SEAGRASS, SASS AND SIRENIA

Meet one of the ocean’s more charming lawnmowers — the dugong — an endearing aquatic vacuum with a taste for seagrass and a lineage that runs far deeper than its gentle gaze might suggest.

Like their rounder, paddle-tailed cousins, the manatees, dugongs belong to the order Sirenia — a small but storied group of marine mammals that made the rather bold decision to abandon land for a life at sea. 

They are the last whisper of a once more diverse clan that included the enormous Steller’s sea cow, Hydrodamalis gigas, a North Pacific giant hunted to extinction in the 18th century with disheartening efficiency.

Now, if you’re ever sizing one up in the shallows, there’s a tidy little trick to telling them apart. 

Dugongs sport elegant, whale-like fluked tails with pointed tips, built for steady cruising. Manatees, by contrast, carry broad, paddle-shaped tails — think beaver, but supersized and decidedly less industrious on land.

Dugongs glide through warm coastal waters of northern Australia and across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, favouring sheltered bays, lagoons, and estuaries where seagrass meadows flourish. 

Their bodies are beautifully fusiform — streamlined, torpedo-shaped — lacking both dorsal fins and hind limbs, a design tuned for efficient, unhurried grazing. 

Watching them feed is rather like observing a very polite underwater gardener. They uproot entire seagrass plants, roots and all, leaving tidy feeding trails etched into the seabed.

Seagrass is their preferred fare — low in fibre, rich in nitrogen, and delightfully easy to digest — but they are not above the occasional culinary detour. Algae, invertebrates, sea squirts, shellfish, and even the odd jellyfish have all made appearances on the menu. Opportunistic, but with standards.

Their story stretches back into deep time. The earliest sirenians appear in the Early Eocene, roughly 50 million years ago, when warm, shallow seas lapped across what is now North Africa and the Tethys Sea. 

Fossil forms such as Prorastomus from Jamaica and Pezosiren — a delightfully awkward, semi-aquatic walker — show us the transition from land-dwelling herbivores to fully marine grazers. 

By the Oligocene and Miocene, dugong relatives were widespread, leaving their bones scattered through marine sediments across the Caribbean, North and West Africa, Europe, South Asia, and Australia. Today, their fossilized ribs and dense limb bones — wonderfully heavy for ballast — turn up in ancient seagrass deposits, a quiet record of long-vanished coastal meadows.

And here’s the bit that always gives me pause — these gentle giants can live more than 70 years. Seventy years of slow drifting, grazing, and surfacing for breath. 

They are large, unhurried, and, by all appearances, somewhat ill-equipped for drama: poor eyesight, no real defensive arsenal, and an unfortunate resemblance to a floating buffet.

And yet… they endure.

Though their numbers are in decline — habitat loss, boat strikes, and human pressures taking their toll — dugongs persist in these warm, shallow seas, carrying with them a lineage that has weathered tens of millions of years of planetary change. 

Quiet, resilient, and utterly enchanting.

PSEUDOTHURMANNIA: CRETACEOUS AMMONITE

Meet Pseudothurmannia — one of those marvellous Cretaceous ammonites that looks as though nature spent extra time on the details. 

This extinct cephalopod belongs to the subclass Ammonoidea and is tucked neatly within the family Crioceratitidae, part of the wonderfully curly branch of ammonites known as the Ancylocerataceae. 

A proper pedigree, if ever there was one.

Now, have a look at those shell lines — the intricate, looping seams known as sutures. These are no random squiggles. 

They are the biological fingerprints of ammonites, each species carrying its own signature pattern. To the trained eye, they tell time as neatly as any watchmaker. 

Compare the sutures of this beauty with its kin, and we know Pseudothurmannia cruised ancient seas during the Early Cretaceous, from the Hauterivian through to the Barremian, some 132 to 125 million years ago.

Like its modern cousins — squid, cuttlefish and octopus — this fellow was no passive floater. Hidden within that elegant shell was a sharp, beak-like jaw surrounded by a ring of grasping tentacles. Those arms were built for business, used to seize prey from the water column: plankton, small fish, crustaceans and whatever else wandered too close.

And catching a fish while swimming is no easy business. Try it yourself and report back. Ammonites, however, were masters of the ambush — swift, buoyant, and gloriously well-equipped for life in the open sea. 

For millions of years, they were among the great success stories of the oceans… until, of course, the curtain came down at the end of the Cretaceous.

Within their shells, they had a number of chambers, called septa, filled with gas or fluid that were interconnected by a wee air tube. By pushing air in or out, they were able to control their buoyancy in the water column. 

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

Shells of Pseudothurmannia can reach a diameter of about 4–12 centimetres (1.6–4.7 in). They show flat or slightly convex sides, with dense ribs and a subquadrate whorl section.

We find fossils of Pseudothurmannia in Cretaceous outcrops in Antarctica, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Spain, Russia and the United States. The specimen you see here is in the collection of the deeply awesome Manuel Peña Nieto from Córdoba, Spain and is from the Lower Cretaceous of Mallorca.

ANCIENT SWAMPS AND SOLAR FLARES

If fossil fuels are made from fossils, are oil, gas and coal made from dead dinosaurs? Well, no, but they are made from fossils. 

We do not heat our homes or run our cars on dead hadrosaurs. Instead, we burn very old plants and algae. 

It sounds much less exciting, but the process by which algae and other plant life soak up the Sun's energy, store it for millions of years, then give it all up for us to burn as fuel is a pretty fantastic tale.

Fossil fuel is formed by a natural process — the anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms. These plants and algae lived and died many millions of years ago, but while they lived, they soaked up and stored energy from the sun through photosynthesis. 

Picture ancient trees, algae and peat soaking up the sun, then storing that energy for us to use millions of years later. 

These organisms and their resulting fossil fuels are millions of years old, sometimes more than 650 million years. That's way back in the day when Earth's inhabitants were mostly viruses, bacteria and some early multi-cellular jelly-like critters.

Fossil fuels consist mainly of dead plants – coal from trees, and natural gas and oil from algae, a diverse group of aquatic photosynthetic eukaryotic organisms I like to think of as pond scum. These deposits are called fossil fuels because, like fossils, they are the remains of plants and animals that lived long ago.

