Sunday 27 February 2022

LATE HETTANGIAN AMMONITE FAUNA FROM TASEKO LAKES

The late Hettangian ammonite fauna from Taseko Lakes is diverse and relatively well‐preserved. Over three field seasons from 2001-2003, thirty-five taxa from the Mineralense and Rursicostatum zones were studied and three new species discovered and named: Fergusonites hendersonae, Eolytoceras constrictum and Pseudaetomoceras victoriense

This material is very important as it greatly expands our understanding of the fauna and ranges of ammonites currently included in the North American regional ammonite zonation. 

I had the very great honour of having the fellow below, Fergusonites hendersonae, a new species of nektonic carnivorous ammonite, named after me by palaeontologist Louse Longridge from the University of British Columbia. 

I'd met Louise as an undergrad and was pleased as punch to hear that she would be continuing the research by Dr. Howard Tipper, the authority on this area of the Chilcotins and Haida Gwaii — which he dearly loved. 

"Tip" was a renowned Jurassic ammonite palaeontologist and an excellent regional mapper who mapped large areas of the Cordillera. He made significant contributions to Jurassic paleobiogeography and taxonomy in collaboration with Dr. Paul Smith, Head of Earth and Ocean Science at the University of British Columbia. 

Tip’s regional mapping within BC has withstood the test of time and for many areas became the regions' base maps for future studies. The scope of Tip’s understanding of Cordilleran geology and Jurassic palaeontology will likely never be matched. He passed away on April 21, 2005. His humour, knowledge and leadership will be sorely missed. 

Fergusonites hendersonae
Before he left us, he shared that knowledge with many of whom who would help to secure his legacy for future generations. We did several trips over the years up to the Taseko Lake area of the Rockies joined by many wonderful researchers from Vancouver Island Palaeontological Society and Vancouver Paleontological Society, as well as the University of British Columbia. 

Both Dan Bowen and John Fam were instrumental in planning those expeditions and each of them benefited greatly from the knowledge of Dr. Howard Tipper. 

If not for Tipper's early work in the region, our shared understanding and much of what was accomplished in his last years and after his passing would not have been possible. 

Over the course of three field seasons, we endured elevation sickness, rain, snow, grizzly bears and very chilly nights  — we were sleeping right next to a glacier at one point — but were rewarded by the enthusiastic crew, helicopter rides — which really cut down the hiking time — excellent specimens including three new species of ammonites, along with a high-spired gastropod and lobster claw that have yet to be written up. This area of the world is wonderful to hike and explore — stunningly beautiful country. We were also blessed with access as the area is closed to all fossil collecting except with a permit.

This fauna understanding helps us to understand the correlations between different areas: (1) the Mineralense and Rursicostatum zones are present in Taseko Lakes and can be readily correlated with contemporaneous strata elsewhere in North America; (2) the Mineralense and Rursicostatum zones of North America are broadly equivalent to the Canadensis Zone and probably the Arcuatum horizon of the South American succession; (3) broad correlations are possible with middle–late Hettangian and earliest Sinemurian taxa in New Zealand; (4) the Mineralense and Rursicostatum zones are broadly equivalent to the circum‐Mediterranean Marmoreum Zone; (5) the Mineralense Zone and the lower to middle portion of the Rursicostatum Zone are probably equivalent to the Complanata Subzone whereas the upper portion of the Rursicostatum Zone may equate to the Depressa Subzone of the north‐west European succession.

Taseko Lake Area, BC
The Taseko Lakes area has yielded the best preserved and most diverse collection of late Hettangian ammonites yet discovered in British Columbia (BC). Early studies of the fauna were undertaken by Frebold (1951, 1967). At that time, eastern Pacific ammonite faunas were poorly understood and species were frequently shoehorned into established north‐west European taxa. 

Since then, knowledge of eastern Pacific Hettangian ammonite faunas has improved considerably. 

Detailed systematic studies have been completed on faunas from localities in other areas of BC, Alberta, Alaska, Oregon, Nevada, Mexico and South America (e.g. Guex 1980, 1995; Imlay 1981; Hillebrandt 1981, 1988, 1990, 1994, 2000a–d; Smith and Tipper 1986; Riccardi et al. 1991; Jakobs and Pálfy 1994; Pálfy et al. 1994, 1999; Taylor 1998; Hall et al. 2000; Taylor and Guex 2002; Hall and Pitaru 2004). 

