddish-pink granite from Aswan was used. The granite helped to take the weight of this massive construction. The ancient Egyptians also used nummulite shells as coins. It is not surprising then that the name "Nummulites" is a diminutive form of the Latin nummulus meaning "little coin," a direct reference to their shape and usage.

A Nummulite Protozoan Foraminiferan

Back in 2013, archaeologists made an unlikely find in a cave seven hundred kilometres from Giza. 

Their find, a 4,600-year-old papyrus scroll, details an ancient shipload of rock, likely destined for  Khufu's pyramid, the pyramid that would later be known as the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The papyrus is addressed to Ankh-haf, Khufu’s half-brother, and describes the undertaking of an expedition by a 200-man crew to the limestone quarries near Tura, on the eastern shore of the Nile. After loading the blocks onto their ship, the expedition indented to float down the river Nile for a successful delivery. They were then joined by another 100,000 slaves who had the unenviable task of unloading the 2-3 ton blocks of limestone built from nummulites, then pulling them across ramps to be dragged to the construction site.

It is amazing to have documentation from the 4th dynasty and poetic that this shipping order should be for materials, immortalized first as nummulites in the Eocene, excavated, carved and immortalized at Giza.

Herodotus' Histories, Book VIII

The Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt during the construction of Khufu's pyramid by more than 100,000 slaves. Herodotus wasn't a fan of Khufu, describing him as a cruel tyrant.

In his literary work Historiae, Book II, chapter 124–126, Herodotus writes: "As long as Rhámpsinîtos was king, as they told me, there was nothing but orderly rule in Egypt, and the land prospered greatly. 

But after him Khéops became king over them and brought them to every kind of suffering: 

He closed all the temples; after this he kept the priests from sacrificing there and then he forced all the Egyptians to work for him.

So some were ordered to draw stones from the stone quarries in the Arabian mountains to the Nile, and others he forced to receive the stones after they had been carried over the river in boats, and to draw them to those called the Libyan mountains. 

And they worked by 100,000 men at a time, for each three months continually. Of this oppression there passed ten years while the causeway was made by which they drew the stones, which causeway they built, and it is a work not much less, as it appears to me, than the pyramid.

For the length of it is 5 furlongs and the breadth 10 fathoms and the height, where it is highest, 8 fathoms, and it is made of polished stone and with figures carved upon it. For this, they said, 10 years were spent, and for the underground chambers on the hill upon which the pyramids stand, which he caused to be made as sepulchral chambers for himself in an island, having conducted thither a channel from the Nile."

It is estimated that 5.5 million tonnes of nummulites limestone, 8,000 tonnes of granite (imported from Aswan), and 500,000 tonnes of mortar were used in the construction of the Great Pyramid. Built by an evil genius, yes, but stunning none-the-less. Unintentionally, it may have been one of the largest — and arguably cruellest — paleontological excavations ever attempted.

Photo of Fossil nummulites in Urbasa, Navarre by Theklan - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1125411

Photo: Nummulites from above and horizontally bisected by R A Lydekker - Life and Rocks, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3048471

Photo: Fragment from Herodotus' Histories, Book VIII on Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2099, Early 2nd Century AD. Papyrology Rooms, Sackler Library, Oxford

References: Nummulite', Tiscali Dictionary of Animals, retrieved 17 August 2004
Hottinger, Lukas (2006-09-08). "Illustrated Glossary of terms used in foraminiferal research". Paleopolis. Retrieved 2018-11-11.

Reference: Lorraine Casazza, UCMP: https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/science/fieldnotes/casazza_0711.php

Fancy a visit to Cheops? Visit: 29°58′45″N 31°08′03″E

NECKS FOR DAYS: THE LONG GAME OF GIRAFFE EVOLUTION

Tall, spotty, and just a little bit absurd—let’s talk about the giraffe, nature’s own high-rise browser with a flair for the dramatic.

Meet Giraffa camelopardalis, the tallest land animal striding the planet today, reaching a lofty 5–5.5 metres. 

That impossibly long neck? Not a vertebral free-for-all, but the same tidy set of seven cervical vertebrae you and I carry—each one simply stretched into elegant excess. This skyward reach lets them graze on acacia leaves beyond the reach of most herbivores, though it comes with engineering challenges. 

Their hearts—large, muscular, and working against gravity—pump blood up that long column with the help of specialized valves to keep things flowing smoothly when they dip down for a drink. No fainting on the savannah, thank you very much.