If we could go back far enough, we'd find that our oil, gas, and coal deposits are really remnants of algal pools, peat bogs and ancient muddy swamps. 

Dead plants and algae accumulate and over time, the pressure turns the mud mixed with dead plants into rock. Geologists call the once-living matter in the rock kerogen. If they haven't been cooked too badly, we call them fossils.

Kerogen is the solid, insoluble organic matter in sedimentary rocks and it is made from a mixture of ancient organic matter. A bit of this tree and that algae all mixed together to form a black, sticky, oily rock. 

The Earth’s internal heat cooks the kerogen. The hotter it gets, the faster it becomes oil, gas, or coal. If the heat continues after the oil is formed, all the oil turns to gas. The oil and gas then seep through cracks in the rocks. Much of it is lost. 

We find oil and gas today because some happened to become trapped in porous, sponge-like rock layers capped by non-porous rocks. We tap into these the way you might crack into a bottle of olive oil sealed with wax.

Fossil fuel experts call this arrangement a reservoir and places like Alberta, Iran and Qatar are full of them. A petroleum reservoir or oil and gas reservoir is a subsurface pool of hydrocarbons contained in porous or fractured rock formations. 

Petroleum reservoirs are broadly classified as conventional and unconventional reservoirs. In the case of conventional reservoirs, the naturally occurring hydrocarbons, such as crude oil or natural gas, are trapped by overlying rock formations with lower permeability. 

In unconventional reservoirs, the rocks have high porosity and low permeability which keeps the hydrocarbons trapped in place, so these unconventional reservoirs don't need a rock cap.

Fossil Fuels: Coal

Coal is an important form of fossil fuel. Much of the early geologic mapping of Canada — and other countries — was done for the sole purpose of mapping the coal seams. 

You can use it to heat your home, run a coal engine or sell it for cold hard cash. It's a dirty fuel, but for a very long time, most of our industries used it as the sole means of energy. 

But what is so bad about burning coal and other fossil fuels? 

Well, many things...

Burning fossil fuels, like oil and coal, releases large amounts of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere. 

They get trapped as heat, which we call the greenhouse effect. This plays havoc with global weather patterns and our world does not do so well when that happens. 

The massive end-Permian extinction event, the worst natural disaster in Earth's history — when 90% of all life on Earth died —  was caused by massive volcanic eruptions that spewed gas and lava, covering the Earth in volcanic dust, then acid rain. Picture Mordor times ten. This wasn't a culling of the herd, this was full-on decimation. I'll spare you the details, but the whole thing ended poorly.

Dirty or no, coal is still pretty cool. It is wild to think that a lump of coal has the same number of atoms in it as the algae or material that formed it millions of years ago. Yep, all the same atoms, just heated and pressurized over time. When you burn a lump of coal, the same number of atoms are released when those atoms dissipate as particles of soot. 

You may wonder what makes a rock burn. It's not intuitive that it would be possible, and yet there it is. Coal is combustible, meaning it is able to catch fire and burn. Coal is made up mostly from carbon with some hydrogen, sulphur — which smells like rotting eggs — oxygen and nitrogen thrown in.

It is just that the long-ago rain forest was far less dense than the coal you hold in your hand today, and so is the soot into which it dissipates once burned. The energy was captured by the algal pool or rain forest by way of photosynthesis, then that same energy is released when the coal is burnt. So the energy captured in gravity and released billions of years later when the intrinsic gravity of the coal is dissipated by burning. It's enough to bend your brain.

The Sun loses mass all the time because of its process of fusion of atomic content and radiating that energy as light. Our ancient rain forests and algal pools on Earth captured some of it. So maybe our energy transformations between the Earth and the Sun could be seen more like ping-pong matches, with energy, as the ball, passing back and forth.

As mass sucks light in (hello, photosynthesis), it becomes denser, and as mass radiates light out (hello, heat from coal), it becomes less dense. Ying, yang and the beat goes on.

AMMONITES IN CONCRETION

At first glance they look like ordinary stones—rounded, weathered, unassuming. 

But then you notice the delicious hints: a spiral ghosting through the surface, a faint rib, a seam where time is ready to split wide open—it's magic!

Ammonites, long extinct cephalopods, so often appear this way because, shortly after death, their shells became chemical centres of attraction on the seafloor. 

As the soft tissues decayed, they altered the surrounding sediment, triggering minerals—often calcium carbonate or iron-rich compounds—to precipitate rapidly around the shell. 

This early cementation formed a concretion, a protective stone cocoon that hardened long before the surrounding mud was compressed into rock. 

While everything around it flattened, cracked, and distorted under pressure, the ammonite inside remained cradled and whole.

What you see here is a gathering of these time capsules: a cluster of ammonites preserved in their concretions, each one split or weathered just enough to reveal the coiled story within. 

Some are neatly halved, spirals laid bare like fingerprints from ages past; others are only just beginning to show themselves, teasing their presence beneath rough stone skins. 

Together, they tell a familiar fossil-hunter’s tale—of patience, sharp eyes, and the thrill of knowing that this unassuming rock holds an ancient ocean inside.

IN THE FIELD WITH ANY RANDALL: KITSILANO FOSSIL SITE

In the Field with Vancouverite Geoscientist Andy Randell — We were super excited to spend a day with the awesome possum that is Andy Randell filming fossils in the field.

We braved the wet and cold on this fine day to head out in search of fossil plants along the Kitsilano foreshore.

And find them we did! 40 million-year-old pretty as you please plant fossils

The Kitsilano fossil plant sites are intriguing as they hold a mystery... why ONLY plants and NO animal fossils? Nary an insect, mammal or reptile to be found. 

We did find some truly lovely plant fossils that speak to a warmer, wetter environment than the Kitsilano we know today. 

Andy shared that the sediments that lay on the foreshore along Kitsilano Beach are thought to be from the Upper Eocene / Early Oligocene in age (38 to 28 million years old), although opinion varies on the exact age with some folk thinking they may be as much as 40 million-years-old. 

The rocks here are layered in stacks of sand, silt and mudstones associated with a lowland estuarine or deltaic environment. If you look closely, you can see signs of the water meandering into channels and ponds of still water. 

The area would have formed a basin, surrounded by mountains that were drained by rivers into this area. It seems that there are no indications of any marine incursions in the sediment pile, and so the area is assumed to have remained stable for some time.

