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.

MIDDLE TRIASSIC MIXOSAURUS: TAIWAN STYLE

Mixosaurus sp. from Middle Triassic Seas

If you ever wanted to meet an ichthyosaur halfway between “sleek dolphin missile” and “awkward crocodile-fish,” Mixosaurus delivers. 

This extinct marine reptile cruised the Middle Triassic seas around 242–235 million years ago, back when the world’s continents were still shuffling seats and experimenting with new ocean ecosystems.

The Taiwan specimen of Mixosaurus sp. on display at the Natural History Branch of the National Taiwan Museum captures that transitional vibe perfectly. It is a very, very purdy specimen!

With an elongated snout, well-developed fins, and a body still figuring out hydrodynamic fashion, Mixosaurus sits smack in the ichthyosaur family tree between early, lizard-shaped forms and the more streamlined torpedo models that would show up in the Jurassic. 

Think of it as the “adolescent ichthyosaur phase,” complete with growth spurts and evolving lifestyles.

Taxonomically, Mixosaurus belongs to the order Ichthyosauria and is commonly grouped within Mixosauridae. Its relatives include the earlier Utatsusaurus and Grippia (more on the reptilian side of things) and later speed demons like Temnodontosaurus and Stenopterygius. 

While all ichthyosaurs shared adaptations for marine life — big eyes, paddle limbs, and that delightful habit of birthing live young — Mixosaurus kept a few primitive traits, making it a favorite for paleontologists trying to reconstruct evolutionary pathways in Triassic oceans.

As for its museum home: the National Taiwan Museum has a long pedigree. Founded in 1908 during the Japanese era, it’s the oldest museum in Taiwan and houses natural history, anthropology, geology, and zoology collections spanning deep time to present day. 

The Natural History Branch, nestled in a dedicated exhibition space, is where geology, paleontology, and biology truly shine — a quiet refuge where extinct reptiles like Mixosaurus can enjoy their retirement in glass cases while humans politely stare, point, and whisper variants of “whoa.”

If you’re lucky enough to visit, you’ll find Mixosaurus presented not as some dusty relic of a bygone sea, but as a charismatic stepping-stone in reptile evolution — a reminder that even in the Triassic, life was busy experimenting. 

And occasionally, those experiments worked so well they became crowd-pleasers 240 million years later.

The National Taiwan Museum is in Taipei, Taiwan, right in the city’s historic downtown. The main building sits along Xiànběi Road (Xiànběi Rd., Zhongzheng District) facing 228 Peace Memorial Park, making it easy to combine extinct reptiles with a lovely urban stroll.

The Natural History Branch — where the Mixosaurus hangs out — is part of the same museum system and also located in central Taipei. It focuses on geology, biology, and deep time, so it’s very fossil-friendly territory.

If you’re ever in Taipei (or plotting a paleontology-tour itinerary — which, honestly, is something you should do), it’s a fun stop: compact, historic, and just nerdy enough to make Triassic ichthyosaurs feel right at home.

NESSIE: THE OPALIZED PLIOSAUR OF THE EARLY CRETACEOUS

Nessie the Opalized Marine Reptile

At the Opal Museum in Queensland glitters one of the more improbable fossils ever pulled from the ancient seabed — an opalized pliosaur affectionately nicknamed “Nessie.” 

Beneath its shimmering surface lies the story of a powerful marine reptile that ruled the Early Cretaceous oceans roughly 110 million years ago, at a time when much of inland Australia was drowned beneath a warm, shallow epicontinental sea.

The lovely remains you see here are from one of those amazing marine reptiles, a pliosaur, who swam in those ancient seas. So what exactly is a pliosaur?

Pliosaurs are a subgroup within the Plesiosauria, the great marine reptiles (not dinosaurs!) of the Mesozoic. 

While long-necked plesiosaurs favored dainty heads and elongated cervical vertebrae for sweeping, panoramic strikes at small fish and cephalopods, pliosaurs evolved in the opposite direction:

• Skulls short and massive
• Necks abbreviated
• Jaws deep and muscular
• Teeth robust and conical

These were the ambush predators, built less like swans and more like crocodilian torpedoes, with four powerful flippers and a muscular body plan that let them sprint through the water column to surprise prey.

Though not an ichthyosaur — those fast, fish-shaped reptiles that converged spectacularly toward the form of modern dolphins — pliosaurs shared the same ecosystems. 

Ichthyosaurs hunted squid and fish in speed-based chases, while pliosaurs handled bigger, tougher fare: other marine reptiles, ammonites, and the occasional large fish unlucky enough to cross their path.