These studies have demonstrated that Early Jurassic eastern Pacific ammonites had strong Tethyan affinities as well as a high degree of endemism (Guex 1980, 1995; Taylor et al. 1984; Smith et al. 1988; Jakobs et al. 1994; Pálfy et al. 1994). Frebold’s early studies were also hampered because they were based on small collections, which limited understanding of the diversity of the fauna and variation within populations. However, recent mapping has greatly improved our understanding of the geology of Taseko Lakes (Schiarizza et al. 1997; Smith et al. 1998; Umhoefer and Tipper 1998) and encouraged further collecting that has dramatically increased the size of the sample.

A study of the ammonite fauna from Taseko Lakes is of interest for several reasons. The data are important for increasing the precision of the late Hettangian portion of the North American Zonation. 

Owing to the principally Tethyan or endemic nature of Early Jurassic ammonites in the eastern Pacific, a separate zonation for the Hettangian and Sinemurian of the Western Cordillera of North America has been established by Taylor et al. (2001). Except for information available from the early studies by Frebold (1951, 1967), the only Taseko Lakes taxa included in the North American Zonation of Taylor et al. (2001) were species of Angulaticeras studied by Smith and Tipper (2000). 

Since then, Longridge et al. (2006) made significant changes to the zonation of the late Hettangian and early Sinemurian based on a detailed study of the Badouxia fauna from Taseko Lakes (Text‐fig. 2). An additional taxonomic study was recently completed on the late Hettangian ammonite Sunrisites (Longridge et al. 2008) and this information has not yet been included within the zonation. 

Hettangian Zonation
The systematics of the remaining ammonite fauna from Taseko Lakes are presented here. A comprehensive study of this material is important because the exceptional quality and diversity of the fauna provide important data for updating the North American Zonation, making it more comprehensive and more widely applicable, especially in Canada.

The Taseko Lakes fauna can improve Hettangian correlations within North America as well as between North America and the rest of the world. 

North‐west European ammonite successions (e.g. Dean et al. 1961; Mouterde and Corna 1997; Page 2003) are considered the primary standard for Early Jurassic biochronology (Callomon 1984). 

In north‐west Europe, the turnover from schlotheimiid dominated faunas in the late Hettangian to arietitid dominated faunas in the early Sinemurian was sharp (e.g. Dean et al. 1961; Bloos 1994; Bloos and Page 2002). In other areas, by contrast, these faunas were not so mutually exclusive and the transition was much more gradual. 

This makes correlations between north‐west Europe and other areas difficult (e.g. Bloos 1994; Bloos and Page 2000, 2002). Correlations are further impeded by endemism and provincialism. 

The Taseko Lakes fauna addresses these problems because it contains many taxa that are common throughout the eastern Pacific as well as several cosmopolitan taxa that make intercontinental correlation possible. Correlation between North America and other areas is of particular significance in that the interbedded volcanic and fossiliferous marine rocks in North America permit the calibration of geochronological and biochronological time scales (Pálfy et al. 1999, 2000). 

This correlation between the late Hettangian fauna in the Taseko Lakes area and contemporaneous faunas in other areas of North America, South America, New Zealand, western and eastern Tethys, and north‐west Europe is of particular interest to me — especially the correlation of the faunal sequences of Nevada, USA. 

Reference: PaleoDB 157367 M. Clapham GSC C-208992, Section A 09, Castle Pass Angulata - Jurassic 1 - Canada, Longridge et al. (2008)

L. M. Longridge, P. L. Smith, and H. W. Tipper. 2008. Late Hettangian (Early Jurassic) ammonites from Taseko Lakes, British Columbia, Canada. Palaeontology 51:367-404

PaleoDB taxon number: 297415; Cephalopoda - Ammonoidea - Juraphyllitidae; Fergusonites hendersonae Longridge et al. 2008 (ammonite); Average measurements (in mm): shell width 9.88, shell diameter 28.2; Age range: 201.6 to 196.5 Ma. Locality info: British Columbia, Canada (51.1° N, 123.0° W: paleo coordinates 22.1° N, 66.1° W)

Photo One: Hettangian Ammonites and Gastropods, Taseko Lakes. Photo Two: Fergusonites hendersonae, a Late Hettangian (Early Jurassic) ammonite from the Taseko Lakes area of British Columbia, Canadian Rockies, named by Dr. Louise Longridge after Heidi Henderson, Chair, Vancouver Paleontological Society who collected and subsequently donated many Hettangian specimens from Taseko Lakes to the GSC collections. Holotype. GSC 127423 from the Rursicostatum Zone, Castle Pass section A, level 06, Taseko Lakes.

Map: Localities of sections and isolated outcrops bearing late Hettangian ammonites in the Taseko Lakes map area. Figure Two: Zonation for the Hettangian showing correlation of North American zones with South America, north‐west Europe, western Tethys (circum‐Mediterranean), eastern Tethys and New Zealand. Only approximate correlations are implied. 