Plant fossils are common in these beds and are often well preserved. The most common are broadleaved deciduous species such as beech, oak, chestnut and hazel, although several coniferous species are known including redwoods (Sequoia), larch, pine and spruce. The deciduous trees like low, moist landscapes which fit with the basin model. The coniferous species likely lived on the surrounding hills where the ground was somewhat drier and their remains transported by rivers into the depositional basin.

There are also regular signs of burning in the fossils – indicating some kind of forest fire events that must have occurred with some frequency.

You will want to catch his wonderfully engaging interviews. Andy is a professional geologist living in Vancouver who is tailoring his career to bring change to the minerals exploration industry. 

Since 2014, he has established his consulting business, SGDS Hive, which takes on graduate geoscientists and mentors them through a variety of exploration projects to help engage and educate the next generation of geologists. 

Andy is the engine behind Below BC, a non-profit society that provides outreach to the public around Earth Science topics, which now serves several thousand people in British Columbia each year. 

His love of geology and palaeontology started early. Andy is a wealth of knowledge on fossil plants. Growing up on the Isle of Wight, he studied plants that are remarkably similar to those we looked at today—and he is a natural behind the lens!

We were joined by my good friend Lauren, the deeply awesome John Fam, Vice-Chair of the Vancouver Paleontological Society & his two boys, Oliver & Liam. 

It was Liam's first fossil field trip & my 7-month old Flat Coat Retriever's first foray into the field. Both Liam and Coco had a grand time! He found fossils that she inspected and on occasion took a wee bite of to see what all the fuss was about.

We were blessed to have David, Andy's partner, teacher & botany buff, along with their two palaeo puppers — Daisy & Dobby — to complete our escort.

With Andy's guidance, everyone found fossil material and learned a lot about how these fossils were originally laid down in a river system.

A huge thank you to Gabriel Mesquita our talented cinematographer! It was a cold, wet day and the entire crew were troopers. If you are planning to visit the Kitsilano foreshore to look for fossils, know that the stairwell access at the base of Dunbar/Alma Street has been washed away. 

You'll want to head to Waterloo Street and make your way to the beach on the rather steep stairwell found there. Surface collecting is fine at this site. Wear rubber boots and know that the rock is very slippery.

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.

SALMON CANNERIES IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

Tallheo Cannery

Perched atop weathered, rotting pilings and wrapped in the mist and mood of British Columbia’s wild north coast sits the Tallheo Cannery — a faded red relic standing stubbornly against rain, tide, and time.

It was once a place of steam whistles, clanging machinery, shouted greetings from the docks, and the silver flash of salmon arriving by the boatload from the cold Pacific.

Tallheo rests near the former Nuxalk village of Talyu, at the meeting of the Taleomy and Noerick Rivers where they spill into South Bentinck Arm through Taleomy Narrows. 

It is a place we used see enroute to our favourite fishing spots when I was a child. I heard the stories of its history growing up. How it was once a thriving centre of fish production, along with tales of Talyu and which families used to live here.

This is Nuxalk territory — ancient, rich, and deeply storied. The Nuxalk are a distinct people of this coast, with their own language, traditions, and enduring relationship to land and sea.

Tallheo is the name of a cannery, yes, but it is also the name of a dialect of the Nuxalk language spoken by the Talhyumc people who lived here, and by those at Q'umk'uts' near the Bella Coola River estuary. 

Names matter. They hold memory. They hold history. 

Before European contact, the Nuxalk population was more than 35,000 strong and thriving. Then came disease, violence, and colonial disruption. Smallpox and conflict reduced that number to a devastating few hundred souls. Yet here is the story that matters most: they endured. 

Today the population has rebounded to roughly 3,000 and growing — a powerful testament to resilience, kinship, and cultural strength.

In 1905, Tallheo Cannery opened its doors to the hum and thrum of the industrial age. Founded by a Norwegian immigrant, it employed many local residents — Indigenous and settler alike. 

Boats came heavy with Chinook, Pink, Chum, Sockeye, and Spring salmon, their holds brimming with the wealth of these northern waters.

Inside, skilled hands cleaned, cut, packed, and sealed the catch into tins bound for markets near and far. 

Imagine the delight of some London clerk or prairie farm family cracking open a tin of wild Pacific salmon for the very first time — a taste of the far western edge of Canada.

The canning process itself began in France in the early 1800s, spreading across Europe before arriving in North America. What started as military provisioning became one of the great food revolutions of the modern world. British Columbia embraced it with gusto. 

British Columbia welcomed the first canneries in the 1860s. The industry soon became the bread and butter for many local families and allowed those far from the coast and indeed, across the seas, to dine on fresh-caught salmon. 

At one time, British Columbia boasted more than 200 such canneries. Now, nearly all are gone.

One notable survivor is St. Jean’s Cannery and Smokehouse, the last commercial cannery of its kind in British Columbia. A family favourite in my own household, they once bought oysters and fish from my Uncle Dick and Uncle Doug — transformed into chowders, smoked delicacies, and tins of salmon that sold for a tidy 25 cents each. Honest food. Coastal gold.

St. Jean's got their start selling smoked oysters or smudgies to locals, then expanded to chowder and finally salmon. They were a family favourite of ours growing up on the coast. 

Today, they sell hand-packed wild Pacific salmon, tuna and shellfish in their online store and process fresh-caught salmon from sport fishermen. 

Wild, smoked Pink salmon and wild, skinless, boneless Sockeye salmon will run you $5.95 per tin and wild smoked sockeye a few pennies more at $6.50. They also sell candied salmon, a personal favourite of mine, for $7.95-$27.95 in sealed foil pouches. 

The expansion in products led to an expansion of the business itself. St. Jean's is now in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, a fitting local as this community is known as the Salmon Capital of the World, and Delta along the Fraser Lowland south of the Fraser River in British Columbia's Lower Mainland. 

It would be wonderful to see this industry grow even further to bring back the cannery traditions to British Columbia's wild west coast and the bounty found here.

Today, Tallheo has traded fish barrels for feather duvets. Visitors can stay at the Tallheo Cannery Guest House, a bed and breakfast where one can wander the old cannery grounds, explore the original general store, and soak in the moody grandeur of the north coast.

And perhaps that is fitting.