Their patchwork coats—those deliciously irregular polygons—are more than just fashion statements. Beneath each patch lies a network of blood vessels that helps regulate body temperature, a built-in cooling system for life under the African sun. 

And while they move with a languid, almost dreamy gait, don’t be fooled—giraffes can bolt at speeds approaching 60 km/h when properly motivated. All elegance, until it’s time to leg it.

Now, let’s wander into deep time, where the giraffe’s family tree gets wonderfully strange. Giraffes belong to the family Giraffidae, a once diverse clan of even-toed ungulates (Artiodactyla) that includes their only living relative, the shy, forest-dwelling okapi (Okapia johnstoni). 

But their fossil kin? Oh, they were a motley crew. There’s Sivatherium, a burly, moose-like beast from the Miocene to Pleistocene of Africa and Asia, sporting hefty ossicones and a much shorter neck. Then Samotherium, a mid-Miocene form from Eurasia, showing a modest neck—an evolutionary halfway house on the road to giraffe grandeur. 

And the delightfully odd Bohlinia, from the Late Miocene of Europe and Asia, often cited as one of the closest fossil relatives to modern giraffes, already stretching skyward in anticipation of leaves yet to be munched.

Giraffid fossils pop up across Africa, Europe, and Asia, with their story unfolding from the early Miocene, roughly 20 million years ago. Over time, as climates shifted and habitats opened, longer necks and taller frames proved advantageous—natural selection quietly favouring those who could reach just a little higher than the rest. 

Modern giraffe roams sub-Saharan Africa, from savannahs to open woodlands, while their fossil remains—teeth, limb bones, and those distinctive ossicones—turn up in ancient sediments from Kenya to India, telling a tale of a lineage that once ranged far wider than its current bounds.

And then there’s the business of those necks in combat. Male giraffes engage in “necking,” swinging their heads like slow-motion wrecking balls, using their ossicones as blunt instruments in contests of dominance. It’s part duel, part dance, and entirely mesmerizing.

So here we have them—living periscopes of the savannah, equal parts elegance and evolutionary oddity. A creature that looks almost whimsical at first glance, until you realize it is the finely tuned result of millions of years of adaptation, stretching—quite literally—toward survival.

ANCIENT ARAGONITE: FOSSIL PEARLS

One of my favourite pairs of earrings are a simple set of pearls. I have worn them pretty much every day since 2016, when I received them as a gift. 

What is it about pearls that makes them so appealing? I am certainly not alone in this. 

A simple search will show you a vast array of pearls being used for their ornamental value in cultures from all over the world. I suppose the best answer to why they are appealing is just that they are. 

If you make your way to Paris, France and happen to visit the Louvre's Persian Gallery, do take a boo at one of the oldest pearl necklaces in existence — the Susa necklace. It hails from a 2,400-year-old tomb of long lost Syrian Queen. It is a showy piece with three rows of 72 pearls per strand strung upon a bronze wire. 

A queen who truly knew how to accessorize. 

I imagine her putting the final touches of her outfit together, donning the pearls and making an entrance to wow the elite of ancient Damascus. The workmanship is superb, intermixing pure gold to offset the lustre of the pearls. 

It is precious and ancient, crafted one to two hundred years before Christ. Perhaps a gift from an Egyptian Pharaoh or from one of the Sumerians, Eblaites, Akkadians, Assyrians, Hittites, Hurrians, Mitanni, Amorites or Babylonian dignitaries who sued for peace but brought war instead. 

Questions, good questions, but questions without answers. So, what can we say of pearls? We do know what they are and it is not glamorous. Pearls form in shelled molluscs when a wee bit of sand or some other irritant gets trapped inside the shell, injuring the flesh. As a defensive and self-healing tactic, the mollusc wraps it in layer upon layer of mother-of-pearl — that glorious shiny nacre that forms pearls. 

They come in all shapes and sizes from minute to a massive 32 kilograms or 70 pounds. While a wide variety of our mollusc friends respond to injury or irritation by coating the offending intruder with nacre, there are only a few who make the truly gem-y pearls. 

These are the marine pearl oysters, Pteriidae and a few freshwater mussels. 

Aside from Pteriidae and freshwater mussels, we sometimes find less gem-y pearls inside conchs, scallops, clams, abalone, giant clams and large marine gastropods.