Saturday 26 February 2022

LOVE THE WILD: GINKO / LIVING LEGENDS

Living and Fossil Ginko biloba
The gorgeous yellow lobed leaf you see here is from a Maidenhair Tree — Ginko. These lovelies grow slowly but are well worth the effort with their delicate and distinctive lobed leaves of green and yellow. 

Ginko are Living Fossils native to China. We find them in the fossil record as far back as the Permian, 270 million years, rising with cycads, seed ferns and early conifers. They were part of the low, open, shrubby canopy covering our world well before the first flowering plants arrived. 

Ginko grew when Weigeltisaurus jaekeli, the oldest gliding vertebrates first soared our ancient skies and the first wee beetles munched on decaying wood on our forest floors. It is the long history of predation by beetles and their friends that have made Ginko what they are today — hardy, stinky and weaponized. 

These trees are truly a wonder. Consider that they have lasted since the Permian, living through multiple extinction events that wiped out millions of species on the planet. They are one of the few living things to survive a recent human-made extinction event — the atomic bomb blast in Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 — weathering one of the most horrifying moments in human history. 

170 Ginko Survived the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima
When the bomb dropped on Hiroshima it created a fireball that bloomed 1,200 feet in diameter, vaporizing most everything in its radius. 

Somehow 170 resident Gingko trees withstood the ferocity and heat of that blast — and they are still standing to this day, 76 years later. Seemingly impossible, and yet quite true. It is because of their hardy nature that we began looking closely at their genetic make-up. 

Plants with seeds are either angiosperms, our showy flowering plants, or gymnosperms, the naked seed plants. Ginkgo are gymnosperms but in their own subclass, Ginkgoidae. The ginkgos we see growing today are the last remaining member of that subclass.

We see Ginko's rise and diversify in the Permian. By the Jurassic, they had spread across Laurasia, the lands that would become modern Asia. It is this lucky foothold in a young Asia that would eventually save their species. 

From the Jurassic to the Pleistocene their numbers slowly dwindled. We have some great Eocene fossils from outcrops at Quilchena, Tranquille and the McAbee Fossil Beds that show them doing quite well in the interior of British Columbia some 50 million years ago, but this pocket of lush growth seems the exception and not the norm. 

By the Pleistocene, just 2.5 million years ago, glaciation threatened to kill off the last of the ginkgo lineages. Their last stand and platform for global distribution once again was rooted in the forests of central China. Every Ginko you see today originated from that small foothold in China. 

While beautiful, Ginkgo are stinky. I was out for a late stroll the night before last to try and catch a glimpse of the Aurora Borealis up at Queen Elizabeth Park. As I walked along one of the darkened pathways, my nose caught a whiff of something smelly. Think vomit mixed with decaying leaf matter. I looked up to confirm the culprit, a gorgeous bright yellow Ginko backlit from above. 

Ginko in Dan & Lena Bowen's Garden
The reason for their terrible smell is quite clever. It is the result of the chemicals they produce to ward off insects, fungi and bacteria. 

Ginko boast a massive genome comprising some 10.6 billion DNA letters within each strand. You and I boast only three billion letters in our human genome.

Written within this vast genetic code are 41,840 genes or templates that the tree’s cells use to make complex protein molecules that build and maintain each tree and give these stinky lovelies an enviable anti-insect arsenal. 

The photo at the top shows the yellow lobed leaves of a Ginko biloba against an Eocene partial lobe from the McAbee Fossil Beds up near Cache Creek, British Columbia, Canada. The bright yellow is this tree's Autumn colour palette. The bright green leaves you see in the bottom photo are the summer colour palette of this same species. The photo was taken this summer in Dan and Lena Bowen's garden during the VIPS Saber-toothed Salmon Barbeque.

Friday 25 February 2022

FIRST NATIONS HISTORY IN VANCOUVER'S STANLEY PARK

Totem, Welcome & Mortuary Poles at Stanley Park
If you visit Brockton Point in Stanley Park, there are many carved red cedar First Nation poles for you to admire.  

What you are viewing are replicas of First Nation welcome and totem poles that once stood in the park but have been returned to their homes within the province's diverse First Nation communities — or held within museum collections. 

Some of the original totems came from Alert Bay on Cormorant Island, near the Port McNeill on the north coast of Vancouver Island. 

Others came from communities in Haida Gwaii — and still more from the Wuikinuxv First Nations at Rivers Inlet on British Columbia's central west coast — home of the Great Bear Rainforest with her Spirit Bears.