For places like Tallheo are never truly abandoned. They remain layered with stories — of salmon runs and steam engines, of hard labour and family tables, of loss and endurance, of the Nuxalk people whose roots here run far deeper than any piling driven into the mud.

The tide comes in. The tide goes out. The stories remain and the world evolves.

• References: http://nuxalk.net
• St. Jean's Cannery and Smokehouse: https://stjeans.com
• Tallheo Cannery Guest House: https://www.bellacoolacannery.com
• Alaska Historical Society: https://alaskahistoricalsociety.org/history-in-a-can-2
• The Tyee: https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/08/22/Last-BC-Cannery-Standing/

ECHOES FROM THE EOCENE: A WHALE BETWEEN WORLDS

Chrysocetus foudasil 

The impressive skull you see here belongs to Chrysocetus foudasil a member of the Basilosauridae, an ancient family of fully aquatic early whales known as archaeocetes. Though it still bore vestigial hind limbs, it no longer depended on land—a critical evolutionary step from its semi-aquatic ancestors such as Ambulocetus and Protocetus.

Basilosaurids like Chrysocetus, Dorudon, and Basilosaurus ruled the seas of the late Eocene, occupying ecological roles much like today’s dolphins and orcas. 

Basilosaurus grew into a serpent-like giant over 15 meters long, while Dorudon was smaller, sleeker, and likely faster. Chrysocetus was somewhere in between—mid-sized, streamlined, and adapted for powerful undulating swimming.

These early whales represent a pivotal stage in cetacean evolution. They bridge the gap between the land-dwelling artiodactyl ancestors (even-toed ungulates like deer and hippos) and the fully marine mysticetes (baleen whales) and odontocetes (toothed whales) that would later diversify in the Oligocene.

Looking at their remains, we are seeing a window into our world when whales were still learning to be whales—a fleeting evolutionary moment preserved in Moroccan stone, where golden bones tell the story of an ocean in transition.

TERTAPODS AND THE VERTEBRATE HAND

The irresistable tetrapod Tiktaalik

In the late 1930s, our understanding of the transition of fish to tetrapods — and the eventual jump to modern vertebrates — took an unexpected leap forward. 

The evolutionary a'ha came from a single partial fossil skull found on the shores of a riverbank in Eastern Canada. 

Meet the Stegocephalian, Elpistostege watsoni, an extinct genus of finned tetrapodomorphs that lived during the Late Givetian to Early Frasnian of the Late Devonian — 382 million years ago. 

Elpistostege watsoni — perhaps the sister taxon of all other tetrapods — was first described in 1938 by British palaeontologist and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London, Thomas Stanley Westoll. Westroll was an interesting fellow whose research interests were wide-ranging. He was a vertebrate palaeontologist and geologist best known for his innovative work on Palaeozoic fishes and their relationships with tetrapods. 

Elpistostege watsoni

As a specialist in early fish, Westoll was the perfect person to ask to interpret that single partial skull roof discovered at the Escuminac Formation in Quebec, Canada. 

His findings and subsequent publication named Elpistostege watsoni and helped us to better understand the evolution of fishes to tetrapods — four-limbed vertebrates — one of the most important transformations in vertebrate evolution. 

Hypotheses of tetrapod origins rely heavily on the anatomy of but a few tetrapod-like fish fossils from the Middle and Late Devonian, 393–359 million years ago. 

These taxa — known as elpistostegalians — include Panderichthys, Elpistostege and Tiktaalik — none of which had yet to reveal the complete skeletal anatomy of the pectoral fin. 

Elpistostege watsoni

None until 2010 that is, when a complete 1.57-metre-long articulated specimen was found and described by Richard Cloutier et al. in 2020. 

The specimen helped us to understand the origin of the vertebrate hand. Stripped from its encasing stone, it revealed a set of paired fins of Elpistostege containing bones homologous to the phalanges (finger bones) of modern tetrapods and is the most basal tetrapodomorph known to possess them. 

Once the phalanges were uncovered, prep work began on the fins. The fins were covered in wee scales and lepidotrichia (fin rays). The work was tiresome, taking more than 2,700 hours of preparation but the results were thrilling. 

Origin of the Vertebrate Hand

We could now clearly see that the skeleton of the pectoral fin has four proximodistal rows of radials — two of which include branched carpals — as well as two distal rows organized as digits and putative digits. 

Despite this skeletal pattern — which represents the most tetrapod-like arrangement of bones found in a pectoral fin to date blurring the line between fish and land vertebrates — the fin retained lepidotrichia (those wee fin rays) distal to the radials. 

This arrangement confirmed an age-old question — showing us for the first time that the origin of phalanges preceded the loss of fin rays, not the other way around.

E. watsoni is very closely related to Tiktaalik roseae found in 2004 in the Canadian Arctic — a tetrapodomorpha species also known as a Choanata. These were advanced forms transitional between fish and the early labyrinthodonts playfully referred to as fishapods — half-fish, half-tetrapod in appearance and limb morphology. 

Up to that point, the relationship of limbed vertebrates (tetrapods) to lobe-finned fish (sarcopterygians) was well known, but the origin of major tetrapod features remained obscure for lack of fossils that document the sequence of evolutionary changes — until Tiktaalik. While Tiktaalik is technically a fish, this fellow is as far from fish-like you can be and still be a card-carrying member of the group. 

Tiktaalik roseae

Complete with scales and gills, this proto-fish lacked the conical head we see in modern fish but had a rather flattened triangular head more like that of a crocodile. 

Tiktaalik had scales on its back and fins with fin webbing but like early land-living animals, it had a distinctive flat head and neck. He was a brawny brute. The shape of his skull and shoulder look part fish and part amphibian.

The watershed moment came as Tiktaalik was prepped. Inside Tiktaalik's fins, we find bones that correspond to the upper arm, forearm and even parts of the wrist — all inside a fin with webbing — remarkable! 

Its fins have thin ray bones for paddling like most fish, but with brawny interior bones that gave Tiktaalik the ability to prop itself up, using his limbs for support. I picture him propped up on one paddle saying, "how you doing?" 

Six years after Tiktaalik was discovered by Neil Shubin and team in the ice-covered tundra of the Canadian Arctic on southern Ellesmere Island, a team working the outcrops at Miguasha on the Gaspé Peninsula discovered the only fully specimen of E. watsoni found to date — greatly increasing our knowledge of this finned tantalizingly transitional tetrapodomorph. 