The Early Cretaceous seas hosted a diverse guild of reptiles:

• Ichthyosaurs (fish-shaped pursuit predators)
• Long-necked plesiosaurs (precision feeders)
• Pliosaurs (apex ambush predators)
• Crocodyliforms (semi-aquatic opportunists)
• Ammonites & belemnites (cephalopods forming the backbone of the food web)

Nessie sits among a lineage that includes broad-skulled bruisers like Kronosaurus queenslandicus, a fellow Australian celebrity whose skull approached 3 meters in length and whose bite force was probably among the strongest of any Mesozoic reptile.

Pliosaurs didn’t so much swim as fly underwater. Their four hydrofoil flippers generated lift in alternating strokes, allowing bursts of speed followed by graceful pursuit. Streamlined bodies meant low drag, essential for surprise attacks in open water.

Dentition tells the tale:

• Deep-rooted conical teeth resist torsional stress
• Interlocking jaws grip slippery prey
• Short snout adds leverage for skull-crushing force

Ammonites — including opalized forms from the same Australian basins — bear puncture marks suggestive of pliosaur predation. Large fish and other marine reptiles likely rounded out the menu.

Like ichthyosaurs and most plesiosaurs studied from articulated skeletons, pliosaurs were viviparous — they gave birth to live young at sea. No nests, no frantic beach crawls, and no hatchling gauntlet. Babies were miniature versions of adults, already hydrodynamic and hungry.

How do we know this? Well, a few ways. We have fossilized pregnant plesiosaur specimens with embryos and there is always the biomechanical absurdity of hauling such a creature onto land to lay eggs. So, wee ones at sea it is!

Why Opal? Why Here?

Opalization is an Australian specialty, the result of silica-rich groundwater percolating through Cretaceous sediments and replacing bone over geologic time. Fossils from Lightning Ridge and Coober Pedy preserve everything from ammonites to plesiosaurs as shockingly colourful silica pseudomorphs — Earth chemistry as jeweler.

Nessie’s preservation is thus a double marvel for its biological rarity (pliosaur skeletons are uncommon) and mineralogical rarity (precious opal replacement is even rarer)

Pliosaurs survived well into the Late Cretaceous before vanishing in a wave of marine turnover alongside ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, and ammonites. Their departure marks a reshuffling of oceanic power dynamics — a story of climate, sea levels, and evolutionary competition.

QUIET DAREDEVILS OF THE NORTHERN FORESTS: FLYING SQUIRRELS

Flying squirrels are the quiet daredevils of the northern forests, tiny nocturnal acrobats that turn the darkened canopy into an aerial highway. 

Mammals have always found inventive ways to move across the landscape — walking, hopping, swimming, flying — and a select few, such as the marsupial sugar gliders of Australia, have mastered the art of gliding. 

But with fifty-two species scattered across the Northern Hemisphere, flying squirrels are the most successful gliders ever to take to the trees.

They are not true fliers, at least not in the way bats or birds command the air. Instead, these diminutive rodents hurl themselves into space with astonishing confidence, stretching their limbs wide to transform their bodies into living parachutes. It is a leap that looks both reckless and charming: an adorable woodland pilot bounding into the night inside a furry paper airplane, with just enough tooth and claw to remind you they are still wild.

Their improbable flight depends on an extraordinary bit of anatomy — a thin membrane of skin, the patagium, that stretches from wrist to ankle. When they leap, the membrane balloons outward, turning their entire body into a gliding surface. 

Hidden within their tiny wrists are elongated, cartilaginous struts, unique among squirrels, that help spread and stabilize the winglike skin. These distinctive wrist bones mark them as gliders and set them apart from their earthbound cousins.

The evolutionary origins of these sky-graceful rodents, however, have long puzzled scientists. Genetic studies suggest that flying squirrels branched off from tree squirrels around twenty-three million years ago. But fossil evidence tells a different story. 

The oldest remains—mostly cheek teeth—hint that gliding squirrels were already slicing through forest air thirty-six million years ago. 

To complicate matters further, the subtle dental traits used to distinguish gliding squirrels from non-gliding ones may not be exclusive after all. Teeth, it seems, do not always tell the whole truth.

In 2002, a routine excavation at a dumpsite near Barcelona, Spain, brought the mystery into sharper focus. As workers peeled back layers of clay and debris, a peculiar skeleton began to emerge. 

First came a remarkably long tail. Then two robust thigh bones, so unexpectedly large that the team briefly wondered whether they belonged to a small primate. But as each bone was freed and reassembled, the truth took shape. This was no primate. It was a rodent.

The breakthrough came during preparation, when screen-washing the surrounding sediment revealed a set of minute, exquisitely specialized wrist bones — the unmistakable calling card of a glider. From that mud rose the tiny, ancient hands of Miopetaurista neogrivensis, an extinct flying squirrel whose nearly complete skeleton would become the oldest known representative of its kind.