The exception is the most recent addition carved by Robert Yelton in 2009. Robert is a First Nation carver from the Squamish Nation and his original welcome pole graces Brockton Point, the original settlement site of a group of Squamish-Portuguese settlers.  

If you look at the photo above, the lovely chocolate, red and turquoise pole on the right is a replica of the mortuary pole raised to honour the Raven Chief of Skedans or Gida'nsta, the Haida phrase for from his daughter, the title of respect used when addressing a person of high rank. Early fur traders often took the name of the local Chief and used it synonymously as the place names for the sites they visited — hence Skedans from Gida'nsta.

Chief Skedans Mortuary Pole
Chief Skedans, or Qa'gials qe'gawa-i, to his children, lived in Ḵ’uuna Llnagaay, or village at the edge, in Xaayda Kil — a village on the exposed coast of Louise Island — now a Haida Heritage Site.  

There are some paintings you may have seen by Emily Carr of her visits to the site in 1912, She used the phonetic Q'una from Q:o'na to describe both the place name and title of her work. 

Carr's paintings of the totems have always looked to me to be a mash-up — imagine if painter Tamara de Lempicka and photographer Edward Curtis had a baby — not pretty, but interesting.

Some called this area, Huadju-lanas or Xu'adji la'nas, which means Grizzly-Bear-Town, in reference to resident grizzly bear population and their adornment of many totems and artwork by the local artists.

Upon Chief Skedan's death, the mortuary pole was carved both to honour him and provide his final resting place. Dates are a bit fuzzy, but local accounts have this as sometime between 1870-1878 — and at a cost of 290 blankets or roughly $600 in today's currency. 

The great artistry of the pole was much admired by those in the community and those organizing the celebrations for the 1936 Vancouver Golden Jubilee — witnessed by  350,000 newly arrived residents.

Negotiations were pursued and the pole made its way down from Haida Gwaii to Stanley Park in time for the celebrations. The original totem graced Stanley Park for a little over twenty years before eventually making its way back to Haida Gwaii. It was returned to the community with bits of plaster and shoddy paint marring the original. These bits were scraped off and the pole welcomed back with due ceremony. 

In 1964, respected and renowned Northwest Coast master carver, Bill Reid, from the Kaadaas gaah Kiiguwaay, Raven/Wolf Clan of T'anuu, Haida Gwaii and Scottish-German descent, was asked to carve this colourful replica. 

Mountain Goat Detail, Skedans Mortuary Pole
Reid carved the totem onsite in Stanley Park with the help of German carver Werner True. Interestingly, though I looked at length for information on Werner True, all I can find is that he aided Bill Reid on the carving for a payment of $1000.

Don Yeomans, Haida master carver, meticulously recarved the moon crest in 1998. If you have admired the totem pole in the Vancouver Airport, you will have seen some of Yeoman's incredible work. 

The crest is Moon with the face, wings, legs and claws of a mighty and proud Thunderbird with a fairly smallish hooked beak in a split design. We have Moon to thank for the tides and illuminating our darkest nights. As a crest, Moon is associated with transformation and acting as both guardian and protector.

The original pole had a mortuary box that held the Chief's remains. The crest sits atop a very charming mountain goat. I have included a nice close-up here of the replica for you to enjoy. 

Mountain Goats live in the high peaks of British Columbia and being so close to the sky, they have the supernatural ability to cross over to the sky world. They are also credited as being spirit guardians and guides to First Nation shamans.

I love his horns and tucked in cloven hooves. There is another pole being carved on Vancouver Island that I hope to see during its creation that also depicts a Mountain Goat. With permission and in time, I hope to share some of those photos with you. 

Mountain Goat is sitting atop Grizzly Bear or Huaji or Xhuwaji’ with little human figures placed in his ears to represent the Chief's daughter and son-in-law, who raised the pole and held a potlatch in his honour. 

Beneath the great bear is Seal or Killer Whale in his grasp. The inscription in the park says it is a Killer Whale but I am not sure about that interpretation — both the look and lore make Seal more likely. Perhaps if Killer Whale were within Thunderbird's grasp — maybe

Though it is always a pleasure to see Killer Whale carved in red cedar, as the first whales came into being when they were carved in wood by a human — or by Raven — then magically infused with the gift of life.

Siwash Rock on the northern end of Third Beach, Stanley Park
The ground these totems sit upon is composed of plutonic, volcanic and sedimentary layers of rock and exhibits the profound influences of glaciation and glacial retreat from the last ice age. 

Glacial deposits sit atop as a mix of clay, sand, cobbles and larger boulders of glacial till. 