Pearls are made up mostly of the carbonate mineral aragonite, a polymorphous mineral — the same chemical formula but different crystal structure — to calcite and vaterite, sometimes called mu-calcium carbonate. These polymorphous carbonates are a bit like Mexican food where it is the same ingredients mixed in different ways. Visually, they are easy to tell apart — vaterite has a hexagonal crystal system, calcite is trigonal and aragonite is orthorhombic.

As pearls fossilize, the aragonite usually gets replaced by calcite, though sometimes by vaterite or another mineral. When we are very lucky, that aragonite is preserved with its nacreous lustre — that shimmery mother-of-pearl we know and love.  

Molluscs have likely been making pearls since they first evolved 530 million years ago. The oldest known fossil pearls found to date, however, are 230-210 million years old. 

This was the time when our world's landmass was concentrated into the C-shaped supercontinent of Pangaea and the first dinosaurs were calling it home. 

In the ancient ocean of Panthalassa, ecosystems were recovering from the high carbon dioxide levels that fueled the Permian extinction. Death begets life. With 95% of marine life wiped out, new species evolved to fill each niche.  

While this is where we found the oldest pearl on record, I suspect we will one day find one much older and hopefully with its lovely great-great grandmother-of-pearl intact. 

CLALLAM BAY FOSSIL FAUNA

Panopea abrupt (Conrad, 1894)

This lovely large fossil bivalve is Panopea abrupta (Conrad, 1849) an extinct species of marine mollusc in the family Hiatellidae, subclass Heterodonta.

This fossil specimen was collected from lower Miocene deposits in the Clallam Formation on the foreshore bordering the Strait of Juan de Fuca near Clallam Bay, Olympic Peninsula, northwestern Washington. 

The oldest recorded specimen of one of their modern relatives lived not too far from here in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. That lovely was an impressive 168 years old.

A geoduck sucks water containing plankton down through its long siphon, filters this for food and ejects its refuse out through a separate hole in the siphon. Adult geoducks have few natural predators, which may also contribute to their longevity.

In Alaska, sea otters and dogfish have proved capable of dislodging geoducks; starfish also attack and feed on the exposed geoduck siphon.

Clallam Bay is a sleepy little town on the northwestern edge of the Olympic Peninsula. It was founded back in the 1880s as a steamboat stop and later served as a Mill town. If you are planning to visit the fossil exposures, head to the edge of town where it meets the sea.

Once at the water's edge, head east along the shore until you can go no further. You'll find marine fossils in the sandstone on the shore and cliffs. Mind the tide as access to the fossil site is only possible at low or mid-tide. You'll have to swim for it if you time it poorly. Clallam Bay: 48°15′17″N 124°15′30″W.

Near this site, there are many additional fossil localities to explore. 

In Sequim Bay, you can find Pleistocene vertebrates as well as Miocene cetacean bones near Slip Point. Near the Twin Post Office, you can find Oligocene nautiloids and bivalves (2.5km west in the bluff); You can find crabs including, Branchioplax in the Eocene limestone concretions from Neah Bay.

References: Addicott, Warren. Molluscan paleontology of the lower Miocene Clallam Formation, northwestern Washington, Geological Survey Paper 976.

TRICERATOPS: THE HERD THAT CHANGED THE STORY

Triceratops, Leiden, Netherlands

At the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, a visit to the dinosaur gallery is also a glimpse into the work of a research institute. 

Naturalis studies life on Earth through its vast natural history collection, and its dinosaur discoveries have given us something remarkable to talk about.

Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden traces its beginnings to 1820, when King William I founded the Netherlands’ National Museum of Natural History by bringing together existing collections and scientific cabinets. 

Its holdings grew through research expeditions, collections from other Dutch institutions and gifts from private collectors. That history has a difficult side: some specimens were collected in colonial settings under circumstances Naturalis now investigates through provenance research. 

Today, the collection holds more than 43 million objects, though only a fraction are on display. Visitors can meet Trix the T. rex and Triceratops in the Dinosaur Age gallery, explore mammoth fossils and other Ice Age animals, and discover how life has changed over billions of years.

It is there wonderful triceratops display you see in the photo here. It showcases Triceratops horridus: three horns, a broad bony frill, a sturdy plant eater’s body, and a face that has been a dinosaur icon for generations. 

It lived in North America near the end of the Cretaceous, roughly 67 million years ago.

These fellows are some of my favourite dinosaurs. I had a lovely figurine of one that I played with as a youth and still sits on my shelf to this day.