E. watsoni fossils are rare — this was the fourth specimen collected in over 130 years of hunting. Charmingly, the specimen was right on our doorstop — extracted but a few feet away from the main stairs descending onto the beach of Miguasha National Park. 

L'nu Mi’gmaq First Nations of the Gespe’gewa’gi Region

Miguasha is nestled in the Gaspésie or Gespe’gewa’gi region of Canada — home to the Mi’gmaq First Nations who self-refer as L’nu or Lnu. The word Mi’gmaq or Mi’kmaq means the family or my allies/friends in Mi'kmaw, their native tongue (and soon to be Nova Scotia's provincial first language). They are the people of the sea and the original inhabitants of Atlantic Canada having lived here for more than 10,000 years. 

The L'nu were the first First Nation people to establish contact and trade with European explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries — and perhaps the Norse as early as the turn of the Millenium. Sailing vessels filled with French, British, Scottish, Irish and others arrived one by one to lay claim to the region — settling and fighting over the land. As each group rolled out their machinations of discovery, tensions turned to an all-out war with the British and French going head to head. I'll spare you the sordid details but for everyone caught in the crossfire, it went poorly.

North America Map 1775 (Click to Enlarge)

Cut to 1760, the British tipped the balance with their win at the Battle of the Restigouche, the last naval battle between France and England for possession of the North American continent — Turtle Island. 

The bittersweet British victory sparked the American War of Independence. 

For the next twenty years, the L'nu would witness and become embroiled in yet another war for these lands, their lands — first as bystanders, then as American allies, then intimidated into submission by the British Royal Navy with a show of force by way of a thirty-four gun man-of-war, encouraging L'nu compliance — finally culminating in an end to the hostilities with the 1783 Treaty of Paris. 

The peace accord held no provisions for the L'nu, Métis and First Nations impacted. None of these newcomers was Mi'kmaq — neither friends nor allies.

It was to this area some sixty years later that the newly formed Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) began exploring and mapping the newly formed United Province of Canada. Geologists in the New Brunswick Geology Branch traipsed through the rugged countryside that would become a Canadian province in 1867. 

It was on one of these expeditions that the Miguasha fossil outcrops were discovered. They, too, would transform in time to become Miguasha National Park or Parc de Miguasha, but at first, they were simply the promising sedimentary exposures on the hillside across the water —  a treasure trove of  Late Devonian fauna waiting to be discovered.

In the summer of 1842, Abraham Gesner, New Brunswick’s first Provincial Geologist, crossed the northern part of the region exploring for coal. Well, mostly looking for coal. Gesner also had a keen eye for fossils and his trip to the Gaspé Peninsula came fast on the heels of a jaunt along the rocky beaches of Chignecto Bay at the head of the Bay of Fundy and home to the standing fossil trees of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs. 

Passionate about geology and chemistry, he is perhaps most famous for his invention of the process to distil the combustible hydrocarbon kerosene from coal oil — a subject on which his long walks exploring a budding Canada gave him a great deal of time to consider. We have Gesner to thank for the modern petroleum industry. He filed many patents for clever ways to distil the soft tar-like coal or bitumen still in use today.

He was skilled in a broad range of scientific disciplines — being a geologist, palaeontologist, physician, chemist, anatomist and naturalist — a brass tacks geek to his core. Gesner explored the coal exposures and fossil outcrops across the famed area that witnessed the region become part of England and not France — and no longer L'nu.

Following the Restigouche River in New Brunswick through the Dalhousie region, Gesner navigated through the estuary to reach the southern coast of the Gaspé Peninsula into what would become the southeastern coast of Quebec to get a better look at the cliffs across the water. He was the first geologist to lay eyes on the Escuminac Formation and its fossils.

In his 1843 report to the Geologic Survey, he wrote, “I found the shore lined with a coarse conglomerate. Farther eastward the rocks are light blue sandstones and shales, containing the remains of vegetables. In these sandstone and shales, I found the remains of fish and a small species of tortoise with fossil foot-marks.”

We now know that this little tortoise was the famous Bothriolepis, an antiarch placoderm fish. It was also the first formal mention of the Miguasha fauna in our scientific literature. Despite the circulation of his report, Gesner’s discovery was all but ignored — the cliffs and their fossil bounty abandoned for decades to come. Geologists like Ells, Foord and Weston, and the research of Whiteaves and Dawson, would eventually follow in Gesner's footsteps.

North America Map 1866 (Click to Enlarge)

Over the past 180 years, this Devonian site has yielded a wonderfully diverse aquatic assemblage from the Age of Fishes — five of the six fossil fish groups associated with the Devonian including exceptionally well-preserved fossil specimens of the lobe-finned fishes. 

This is exciting as it is the lobe-finned fishes — the sarcopterygians — that gave rise to the first four-legged, air-breathing terrestrial vertebrates – the tetrapods. 

Fossil specimens from Miguasha include twenty species of lower vertebrates — anaspids, osteostra-cans, placoderms, acanthodians, actinopterygians and sarcopterygians — plus a limited invertebrate assemblage, along with terrestrial plants, scorpions and millipedes.

Originally interpreted as a freshwater lacustrine environment, recent paleontological, taphonomic, sedimentological and geochemical evidence corroborates a brackish estuarine setting — and definitely not the deep waters of the sea. This is important because the species that gave rise to our land-living animals began life in shallow streams and lakes. It tells us a bit about how our dear Elpistostege watsoni liked to live — preferring to lollygag in cool river waters where seawater mixed with fresh. Not fully freshwater, but a wee bit of salinity to add flavour.  