There are a few areas of exposed volcanics within the park that speak to the scraping of the glaciers as they retreated about 12,500 years ago. 

The iconic moss and lichen coated Siwash Rock on the northern end of Third Beach is one of the more picturesque of these. It is a basaltic and andesitic volcanic rock — a blend of black phenocrysts of augite cemented together with plagioclase, hornblende and volcanic glass.

Images not shown: 

Do check out the work of Emily Carr and her paintings of Q:o'na from the 1940s. I'll share a link here but do not have permission to post her works. http://www.emilycarr.org/totems/exhibit/haida/ssintro.htm

Thursday 24 February 2022

TABLE FOR ONE, PARTY OF TWO: ANGLERFISH

The festive lassie you see here is an Anglerfish. They always look to be celebrating a birthday of some kind, albeit solo. This party is happening deep in our oceans and for those that join in, I hope they like it rough.

The wee candle you see on her forehead is a photophore, a tiny bit of luminous dorsal spine. Many of our sea dwellers have these candle-like bits illuminating the depths. You may have noticed them glowing around the eyes of many of our cephalopod friends. 

These light organs can be a simple grouping of photogenic cells or more complex with light reflectors, lenses, colour filters able to adjust the intensity or angular distribution of the light they produce. Some species have adapted their photophores to avoid being eaten, in others, it's an invitation to lunch.

In anglerfish' world, this swaying light is dead sexy. It's an adaptation used to attract prey and mates alike.

Deep in the murky depths of the Atlantic and Antarctic oceans, hopeful female anglerfish light up their sexy lures. When a male latches onto this tasty bit of flesh, he fuses himself totally. He might be one of several potential mates. She's not picky, just hungry. Lure. Feed. Mate. Repeat.

A friend asked if anglerfish mate for life. Well, yes.... yes, indeed they do.

Mating is a tough business down in the depths. Her body absorbs all the yummy nutrients of his body over time until all that's left are his testes. While unusual, it is only one of many weird and whacky ways our fishy friends communicate, entice, hunt and creatively survive and thrive. The deepest, darkest part of the ocean isn't empty — its hungry.

The evolution of fish began about 530 million years ago with the first fish lineages belonging to the Agnatha, a superclass of jawless fish. We still see them in our waters as cyclostomes but have lost the conodonts and ostracoderms to the annals of time. Like all vertebrates, fish have bilateral symmetry; when divided down the middle or central axis, each half is the same. Organisms with bilateral symmetry are generally more agile, making finding a mate, hunting or avoiding being hunted a whole lot easier.

When we envision fish, we generally picture large eyes, gills, a well-developed mouth. The earliest animals that we classify as fish appeared as soft-bodied chordates who lacked a true spine. While they were spineless, they did have notochords, a cartilaginous skeletal rod that gave them more dexterity than the cold-blooded invertebrates who shared those ancient seas and evolved without a backbone. 

Fish would continue to evolve throughout the Paleozoic, diversifying into a wide range of forms. Several forms of Paleozoic fish developed external armour that protected them from predators. The first fish with jaws appeared in the Silurian period, after which many species, including sharks, became formidable marine predators rather than just the prey of arthropods.

Fish in general respire using gills, are most often covered with bony scales and propel themselves using fins. There are two main types of fins, median fins and paired fins. The median fins include the caudal fin or tail fin, the dorsal fin, and the anal fin. Now there may be more than one dorsal, and one anal fin in some fishes.

The paired fins include the pectoral fins and the pelvic fins. And these paired fins are connected to, and supported by, pectoral and pelvic girdles, at the shoulder and hip; in the same way, our arms and legs are connected to and supported by, pectoral and pelvic girdles. This arrangement is something we inherited from the ancestors we share with fish. They are homologous structures.

When we speak of early vertebrates, we are often talking about fish. Fish is a term we use a lot in our everyday lives but taxonomically it is not all that useful. When we say, fish we generally mean an ectothermic, aquatic vertebrate with gills and fins.

Fortunately, many of our fishy friends have ended up in the fossil record. We may see some of the soft bits from time to time, as in the lovely fossil fish found in concretion in Brazil, but we often see fish skeletons. Vertebrates with hard skeletons had a much better chance of being preserved. 

Eohiodon Fish, McAbee Fossil Beds
In British Columbia, we have lovely two-dimensional Eocene fossil fish well-represented from the Allenby of Princeton and the McAbee Fossil Beds. 

We have the Tiktaalik roseae, a large freshwater fish, from 375 million-year-old Devonian deposits on Ellesmere Island in Canada's Arctic. Tiktaalik is a wonderfully bizarre creature with a flat, almost reptilian head but also fins, scales and gills. We have other wonders from this time. 