Studied in detail by Casanovas-Vilar and colleagues, the 11.6-million-year-old fossil revealed an animal belonging to the lineage of large flying squirrels, the same branch that today includes the giant gliders of Asia. Molecular and paleontological data, when combined with this new find, painted a richer story: flying squirrels may have arisen between thirty-one and twenty-five million years ago — and perhaps even earlier. 

The skeleton of Miopetaurista was so similar to those of modern Petaurista that the living giants of Asia might fairly be called “living fossils,” their basic form barely altered across nearly twelve million years of evolutionary time.

It is rare for molecular and fossil evidence to agree so neatly, yet in this case, both strands appear to weave the same narrative. The Barcelona specimen anchors the timeline, offering a crucial calibration point that reconciles genetic divergence estimates with the scattered hints found in teeth alone. It also underscores how conservative evolution can be: once perfected, the gliding design of flying squirrels changed little through the ages.

Still, much remains hidden in the shadows of deep time. Older fossils, or transitional forms showing the first experimental steps toward gliding, could help illuminate how these rodents took to the air. What combination of strength, membrane, and courage first allowed a squirrel to turn a fall into a flight? And how did these early pioneers spread so widely across the forests of the Northern Hemisphere?

Flying squirrels remain unique among mammals that glide, remarkable for both their diversity and their broad geographical reach. Yet their lineage is a riddle still missing key chapters. For now, the fossil from Barcelona stands as a rare and precious window into their past — the moment when a small rodent stretched its skin, trusted the air, and opened an entirely new evolutionary pathway between the branches.

CHASING THE SCIENCE OF SUNSETS: WHY EVENING LIGHT FEELS LIKE MAGIC

 

Ancient Starlight Warming the Hills

After a long day on the trail—dust on your boots, muscles humming with that pleasant kind of fatigue—there is a particular hush that settles in as the sun sinks toward the horizon. 

The air cools. The world exhales. You stand there, maybe nursing a new blister or two, and the sky unfurls into a slow-blooming masterpiece of gold, tangerine, and ember-red. 

It an awe-inspiring view—serenity, visual poetry suspended in the last breaths of the day.

But have you ever paused in that glowing moment and wondered why sunsets look the way they do? Or what sunlight truly is, beyond the familiar warmth on your skin?

Sunlight begins as violence—beautiful cosmic violence. Deep within the Sun, hydrogen nuclei are squeezed and fused into helium in a thermonuclear furnace that has been roaring for 4.6 billion years. 

Solar-Powered Beauty

The energy released in these reactions travels outward as electromagnetic waves, a spectrum of radiation that includes visible light, ultraviolet rays, infrared warmth, and far stranger, invisible forms of energy. 

By the time these waves break free of the Sun’s surface, they’re tossed into space at the speed of light, making the 150-million-kilometre journey to Earth in just over eight minutes.

Once that energy reaches us, we give it a tidy scientific name: insolation, or incoming solar radiation. It may sound static, but it isn’t. 

The Sun is a restless star. 

Bursts of hot, tangled magnetic activity—solar flares—briefly brighten it, while dark sunspots, cooler by stellar standards, dim it. These cycles shift the amount of heat and light we receive over days, weeks, even months.

When sunlight finally reaches Earth, it gets straight to work. Our bodies quietly convert ultraviolet rays into Vitamin D, that small biochemical miracle essential to our bones and immune systems. Plants, meanwhile, harness the solar feast through photosynthesis, turning carbon dioxide, water, and photons into sugars and oxygen. In chemical shorthand:

6 CO₂ + 6 H₂O + light → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6 O₂

Across the globe, photosynthetic organisms use sunlight to fix roughly 100–115 billion metric tonnes of carbon into biomass each year—about six times more energy than humanity collectively consumes. Humans, indeed, are bit players in a sun-powered world.

For all our scientific progress, the nature of light still teases us with mystery. It behaves as both a wave and a particle, depending on how we look at it. And the entire universe is steeped in its echoes, from the glow of newborn stars to the faint hiss of cosmic microwave background radiation—the lingering afterglow of the Big Bang.

But if sunlight begins in fusion and ends in galactic poetry, its final flourish—its colours—are created right here in our sky.

As beams of white light enter Earth’s atmosphere, they collide with nitrogen, oxygen, dust, wildfire smoke, sea salt, pollen—whatever is drifting through the air that day. Shorter wavelengths like blues and greens scatter more easily, ricocheting around and out of view. 

Longer wavelengths—yellows, oranges, and reds—sail through more cleanly, surviving the gauntlet. When the Sun dips low in the sky, its rays pass through more atmosphere, amplifying this effect. What remains to reach your eyes is that molten palette we call sunset.

It feels like magic. It is physics. It is the Sun’s long-distance love letter, read through Earth’s shimmering veil. You’re standing in the path of ancient starlight, scattered into gold just for you.