• Photos: Elpistostege watsoni (Westoll, 1938 ), Upper Devonian (Frasnian), Escuminac formation, Parc de Miguasha, Baie des Chaleurs, Gaspé, Québec, Canada. John Fam, VanPS
• Origin of the Vertebrate Hand Illustration, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2100-8
• Tiktaalik Illustration: By Obsidian Soul - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47401797

References & further reading:

• From Water to Land: https://www.miguasha.ca/mig-en/the_first_discoveries.php
• UNESCO Miguasha National Park: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/686/
• Office of L'nu Affairs: https://novascotia.ca/abor/aboriginal-people/
• Cloutier, R., Clement, A.M., Lee, M.S.Y. et al. Elpistostege and the origin of the vertebrate hand. Nature 579, 549–554 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2100-8
• Daeschler, E. B., Shubin, N. H. & Jenkins, F. A. Jr. A Devonian tetrapod-like fish and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan. Nature 440, 757–763 (2006).
• Shubin, Neil. Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion History of the Human Body.
• Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03972-8

BE STILL MY HEART: ANAHOPLITES PLANUS

There are fossils that whisper and then there are those that positively sing.

This interesting beauty is a splendid specimen of Anahoplites planus (Mantell, 1822), drawn from Albian-aged sediments at Courcelles-sur-Voire in the Aube region of north-central France. 

And sing, it does! There are so many things going on here!

Roughly 105 million years ago, when warm Cretaceous seas spread across much of Europe, this elegant cephalopod cruised ancient waters with all the poise of a creature that knew it wore excellent tailoring.

Anahoplites, first named by Sowerby in 1815, is a delightfully refined genus of hoplitid ammonite. 

Its shell is compressed and neatly streamlined, with flat flanks, a narrow venter — sometimes grooved, sometimes smooth — and graceful, flexuous ribs rising from modest umbilical tubercles before ending in a fringe of fine ventrolateral nodes. In short: less brute force, more couture. 

Its sturdier cousins in the Hoplitinae favour broader whorls and heavier ornament, but Anahoplites has always struck a finer silhouette.

Today, the genus sits comfortably within the subfamily Anahoplitinae, a taxonomic reshuffle that recognises its more delicate build and distinct style. We find these beauties in Middle to Late Albian rocks from England across Europe and eastward toward the Transcaspian reaches near the Caspian Sea — proof that good design travels.

And what a setting this fossil calls home. The Aube department lends its name to the Albian Stage itself, established by d’Orbigny in 1842. 

Here, the stratotype succession includes the Argiles tégulines de Courcelles, some 82 metres of clay-rich deposits, overlain by the Marnes de Brienne, a further 43 metres of marl. Their boundary is marked by a hardened bed, clear in the field to those with sharp eyes and muddy boots.

This particular shell, measuring 113 mm across, did not rest alone on the seafloor. It became a tiny apartment block after death. 

Two forms of bryozoans encrust its surface, joined by an oyster and industrious serpulid worms, all leaving their marks upon those handsome flanks. Even in death, it was prime real estate.

Lovingly prepared using potash by José Juárez Ruiz of Spain, this fossil now offers us not just the form of one ammonite, but a snapshot of an ancient community. 

One shell. Many stories. And my, what a beauty.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A HADROSAUR

Glorious Parasaurolophus art work by Daniel Eskridge

Morning mist curls along the banks of a wide, slow river. The air is heavy with the earthy scent of wet ferns and moss, tinged with the sweet tang of distant flowering trees. 

Sunlight filters through the canopy of towering conifers, catching the mist in golden rays that dance across the forest floor. 

In the dappled light, a herd of Edmontosaurus—duck-billed hadrosaurs—trundle slowly along the muddy bank. 

Their broad, flattened snouts graze the lush vegetation as they move, leaves crunching softly underfoot. 

Occasionally, one lifts its head, nostrils flaring as it senses the faint rustle of small mammals or the distant call of a Troodon hunting nearby. The low, resonant calls of the herd echo through the valley—a combination of hums, grunts, and whistling notes, a complex social language that signals alertness or contentment.

Around the herd, the world teems with life. Tiny lizards dart among fallen logs. Feathered dinosaurs like Caudipteryx flit through the branches, their wings rustling against the leaves. In the sky, pterosaurs wheel silently, shadowing the riverbanks, while fish occasionally leap from the water, disturbing the mirrored surface. 

A Tyrannosaurus stalks at a distance, its presence felt more than seen, tension rippling through the herd as they lift their heads in unison, scanning the forest edge. Yet for now, they continue to feed, grazing on conifers, ferns, and flowering plants, their broad dental batteries efficiently shearing tough plant material.

As the sun climbs higher, the herd’s rhythm shifts. Juveniles cluster together near the center of the group, protected by adults forming a loose perimeter. Mothers communicate constantly with low-frequency hums that travel through the ground, letting their young know it is safe to graze. Each hadrosaur maintains a personal space, yet the herd moves as a fluid unit, coordinated by sight, sound, and subtle gestures. 

Occasionally, two adults nuzzle briefly or bump heads—a gentle reinforcement of social bonds within the herd.

By midday, the river becomes a focal point. Watering holes are where wildlife gather. 

Hadrosaurs wade into shallow water, stirring the mud with their broad feet, creating a chorus of splashes and grunts. The water’s surface reflects the glittering canopy above, disturbed only by the occasional leap of fish or the landing of a pterosaur. 

Here, the herd drinks, cools down, and reorients itself to the sun’s angle. Younglings playfully chase each other through the shallows, their calls mingling with the rhythmic lapping of water. Predators lurk nearby, and the herd’s vigilance never wavers—any unusual sound or movement triggers a wave of alert postures, heads lifting in unison, tails flicking nervously.

As afternoon wanes, the herd moves toward forested areas, seeking shade. The scent of resin from conifers mingles with the damp earth, masking the smell of predators. The larger adults lead, while subadults and juveniles follow, practicing the complex patterns of herd movement they will rely on for survival. 

The subtle vibrational signals—footsteps, tail swishes, body shifts—help coordinate the group over distances that the eyes alone cannot manage. Within these social structures, older hadrosaurs seem to guide the young, showing where the most nutritious plants grow and signaling which areas are safe.

By evening, the forest becomes alive with nocturnal creatures. Crickets and insects add a constant hum to the air, while small mammals rustle in the underbrush. The herd settles in a sheltered clearing, forming protective clusters. 

Some adults lower themselves to rest, heads tucked under broad forelimbs, while juveniles huddle close, still vocalizing softly, practicing the calls they will use to communicate when they reach adulthood. 

The sounds of the night—rustling leaves, distant predator calls, and the gentle low-frequency hums of the hadrosaurs—create a layered, symphonic soundscape of life at the end of a Cretaceous day.