Canada also boasts spectacular antiarch placoderms, Bothriolepsis, found in the Upper Devonian shales of Miguasha in Quebec.

There are fragments of bone-like tissues from as early as the Late Cambrian with the oldest fossils that are truly recognizable as fishes come from the Middle Ordovician from North America, South America and Australia. At the time, South America and Australia were part of a supercontinent called Gondwana. North America was part of another supercontinent called Laurentia and the two were separated by deep oceans.

These two supercontinents and others that were also present were partially covered by shallow equatorial seas and the continents themselves were barren and rocky. Land plants didn't evolve until later in the Silurian Period. In these shallow equatorial seas, a large diverse and widespread group of armoured, jawless fishes evolved: the Pteraspidomorphi. The first of our three groups of ostracoderms. The Pteraspidomorphi are divided into three major groups: the Astraspida, Arandaspida and the Heterostraci.

The oldest and most primitive pteraspidomorphs were the Astraspida and the Arandaspida. You'll notice that all three of these taxon names contain 'aspid', which means shield. This is because these early fishes — and many of the Pteraspidomorphi — possessed large plates of dermal bone at the anterior end of their bodies. This dermal armour was very common in early vertebrates, but it was lost in their descendants. 

Arandaspida is represented by two well-known genera: Sacabampaspis, from South America and Arandaspis from Australia. Arandaspis have large, simple, dorsal and ventral head shields. Their bodies were fusiform, which means they were shaped sort of like a spindle, fat in the middle and tapering at both ends. Picture a sausage that is a bit wider near the centre with a crisp outer shell.

If you're a keen bean to see an anglerfish that recently washed up on the shores of Newport Beach this past May, hit this link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/11/deep-sea-anglerfish-california-beach-finding-nemo. Kudos for my colleague, Giovanni, bringing this gloriously horrific lovely to my attention. 

Wednesday 23 February 2022

HISTORICAL FOLIAGE & THE FOSSIL RECORD

The colder seasons of autumn and winter are a wonderful time to explore Vancouver. The riot of yellow, orange and green from the cities autumn palette slowly fades to deep gold and soft browns. 

Fallen debris you crunch through send up wafts of earthy smells that whisper of decomposition, the journey from leaf to soil.

It is a wonderful time to be out and about. I do love the mountain trails but must confess to loving our cultivated gardens for their colour and variety. 

We have some lovely native plants and trees and more than a few exotics at Vancouver's arboreal trifecta — Van Dusen, Queen E Park and UBC Botanical Gardens. One of those exotics, at least exotic to me, is the lovely conifer you see here is Metasequoia glyptostroboides — the dawn redwood. 

Of this long lineage, this is the sole surviving species in the genus Metasequoia and one of three species of conifers known as redwoods. Metasequoia are the smaller cousins of the mighty Giant Sequoia, the most massive trees on Earth. 

As a group, the redwoods are impressive trees and very long-lived. The President, an ancient Giant Sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum, and granddaddy to them all has lived for more than 3,200 years. While this tree is named The President, a worthy name, it doesn't really cover the magnitude of this giant by half.   

This tree was a wee seedling making its way in the soils of the Sierra Nevada mountains of California before we invented writing. It had reached full height before any of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, those remarkable constructions of classical antiquity, were even an inkling of our budding human achievements. And it has outlasted them all save the Great Pyramid of Giza, the oldest and last of those seven still standing, though the tree has faired better. Giza still stands but the majority of the limestone façade is long gone.

Aside from their good looks (which can really only get you so far), they are resistant to fire and insects through a combined effort of bark over a foot thick, a high tannin content and minimal resin, a genius of evolutionary design. 

While individual Metasequoia live a long time, as a genus they have lived far longer. 

Like Phoenix from the Ashes, the Cretaceous (K-Pg) extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs, ammonites and more than seventy-five percent of all species on the planet was their curtain call. The void left by that devastation saw the birth of this genus — and they have not changed all that much in the 65 million years since. Modern Metasequoia glyptostroboides looks pretty much identical to their late Cretaceous brethren.

Dawn Redwood Cones with scales paired in opposite rows
They are remarkably similar to and sometimes mistaken for Sequoia at first glance but are easily distinguishable if you look at their size (an obvious visual in a mature tree) or to their needles and cones in younger specimens. 

Metasequoia has paired needles that attach opposite to each other on the compound stem. Sequoia needles are offset and attached alternately. Think of the pattern as jumping versus walking with your two feet moving forward parallel to one another. 