We often picture Triceratops roaming in herds, but fossils had offered little firm evidence for that familiar scene. Then Naturalis researchers uncovered the remains of five individuals together in Wyoming. Naturalis excavated six Triceratops in Wyoming overall, but five were found together in the bonebed that became the museum’s herd.

The five Triceratops were found by a Naturalis Biodiversity Center expedition team on a ranch near Newcastle, Wyoming, in 2013. The team was searching for Tyrannosaurus fossils when it encountered Triceratops bones. Further excavation revealed remains of at least five individuals together; the work continued over several years under research leader Anne Schulp. 

Anne Schulp is a vertebrate palaeontologist at Naturalis and a professor at Utrecht University. Trained in Earth Sciences, with a doctorate focused on mosasaurs, Schulp studies dinosaurs, ancient marine reptiles and fossil footprints, and continues to lead the research group investigating Naturalis’s Triceratops herd.

Years of excavation and study led them to conclude that these animals lived and died as a group. In 2024, Naturalis brought all five together for the first public display of this extraordinary herd.

That is the thrill of palaeontology: even the dinosaurs we think we know can surprise us. One fossil tells us about an animal. Five found together may tell us something about how they lived.

The herd’s Leiden exhibition ended in August 2025, and the fossils are now travelling internationally. This photo captures a special chapter in their story.

Image ID: 2559349211

BEAUTIFUL PATHOLOGY: QUENSTEDTOCERAS

What you are seeing here is a protuberance extruding from the venter of Quenstedtoceras cf. leachi (Sowerby). It is a pathology in the shell from hosting immature bivalves that shared the seas with these Middle Jurassic, Upper Callovian, Lamberti zone fauna from the Volga River basin. 

The collecting site is the now inactive Dubki commercial clay quarry and brickyard near Saratov, Russia. 

The site has produced thousands of ammonite specimens. A good 1,100 of those ended up at the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, South Dakota. 

Roughly 1,000 of those are Quenstedtoceras (Lamberticeras) lamberti and the other 100 are a mix of other species found in the same zone. These included Eboraciceras, Peltoceras, Kosmoceras, Grossouvria, Proriceras, Cadoceras and Rursiceras. 

What is especially interesting is the volume of specimens — 167 Quenstedtoceras (Lamberticeras) lamberti and 89 other species in the Black Hills collection — with healed predation injuries. It seems Quenstedtoceras (Lamberticeras) lamberti are the most common specimens found here and so not surprisingly the most common species found injured. 

Of the 1,000, 655 of the Quenstedtoceras (Lamberticeras) lamberti displayed some sort of deformation or growth on the shell or had grown in a tilted manner. 

Again, some of the Q. lamberti had small depressions in the centre likely due to a healed bite and hosting infestations of the immature bivalve Placunopsis and some Ostrea. 

The bivalves thrived on their accommodating hosts and the ammonites carried on, growing their shells right up and over their bivalve guests. 

This relationship led to some weird and deformities of their shells. They grow in, around, up and over nearly every surface of the shell and seem to have lived out their lives there. It must have gotten a bit unworkable for the ammonites, their shells becoming warped and unevenly weighted. 

Over time, both the flourishing bivalves and the ammonite shells growing up and over them produced some of the most interesting pathology specimens I have ever seen.    

In the photo here from Emil Black, you can see some of the distorted shapes of Quenstedtoceras sp. 

Look closely and you see a trochospiral or flattened appearance on one side while they are rounded on the other. 

All of these beauties hail from the Dubki Quarry near Saratov, Russia. The ammonites were collected in marl or clay used in brick making. The clay particles suggest a calm, deep marine environment. 

One of the lovely features of the preservation here is the amount of pyrite filling and replacement. It looks like these ammonites were buried in an oxygen-deficient environment. 

The ammonites were likely living higher in the water column, well above the oxygen-poor bottom. An isotopic study would be interesting to prove this hypothesis. 

There's certainly enough of these ammonites that have been recovered to make that possible. It's estimated that over a thousand specimens have been recovered from the site but that number is likely much higher. But these are not complete specimens. We mostly find the phragmocones and partial body chambers. Given the numbers, this may be a site documenting a mass spawning death over several years or generations.

If you fancy a read on all things cephie, consider picking up a copy of Cephalopods Present and Past: New Insights and Fresh Perspectives edited by Neil Landman and Richard Davis. Figure 16.2 is from page 348 of that publication and shows the hosting predation quite well. 