The world of hadrosaurs was far from solitary—their forests, riverbanks, and floodplains teemed with life, forming a complex and interconnected ecosystem. While the herd grazed, the air vibrated with the calls of feathered dinosaurs like Microraptor flitting between branches, occasionally diving to snatch insects from the foliage. Small mammals—ancestors of shrews and multituberculates—scuttled across the forest floor, their tiny claws stirring the moss and fallen leaves.

Predators lurked at every edge. Tyrannosaurus and Albertosaurus prowled open plains and forest margins, stalking both hadrosaurs and smaller herbivores. Juvenile hadrosaurs, particularly vulnerable, relied on the protective circle of adults, whose heads, tails, and bodies created a living barrier. Even crocodilians patrolled the rivers, their eyes breaking the water’s surface as they waited for an unwary hadrosaur to drink or bathe.

But the landscape was not only danger and vigilance. Insects buzzed among flowering angiosperms, pollinating as they fed, while dragonfly-like odonates skimmed over ponds and streams. Frogs croaked from the damp undergrowth, adding a pulsing rhythm to the daily soundscape. Trees, ferns, and cycads provided more than food; their dense canopies offered shelter from predators and sun, while fallen logs and leaf litter created microhabitats for countless invertebrates.

Seasonal changes added another layer of complexity. During rainy months, riverbanks became muddy feeding grounds, leaving tracks that we find and study today. 

In drier periods, herds migrated across plains and valleys, guided by the scent of water and fresh vegetation. The interplay of predators, prey, plants, and smaller animals created a dynamic, constantly shifting stage where survival depended on vigilance, cooperation, and adaptability.

Through fossil evidence—trackways, bone beds, and stomach content analysis—we can reconstruct this rich tapestry. Imagining the sensory richness: the smell of resin and damp soil, the low hum of a herd communicating, the distant roar of predators, and the flash of feathered wings overhead, gives life to a world that has been silent for 66 million years. 

In that world, hadrosaurs were central actors in a vibrant, thriving ecosystem. Hadrosaurs were not solitary wanderers but highly social beings, capable of complex communication, coordinated group behavior, and protective care of their young. 

The hadrosaurs you see in this post are Parasaurolophus — one of the last of the duckbills to roam the Earth and their great crests were the original trumpets. We now know that their bizarre head adornments help them produce a low B-Flat or Bb. This is the same B-Flat you hear wind ensembles tune to with the help of their tuba, horn or clarinet players.

I imagine them signaling to the troops with their trumpeting sound carried on the winds similar to the bugle-horn call of an elephant.

Imagining a day in their life—from morning grazing along rivers to evening rest in the forest—reveals the richness of their world, teeming with interactions and sensory experiences that echo across millions of years.

For those that love paleo art, check out the work of Daniel Eskridge (shared with permission here) to see more of his work and purchase some to bring into your world by visiting:https://daniel-eskridge.pixels.com/

THE BLUE SLIPPER: GAULT AMMONITES

This lovely duo is a personal favourite of mine. A small marvel from a vanished sea — a delightful wee ammonite measuring just 2.6 centimetres across, Anahoplites planns, from the Cretaceous Folkestone Gault Clay of Kent, in southeast England. 

Sharing this ancient stage is a 3.2 centimetre section of Hamites sp., one of those wonderfully uncoiled ammonites that seem to have ignored the usual rules of shell design. 

Together, they sit upon their original matrix, a handsome slab of Gault Clay — known locally, and rather poetically, as the Blue Slipper.

This fine muddy clay was laid down some 105 to 110 million years ago during the Lower Cretaceous, in the Upper and Middle Albian. 

At that time, a calm, fairly deep continental shelf sea spread across what is now southern England and northern France. There were no rivers muddling these waters, no estuarine murk drifting in. The absence of brackish or freshwater fossils tells us this was an open marine setting, clear of freshwater influence and comfortably offshore.

The sea itself was not abyssal, but neither was it shallow. Evidence suggests depths of around 40 to 60 metres. We know this, delightfully enough, from borings made by specialist algal-grazing gastropods, and from studies of foraminifera undertaken by Khan in 1950. 

Even the temperatures have been estimated: around 20 to 22 degrees Celsius near the surface, and a cooler 17 to 19 degrees on the seafloor. Quite balmy, really — especially for creatures wearing shells all day.

The Gault is perhaps best known for rather less peaceful behaviour. It is responsible for many of the major landslides around Ventnor and Blackgang on the Isle of Wight, where this slippery clay can transform stable slopes into geological chaos with unnerving enthusiasm.

Yet for fossil lovers, the Gault’s true fame lies in its extraordinary marine fauna, particularly from mainland localities such as Folkestone in Kent — the type locality for the Gault Clay and one of Britain’s most celebrated collecting sites. 

The clay yields ammonites in abundance. The Isle of Wight Gault is less generous, though the south-east coast of the island has produced a fine variety of ammonites, especially members of Hoplites, Paranahoplites, and Beudanticeras.

Though less fossiliferous on the island, the Gault can still reward the patient collector with treasures from these muddy mid-Cretaceous seas: ammonites such as Hoplites, Hamites, Euhoplites, Anahoplites, and Dimorphoplites; belemnites including Neohibolites; bivalves such as Birostrina and Pectinucula; gastropods, including the splendidly elegant Anchura; solitary corals; fish remains, including shark teeth; scattered crinoid fragments; and crustaceans — among them the crab Notopocorystes, a name which sounds faintly like a Roman senator.

Occasional fragments of fossil wood may also be found, drifted from ancient shores and entombed in marine mud. The lovely ammonite before us comes from the Gault Clays of Folkestone. 

Not all workers would split the genus Euhoplites so finely, and there is a respectable argument for viewing this beauty as a particularly robust form of E. loricatus, with Proeuhoplites regarded as a synonym of Euhoplites. Taxonomy, as ever, remains one of science’s more genteel battlegrounds.

Much of the fine knowledge surrounding these beds has been shared by collectors such as Jack Wonfor, whose collections contain many beautiful Gault ammonites. 

For those wishing to delve deeper, the Palaeontological Association publication Fossils of the Gault Clay by Andrew S. Gale is available in Dinosaur Isle’s gift shop.