Metasequoia needles are paired as if you were jumping forward, one print beside the other, while Sequoia needles have the one-in-front-of-the-other pattern of walking.

The seed-bearing cones of Metasequoia have a stalk at their base and the scales are arranged in paired opposite rows which you can see quite well in the visual above. Coast redwood cone scales are arranged in a spiral and lack a stalk at their base.

Although the least tall of the redwoods, it grows to an impressive sixty meters (200 feet) in height. It is sometimes called Shui-sa, or water fir by those who live in the secluded mountainous region of China where it was rediscovered.

Fossil Metasequoia, McAbee Fossil Beds
Metasequoia fossils are known from many areas in the Northern Hemisphere and were one of my first fossil finds as a teenager. 

And folk love naming them. More than twenty fossil species have been named over time —  some even identified as the genus Sequoia in error — but for all their collective efforts to beef up this genus there are just three species: Metasequoia foxii, Metasequoia milleri, and Metasequoia occidentalis.

During the Paleocene and Eocene, extensive forests of Metasequoia thrived as far north as Strathcona Fiord on Ellesmere Island and sites on Axel Heiberg Island in Canada's far north around 80° N latitude.

We find lovely examples of Metasequoia occidentalis in the Eocene outcrops at McAbee near Cache Creek, British Columbia, Canada. I shared a photo here of one of those specimens. Once this piece dries out a bit, I will take a dental pick to it to reveal some of the teaser fossils peeking out.

The McAbee Fossil Beds are known for their incredible abundance, diversity and quality of fossils including lovely plant, insect and fish species that lived in an old lake bed setting. While the Metasequoia and other fossils found here are 52-53 million years old, the genus is much older. It is quite remarkable that both their fossil and extant lineage were discovered in just a few years of one another. 

Metasequoia was first described as a new genus from a fossil specimen found in 1939 and published by Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki in 1941. Remarkably, the living version of this new genus was discovered later that same year. 

Professor Zhan Wang, an official from the Bureau of Forest Research was recovering from malaria at an old school chum's home in central China. His friend told him of a stand of trees discovered in the winter of 1941 by Chinese botanist Toh Gan (干铎). The trees were not far away from where they were staying and Gan's winter visit meant he did not collect any specimen as the trees had lost their leaves. 

The locals called the trees Shui-sa, or water fir. As trees go, they were reportedly quite impressive with some growing as much as sixty feet tall. Wang was excited by the possibility of finding a new species and asked his friend to describe the trees and their needles in detail. Emboldened by the tale, Wang set off through the remote mountains to search for his mysterious trees and found them deep in the heart of  Modaoxi (磨刀溪; now renamed Moudao (谋道), in Lichuan County, in the central China province of Hubei. He found the trees and was able to collect living specimens but initially thought they were from Glyptostrobus pensilis (水松). 

A few years later, Wang showed the trees to botanist Wan-Chun Cheng and learned that these were not the leaves of s Glyptostrobus pensilis (水松 ) but belonged to a new species. 

While the find was exciting, it was overshadowed by China's ongoing conflict with the Japanese that was continuing to escalate. With war at hand, Wang's research funding and science focus needed to be set aside for another two years as he fled the bombing of Beijing. 

When you live in a world without war on home soil it is easy to forget the realities for those who grew up in it. 

Zhan Wang and his family lived to witness the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, then the 1937 clash between Chinese and Japanese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge, just outside Beijing. 

That clash sparked an all-out war that would grow in ferocity to become World War II. 

Within a year, the Chinese military situation was dire. Most of eastern China lay in Japanese hands: Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, Wuhan. As the Japanese advanced, they left a devastated population in their path where atrocity after atrocity was the norm. Many outside observers assumed that China could not hold out, and the most likely scenario was a Japanese victory over China.

Yet the Chinese hung on, and after the horrors of Pearl Harbor, the war became genuinely global. The western Allies and China were now united in their war against Japan, a conflict that would finally end on September 2, 1945, after Allied naval forces blockaded Japan and subjected the island nation to intensive bombing, including the utter devastation that was the Enola Gay's atomic payload over Hiroshima. 

With World War II behind them, the Chinese researchers were able to re-focus their energies on the sciences. Sadly, Wang was not able to join them. Instead, two of his colleagues, Wan Chun Cheng and Hu Hsen Hsu, the director of Fan Memorial Institute of Biology would continue the work. Wan-Chun Cheng sent specimens to Hu Hsen Hsu and upon examination realised they were the living version of the trees Miki had published upon in 1941. 