Photos: Courtesy of the deeply awesome Emil Black. These are in his personal collection that I hope to see in person one day. 

It was his sharing of the top photo and the strange anomaly that had me explore more about the fossils from Dubki and the weird and wonderful hosting relationship between ammonites and bivalves. Thank you, my friend!

SIAMOSAURUS: THE DINOSAUR KNOWN FROM A HANDFUL OF TEETH

Siamosaurus suteethorni

Some dinosaurs leave us a skeleton. Siamosaurus suteethorni left us teeth and an invitation to argue about them for decades.

Found in Thailand and named in 1986, Siamosaurus was the first dinosaur named from the country. 

Its long, conical teeth have lengthwise ridges and look much more like the fish-grabbing equipment of a spinosaurid than the steak knives of a T. rex. 

We can get a sneak peek that this magnificent fellow's skeleton on display at Thailand’s THAINOSAUR exhibition. The long jaws, sweeping tail, and dramatic pose make it look ready to lunge at you.

There’s just one catch: palaeontologists have never found a complete Siamosaurus skeleton.

Scientists named the dinosaur in 1986 after teeth were discovered in Thailand’s Sao Khua Formation. 

Those teeth are long and conical, with ridges running down their sides. They resemble the teeth of spinosaurs, a group of predators often associated with catching fish. 

Think less “slice through dinner like a steak knife” and more “grab a slippery meal before it escapes.” Fish is a plausible part of the menu, though the teeth alone cannot tell us everything this particular dinosaur ate.

Siamosaurus has an important place in Thai palaeontology: it was the first dinosaur named from Thailand. But being first does not mean being well known. Without a skull and skeleton securely identified as Siamosaurus, its exact proportions and appearance remain uncertain. 

The spectacular mount in this photograph is a reconstruction, showing visitors a scientifically informed possibility rather than a set of excavated bones. 

THAINOSAUR describes its dinosaur displays as recreations and also exhibits genuine fossils. They are working with what they've got, and I respect that. It is a wonderful display!

And the tooth story has grown more interesting. In a 2025 study, Thai researchers Kridsanupong Puntanon, Suravech Suteethorn and Adun Samathi examined spinosaurid teeth from Hin Lat Yao on Phu Wiang Mountain, along with evidence from other remains found there, including tail vertebrae. 

They compared the fossils’ features and used statistical and evolutionary analyses to investigate where the teeth fit among spinosaurs.

Their conclusion was careful: the Hin Lat Yao spinosaurid may be distinct from Siamosaurus. In other words, Thailand’s spinosaur fossils should not automatically be placed in one dinosaur’s mouth. 

The researchers also suggested that Southeast Asia may have played a significant role in the evolution and spread of this remarkable group. That is a proposal for further investigation, not a solved family tree.

So what are we seeing in the photograph? A wonderful way to meet a Thai dinosaur—and the skill of a museum team that turned incomplete evidence into something we can stand beside and wonder at. 

The real Siamosaurus has given us its teeth. The rest of its portrait is still waiting underground. Perhaps it knew a good mystery would keep us coming back.

Oh, Thailand... you're officially added to my bucket list! I'd be pretty chuffed to find the skeleton!

That’s part of the fun of fossils. A handful of teeth can reveal a predator in an ancient ecosystem, while leaving just enough unanswered to keep us digging.

Lead Image ID: 2679304243. Reconstructed Siamosaurus suteethorni skeleton at the THAINOSAUR exhibition in Bangkok. 

ANKYLOSAURUS: THE DINOSAUR WITH BUILT-IN SECURITY

Ankylosaurus

Ankylosaurus took “don’t mess with me” to a whole new level: body armour, a giant tail club, and absolutely no interest in becoming someone else’s lunch.

This heavily armoured dinosaur lived in North America near the end of the Cretaceous. 

Bony plates protected its broad back, while a low-slung body kept its softer belly close to the ground. It spent its days eating vegetation and, presumably, being an absolute nuisance to anything hoping for an easy lunch.

Then there was the tail. The “handle” was made of stiffened, interlocking bones, with a hefty bony knob at the end. 

Ankylosaur tail clubs could deliver a powerful sideways blow. Bam! Was that club used against predators, rival ankylosaurs, or both? 

Fossils from another club-tailed ankylosaur, Zuul, show injuries consistent with blows from other tail clubs. That gives us a fascinating clue, though it doesn’t tell us every way Ankylosaurus used its own.