And there is also an excellent website maintained by Fred Clouter, filled with references, resources, and links to some of the finest books on the Gault Clay and Folkestone Fossil Beds. You can explore it here: http://www.gaultammonite.co.uk/

A tiny shell, a scrap of clay, and suddenly an ancient sea returns to life. Not bad for 2.6 centimetres of swagger.

BEARS: HARBINGERS OF SPRING

Stretching the legs on a Spring stroll

Some of Vancouver Island’s many bears take a stroll through the wilds on Vancouver Island. 

While stumbling upon them may cause us surprise, they have heard us (and smelled us) coming for miles. 

If you work or play in the woods of British Columbia, both grizzly and black bear sightings are common. 

As Spring arrives with warmer weather and growing daylight, bears begin awakening in the Comox Valley, across Vancouver Island and around the rest of the province, they wake up thirsty and often quench their thirst, then head back to their dens for more sleep. 

As well as parched, some have such powerful hunger they choose to forgo more sleep in favour of beginning the welcome task of searching for food. 

 

Up for a Spring snack but still a bit sleepy

They snack on plant roots, grasses, berries, insects, the shellfish on our coastlines and small mammals—all to replace the many calories they burned off over their winter hibernation. 

Nearly half the world's population, some 26,000 grizzly bears and 380,000 black bears, roam the Canadian wilderness — of those, 14,000 grizzlies and around 140,000-ish black bears call British Columbia home. 

These highly intelligent omnivores lumber along our coastlines, mountains and forests. It is hard to confirm how many live on Vancouver Island, but estimates range from 7,000 to 12,000. 

Bears in the Fossil Record Both bear families descend from a common ancestor, Ursavus, a bear-dog the size of a raccoon who lived more than 20 million years ago. Seems an implausible lineage given the size of their enormous descendants. 

Our Island black bears are a little larger than their mainland counterparts. Females can weigh up to almost 400 lbs or (180 kg), and our males get up to 600 lbs or (275 kg) in weight. 

Their beefy cousins get even bigger. An average grizzly weighs in around 800 lbs (363 kg), but a recent find in Alaska tops the charts at 1600 lbs (726 kg). This mighty beast stood 12' 6' high at the shoulder, 14' to the top of his head and is one of the largest grizzlies ever recorded — a na̱ndzi. Adult bears tend to live solo except during mating season. 

Those looking for love congregate from May to July hoping to find a mate. Through adaptation to shifting seasons, the females' reproductive system delays the implantation of fertilised eggs — blastocysts —until November or December to ensure her healthy pups arrive during hibernation. If food resources are slim, the newly formed embryo does not catch or attach to her uterine wall, and she would try again next year. 

Female grizzly bears reach mating maturity at 4-5 years of age. They give birth to a single or up to four cubs (though usually just two) in January or February. 

The newborn cubs are cute little nuggets — tiny, hairless, and helpless — weighing in at 2-3 kilograms or 4-8 pounds. 

They feast on their mother’s nutrient-dense milk for the first two months of life then stay with their mother for another 16 months or more. 

Once fully grown, they can run 56 km an hour, are good at climbing trees, swimming, and live 20-25 years in the wild. 

Bear encounters bring a humbling appreciation of how remarkable these massive beasts are. 

Knowing their level of intelligence, keen memory, and bite force of over 8,000,000 pascals — enough to crush a bowling ball — inspires awe and caution in equal measure. 

They have an indescribable presence. It is likely because of this that these majestic bears show up often in the superb carvings and work of First Nations artists. First Nation Lore and Language In the Kwak'wala language of the Kwakwaka'wakw — speakers of Kwak'wala — a grizzly bear is known as nan. 

The ornamental carved grizzly bear headdress worn by the comic Dluwalakha Grizzly Bear Dancers — Once more from Heaven — in the Grizzly Bear Dance or Gaga̱lalał, is known as na̱ng̱a̱mł. 

The Dluwalakha dancers receive supernatural treasures or dloogwi, which they pass down from generation to generation. 

Kwaguʼł Winter Dancers — Qagyuhl 

Should you encounter a black bear and wish to greet them in Kwak'wala, you would call them t̕ła'yi. Kwakiutl First Nations, Smoke of the World, count Grizzly Bears as an ancestor — along with Seagull, Sun and Thunderbird. To tell stories of the ancestors is na̱wiła. 

Smoke of the World / Speaking of the Ancestors — Na̱wiła

Each of these ancestors took off their masks to become human and founded the many groups now bound together by language and culture as Kwakwaka’wakw. Not all Kwakwaka'wakw dance the Gaga̱lalał, but our ancestors likely attended feasts where the great bear was celebrated. 

To speak or tell stories of the ancestors is na̱wiła — and Grizzly bear as an ancestor is Na̱n Helus. 

Whether ancestor or neighbour, these beautiful creatures live all around us. We may see them moving through our neighbourhoods for food or returning to their habitat. 

It is vital for all of us to be mindful of how our actions impact them and to keep attractants — delicious, smelly garbage and open food — in sealed garbage cans and not outside in open containers. We share this world with them and it is our responsibility to help keep them — and us — safe. 

If you are headed into the wild, stop by a local Visitor Centre for up-to-date guidance, trail conditions, and local wildlife activity. If there is a local sporting or fishing store, they tend to have up-to-the-minute information on what animals you may expect to encounter. 

If you see folk on the trail, ask them what they've seen. Check information online but always confirm with local knowledge if you are able.

Reporting Encounters: If you encounter wildlife that is aggressive or causing property damage, call the BC Conservation Officer Service at 1-877-952-7277 (RAPP). 

Bear Aware: BearWise offers great advice helping people live responsibly with bears. You can visit them online at https://bearwise.org/

WildSafeBC: Discover wild facts, safety advice and conflict reduction strategies for wildlife species in British Columbia. They offer a Recreating in Bear Country Course. Visit them at www.wildsafebc.com

BARNACLES: K'WITA'A

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

They cling to rocks deep in the sea and 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.

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.

One of my earliest memories is of playing with them in the tidepools on the north end of Vancouver Island. It was here that I learned their many names. In the Kwak'wala language of the Pacific Northwest, the word for barnacles is k̕wit̕a̱'a — and if it is a very small barnacle it is called t̕sot̕soma — and the Kwak'wala word for glue is ḵ̕wa̱dayu.