TOXODON: SOUTH AMERICA'S MOST MAGNIFICENT ODDBALL

Toxodon was a hulking, hippo-sized grazing mammal that once roamed the ancient grasslands, wetlands, and scrub of South America. 

The creature first entered the scientific spotlight thanks to Charles Darwin, who stumbled upon its bones during the HMS Beagle expedition. 

On November 26, 1834, while travelling in Uruguay, Darwin heard rumours of “giant’s bones” on a nearby farm. 

Curious, he rode over, investigated the cache, and purchased the skull of a strange beast for eighteen pence — a bargain for a fossil that would later puzzle the greatest minds of the 19th century.

In his journals, Darwin mused: “Toxodon is perhaps one of the strangest animals ever discovered.” And frankly, he wasn’t wrong. 

Once the skeleton was fully reconstructed, it appeared to pull anatomical traits from every corner of the mammalian tree. It was as large and barrel-bodied as a rhinoceros, yet equipped with chisel-shaped incisors reminiscent of oversized rodents — hence its name, meaning “arched tooth.” 

Its high-set eyes and nostrils suggested an animal comfortable in water, much like a hippo or manatee. Darwin marvelled at this evolutionary mash-up: “How wonderfully are the different orders… blended together in the structure of the Toxodon!”

For over a century, the lineage of Toxodon remained a scientific enigma. Traditional morphology bounced it somewhere among ungulates, rodents, and even sirenians. Then, in 2015, ancient DNA changed the game. 

A groundbreaking genomic study revealed that Toxodon — along with the equally bizarre Macrauchenia — belonged to a lineage known as the South American native ungulates, or SANUs. 

These animals were the evolutionary result of South America’s long isolation after the breakup of Gondwana. And here’s the kicker: SANUs are now understood to be distantly related to modern perissodactyls, the group that includes horses, tapirs, and rhinoceroses. 

So Darwin’s instincts weren’t far off — the resemblance to rhinos wasn’t just superficial whimsy.

Toxodon and its relatives (family Toxodontidae) appear in the Late Miocene, roughly 9 million years ago, and flourish throughout the Pliocene and Pleistocene of South America. 

Their fossils have been uncovered across Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with especially rich deposits in the Pampean region where Darwin first collected his specimens.

These creatures were part of a wider radiation of endemic South American mammals — a remarkable fauna that included giant ground sloths, glyptodonts, terror birds, and litopterns. For tens of millions of years, South America functioned almost like a massive evolutionary island, producing lineages found nowhere else on Earth.

Toxodon itself survived until the tail end of the last Ice Age, vanishing about 12,000 years ago, around the time humans arrived on the continent and climate systems shifted dramatically. Its demise mirrors the fate of many Pleistocene megafaunal giants.

Toxodon stands as a fascinating case study in convergent evolution and the challenges of reconstructing deep-time relationships. Its stocky limbs, massive grinding teeth, and robust skull mark it as a grazer well-suited to tough vegetation, while its semi-aquatic adaptations hint at a lifestyle spent wallowing in wetlands and rivers. 

It was, in many ways, a South American answer to the hippo — yet biologically and evolutionarily, it belonged to an entirely different branch of the mammalian tree.

Darwin might have described it as a beautiful blend of mismatched traits, but with DNA in hand, we now see Toxodon not as a puzzle piece forced to fit the wrong box — but as the last great representative of an ancient, isolated ungulate lineage that flourished for millions of years in a continent of evolutionary mischief.

SPISULA FOSSIL CLAMS FROM HAIDA GWAII

Some lovely Spisula praecursor (Dall) fossil clams from the Skonun Formation of Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, captured from the Miocene when this coastline looked very different from today. 

These fossil bivalves belong to the surf clam lineage, a group well adapted to shallow, energetic marine environments with shifting sands and strong wave action. 

Their robust, equivalve shells and streamlined form speak to a life spent burrowed just beneath the sediment surface, filtering seawater for food while riding out constant motion above.

The Skonun Formation preserves a rich snapshot of nearshore marine life along the northeastern Pacific margin during the Miocene, roughly 23 to 5 million years ago. 

At that time, Haida Gwaii lay along an active tectonic edge, with sediments accumulating in coastal and shelf settings influenced by currents, storms, and abundant nutrient flow. 

Fossils such as Spisula praecursor help us reconstruct these dynamic environments, offering clues about water depth, substrate type, and even paleoclimate.

These particular specimens came from a single block only accessible on a falling tide. Timing, as ever, was everything—and the tide had other ideas. 

The excavation involved equal parts determination and seawater, leaving both collector and fossils thoroughly soaked. Still, there is something fitting about getting wet while freeing marine clams from their ancient shoreline, a small reminder that fieldwork often mirrors the environments we are trying to understand.

A LINEAGE OF GIANTS: MEET THE 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.

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.

Irish Elk, 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