My favourite thing about Ankylosaurus is the contrast: a plant eater dressed for battle. No sharp teeth, no dramatic chase scene—just armour, a formidable tail, and a strong suggestion to give it some personal space.

PETALS FROZEN IN TIME: THE PRINCETON CHERT

It began with a bloom, Florissantia quilchenensis, its petals splayed across a creamy, beige-brown matrix like a fossilized whisper from a warmer world. 

This precious bloom was hard-earned. Covered in dust and sweat, I grinned and held this elusive beauty to the light to take in its exceptional preservation and dusty beauty!

It was day three of my travels. I was hiking the hills around the town of Princeton in the Similkameen region of southern British Columbia, Canada. 

The former mining and railway hub lies at the confluence of the Tulameen into the Similkameen River, just east of the Cascade Mountains. It is dry, arid country covered by native grasslands and low scrub. 

Princeton, BC is located in the traditional territories of the Nlaka’pamux and Syilx (Okanagan) peoples. 

The region has historical significance for the Syilx, particularly the Upper and Lower Similkameen Indian Bands, and has been an important area for gathering red ochre for thousands of years. I had first explored the region looking for red ochre deposits to photograph, always with an eye to the local fossils.

On this particular trip, I was searching for fossils and the iconic flower, Florissantia, in the slopes known locally as Hospital Hill.

A lucky split brought a eureka moment. Is it? Could it be? Yes! Peeling back the layers, I had uncovered a near perfect flower and the treasure I had long been seeking. Searching for Florissantia had brought me to the Princeton area on many occasions but my first was found on this trip. 

Under a hand lens, its details unfurl: each vein etched in silica, each contour revealed with startling fidelity. 

I had uncovered a perfect flower, a time capsule telling us about the landscape as it once was, lush, tropical, and steaming with life.

This singular fossil, preserved in almost impossibly fine detail, is one of the jewels of the Princeton Chert, a fossil treasure hidden in the hills of British Columbia. 

Here, an entire ancient ecosystem—plants, fungi, fish, and the delicate traces of vanished warmth—was captured in stone with such precision that cell walls, stomata, and even parasitic fungi remain visible 48 million years later.

The Princeton Chert lies tucked along the east bank of the Similkameen River, 8.5 km south of the town of Princeton, B.C. At first glance, the exposures of the Allenby Formation appear unassuming: thinly layered bands of shale, coal, and pale chert. 

But within these layers, we've discovered something extraordinary—an anatomically preserved flora, fossilized in three dimensions. Unlike typical compression fossils, these organisms were permeated by silica-rich waters so quickly and so thoroughly that even their internal structures survived.

Since the 1950s, collectors and researchers have pulled back the curtain on this Eocene world, but it was in the 1970s and onward that the Chert achieved global attention. Scientists recognized that the Princeton Chert wasn’t just another fossil site. 

It was a Lagerstätte of unparalleled richness—one of the few places on Earth where entire plant communities are preserved down to the microscopic level.

Thin-sectioned under a microscope, these fossils show xylem vessels, aerenchyma, reproductive organs, pollen, seeds, roots, and fungal pathogens—all exquisitely intact. Few fossil floras in the world rival this clarity.

The Princeton Chert formed in a landscape shaped by fire and water. Its 49 known chert layers, ranging from thin wafers to thick beds over half a metre, alternate with volcanic ash, coal, and shale. Each layer represents a momentary pause in time—a lake or pond basin repeatedly drowned in silica-rich waters after nearby volcanic eruptions.

Radiometric dating now places the site at 48.7 million years old, deep within the Early Eocene Ypresian Stage, a time when Earth’s climate simmered near its all-time warmest. Greenhouse gases were high, ice was nearly absent, and tropical warmth lapped into polar regions.

The Princeton Chert flora thrived in shallow lakes and quiet backwaters. Many species were fully aquatic or semi-aquatic, and the fossils show unmistakable features of plants adapted to waterlogged conditions:

• Reduced vascular tissue (because buoyant plants need little support)
• Aerenchyma—honeycombed air chambers for floatation
• Protoxylem lacunae, ringed by thick-walled cells

Many of these plants have close relatives today:

• Allenbya – a water lily
• Keratosperma – an arum with curling, sculptural leaves
• Alismataceae – water plantains
• Ethela – rush-like monocots and sedges

Seeds, fruits, and roots appear in beautiful profusion. Meanwhile, terrestrial plants—those carried in by floods or dropped by birds—are rare but present.

The chert also preserves snippets of the animals that lived alongside these aquatic gardens. In the overlying shale beds, paleontologists have recovered Amia (bowfins), Amyzon, Libotonius, and even a soft-shelled turtle—a small but telling cast of freshwater neighbours.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Princeton Chert is its preservation of fungi. Here, we have identified:

• Tar spot fungi parasitizing Uhlia palm leaves
• Cryptodidymosphaerites princetonensis, a mycoparasite attacking the tar spot fungus
• Ectomycorrhizae—the first ever documented fossil mycorrhizal symbiosis with Pinus

In Metasequoia milleri, the Eocene ancestor of modern dawn redwood, mycorrhizal relationships appear nearly identical to those in modern forests. It is as though 50 million years have passed with hardly a change.

The Princeton Chert has attracted generations of paleobotanists, sedimentologists, and fossil enthusiasts, each drawn to its exquisite three-dimensional preservation and its window into Eocene ecosystems. 

Charles William “Chuck” Basinger, a Canadian paleobotanist renowned for his work on anatomically preserved plants and early conifer evolution. His meticulous studies helped illuminate the internal structures of Princeton Chert flora at cellular resolution. 

Ruth A. Stockey, a leading paleobotanist specialising in fossil conifers, seed plants, and reproductive biology, has published (along with her many grad students) extensively on the chert’s gymnosperms and angiosperms, reconstructing entire plants from roots to reproductive organs. 

Together with many collaborators over the decades, these scientists have pieced together a vivid portrait of ancient wetland forests—lush, diverse, and humming with microscopic and macroscopic life. 

The site is also beloved within the fossil-collecting community. The Vancouver Paleontological Society (VanPS) has organized field trips here for decades. 

Many members remember their first visit: crouched on a hot summer slope, poking about the roadcuts, collecting fossil insects and plants. One of the first large scale field trips to the region by the VanPS was part of the first BCPA Symposium held in 1998 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. 

Smaller field trips became a regular occurrence, usually one every year or two, and that trend continues. The result of all that exploration is a greater understanding of the many fossil species to be found here.

Dan Bowden of the VanPS has done some wonderful work cataloguing the many fossils found here, with a particularly good eye in identifying the fossil insects. 

These excursions have helped train new generations of citizen scientists, fostering a deep respect for the site’s scientific importance.

If you plan to head to Princeton, be sure to include the Princeton & District Museum on your travels. The museum holds a good selection of the local fossils. It is located at 167 Vermillion Avenue, Princeton, BC, V0X 1W0. You can confirm their house on their website at princetonmuseum.org

Know Before You Go: Exploring the Fossil Lakes of British Columbia

Getting There from Vancouver

• Drive east on Highway 1 through Hope, then continue along Highway 3 (the Crowsnest Highway). The town of Hope offers a good place to stop for a meal and gas up your vehicle.
• Pass through Manning Park and descend into the Similkameen Valley toward Princeton.
• The Princeton Chert itself is on private and protected land; access requires permission and often participation in sanctioned society trips.
• Surface collecting yields a wonderful assortment of fossils. 

INDRICOTHERIUM: A GIANT WITH A STORY IN ITS TEETH

Lower Jaw Teeth of Indricotherium

Imagine a rhinoceros tall enough to browse among the trees, with no horn and an appetite that must have kept it chewing for much of the day. 

Meet Indricotherium, a name often used for the giant prehistoric rhino now generally placed in the genus Paraceratherium. 

It lived in Asia during the Oligocene, tens of millions of years ago, and was among the largest land mammals ever to walk the Earth. Communications Biology

Despite its enormous size, this was no dinosaur. It belonged to the broader rhino family tree: an extinct relative of today’s rhinoceroses, rather than their direct ancestor. And while its towering body tends to steal the show, its teeth offer some of the best clues to how it lived.

First, the menu. Paraceratherium had relatively low-crowned cheek teeth. Tooth crowns are the parts above the gum line, and their height matters because food wears them down. Animals that spend their lives grinding abrasive grasses often have taller crowns to spare. 

Indricotherium

The giant rhino’s teeth fit better with browsing on leaves and other vegetation than with grazing on gritty grass close to the ground. 

That tells us the likely kind of food it ate, though a tooth cannot hand us an exact list of plants. Communications Biology

Then there are the front teeth. Its enlarged incisors were remarkably tusk-like. 

Fossil teeth can tell us more than what happened after a mouthful of food was taken: their shape also helps us work out how an animal might have gathered it. 

Exactly how this giant used those incisors remains an interpretation, but they are a useful reminder that “prehistoric rhino” did not mean “modern rhino, only bigger.”

We can also study wear on fossil teeth. Tiny marks and broader patterns of wear give clues about chewing and the abrasiveness of food, especially when compared with teeth from other mammals. 

Each method has limits: dust, grit and the foods eaten shortly before death can complicate the picture. The strongest reconstruction comes from putting dental evidence alongside the skull, the rest of the skeleton and the environment where the fossils were found.

So what do Indricotherium’s teeth tell us? This immense animal was likely a browser, equipped with a mouth quite unlike that of the horned rhinos we picture today. Its fossils preserve more than a record of size. They give us a glimpse of an Oligocene giant reaching for its next meal—and proof that, in palaeontology, a good set of teeth can be wonderfully revealing.

If you could examine one fossil to learn about an extinct animal’s daily life, would you choose a tooth, a footprint or a skull?

THE MAGISTY OF IRISH ELK

Irish Elk, Megaloceros giganteus

Imagine cresting a windswept hillside in the fading amber of a Pleistocene sunset. 

The tall grass parts in slow ripples, stirred by a warm evening breeze—then by something far larger. 

An Irish Elk steps into view, a towering ghost from deep time, its silhouette edged with gold. It is a view some of our ancestors were lucky to behold!

This magnificent deer—Megaloceros giganteus—was not, in fact, strictly Irish, nor truly an elk. 

It was a giant among cervids, a member of a lineage that roamed from Ireland to Siberia across vast Ice Age steppes. But Ireland’s bogs preserved their remains so exquisitely that the name stuck, and so did the awe.

Irish Elk fossils appear in abundance in the peatlands of Ireland, the loess plains of Eastern Europe, and far into Central Asia. 

Their lineage traces back to the genus Megaloceros, a group of large deer that emerged around two million years ago. 

What made M. giganteus the superstar of its clan? Two words: monumental antlers.

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris

Spanning up to 3.7 metres (twelve feet) from tip to tip, the antlers were not simply oversized decoration—they were evolutionary billboards, broadcasting strength, health, and genetic prowess. 

They also had a hand in their fossil fame. 

When these massive antlers were unearthed centuries ago, early naturalists were convinced they belonged to mythical beasts or antediluvian monsters. 

The truth turned out to be even better: a deer so grand it nearly defied imagination.

Despite their size and majesty, Irish Elk were true deer, closely related to fallow deer and part of an ancient and diverse cervid family. Their bodies were robust, their legs strong and built for open ground, where visibility mattered and where their spectacular antlers could be displayed in their full glory.

But evolution is a dance with the environment, and as the Pleistocene climate fluctuated, the lush grasslands they depended on began to shrink. Their decline wasn’t sudden but drawn out, a slow waltz toward extinction.

The last of these giants fell only a short time ago. We do not know the exact date but the fossils share their stories as more and more are found. The youngest known fossils come from Siberia and date to about 7,700 years ago—well after most Ice Age megafauna had disappeared. 

Irish Elk, Natural History Museum London

By then, humans were spreading across Eurasia, climates were shifting, and dense forests were overtaking open plains. 

A giant deer with enormous antlers was increasingly out of place in a world thick with trees and rife with hunters.

Climate change, habitat loss, and possibly selective hunting all nudged the Irish Elk toward its final chapter. 

They are one of these species that have been talked about as contenders for using DNA to bring them back. 

Today the Irish Elk lives on in museum halls, in bog-darkened bones, and in our imaginations—a giant stepping through grass, pausing on a Pleistocene hillside as if it might turn its head toward us at any moment. There are several Irish Elk in collections and on display at museums around the world where you can view them at your leisure. 

A particularly impressive specimen is on view at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. The museum is a personal favourite of mine and worthy of a visit for its rich history and marvelous fossils, including the Irish Elk you see in the photo above. There are also wonderful examples in the British Museum in London, also worthy of a visit. 

The sheer grandeur of their size is sure to impress you! These beauties are a reminder that the world once held creatures both familiar and impossibly grand.

Illustration Credit: The lead image above was created by the supremely talented Daniel Eskridge, Paleo Illustrator from Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I share it here with permission as I have licensed the use of many of his images over the years, including this one. 

To enjoy his works (and purchase them!) to adorn your walls, visit his website at www.danieleskridge.com