Hu and Cheng published a paper describing a new living species of Metasequoia in May 1948 in the Bulletin of Fan Memorial Institute of Biology.

That same year, Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University sent an expedition to collect seeds and, soon after, seedling trees were distributed to various universities and arboreta worldwide. 

Today, Metasequoia grow around the globe. When I see them, I think of Wang and all he went through. He survived the conflict and went on to teach other bright, young minds about the bountiful flora in China. I think of Wan Chun Cheng collaborating with Hu Hsen Hsu in a time of war and of Hu keeping up to date on scientific research, even published works from colleagues from countries with whom his country was at war. Deep in my belly, I ache for the huge cost to science, research and all the species impacted on the planet from our human conflicts. Each year in April, I plant more Metasequoia to celebrate Earth Day and all that means for every living thing on this big blue orb.  

References: 

  • https://web.stanford.edu/group/humbioresearch/cgi-bin/wordpress/?p=297
  • https://humboldtredwoods.org/redwoods

Tuesday 22 February 2022

MOSASAUR OF VANCOUVER ISLAND

Dove Creek Mosasaur (Tylosaur) found by Rick Ross, VIPS
This specimen of the teeth and lower jawbone of a large marine reptile was discovered by Rick Ross, Vancouver Island Palaeontological Society, during the construction of the Inland Highway, near the Dove Creek intersection, Vancouver Island, British Columbia on Canada's west coast.

If you look closely, you can see several smaller disc-shaped objects to the upper right. These are part of this fellow's sclerotic eye-ring.

These bony plates allowed for safe hunting in deeper waters as the structures protected the delicate eye tissue from the intense water pressure. Diving birds have these same bony plates to aid them in the same way.

Mosasaurs had a hinged jaw that allowed them to swallow prey larger than themselves. They evolved special pterygoid teeth projecting back into the roof of their mouths that acted as guards against escaping prey. The jawbones Rick found were exposed just up to the hinge. Given the size, this toothy fellow could have been as much as seven (7) metres long and weighed up to a tonne.

Along with the significant find of the mosasaur, Rick Ross collected many ammonites and other marine invertebrates exposed during the construction of the Inland Island Highway. He donated the majority of them to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. They now adorn a cabinet bearing his name and are tucked lovingly in with stories he wrote about his collecting adventures.

Glyptoxoceras heteromorph found by Rick Ross, VIPS
Science owes a great debt to the keen eye and fast thinking of Rick Ross for his work in recovering the specimen. Rick was out on a Sunday looking through the blocks that were destined to be crushed to finish up the tail end of the new highway construction. The crews had just dropped a pile of massive blocks near the Dove Creek Road crossing.

Each of the blocks was one to five tonnes in size. Rick was looking through them when he spotted a concretion sticking out. 

It did not look all that different from the hundreds he had been found up and down the highway. Interested to see what it might contain, Rick took his geology hammer and struck a blow. Off popped the end and inside was a large perfect mosasaur tooth.

Looking closer, he could see a bone sticking out in several other places within this massive block. Excited about the find and not quite sure how to approach excavating it from an active construction site, Rick searched the highway and finally located a maintenance working greasing up some heavy machinery. Rick excitedly told the field mechanic about the find and inquired who would need to be called to save the block. His answer was disappointing. The block was destined to be bulldozed in the morning. 

Panicked but still hopeful, Rick asked who his supervisor was and how to reach him on a Sunday. While initially hesitant, the urgency and excitement in Rick's voice swayed him. With a warning that the supervisor would likely not be impressed to get his call, he relented and shared the telephone number. Rick dialled the number and received the predicted reaction. Unrelenting, Rick swayed the supervisor who agreed that if Rick could get a truck up to the site first thing in the AM, the block could be lifted onto the truck. The next hour was filled with phone calls and putting together a plan to get the mighty block.

Rick called Pat Trask from the Courtenay Museum. The two are fossil hunting buddies and Rick was sure that Pat would be up for the challenge. The next call was to Doug Embree, another fossil hunting buddy from the Comox Valley. As luck would have it, Doug's brother Sam had a two-tonne flatbed truck that they would be able to use. The struggle now was would it take the weight? Monday morning arrived and the block was lifted onto the flatbed with the aid of a drill hole and chain through one corner.

The truck groaned and leaned heavily all the way into town. They had to come in via the 17th Street Bridge as a safe route to the Courtenay Museum. the local building store lent the use of a large forklift to lift the block from the heavily tilted truckbed down onto the back deck of the museum. Once in place, it was far too big to move. It sat there for almost seven years before finally being shipped to a preparatory lab down in Washington. There it was prepped and whittled down to the still massive block we see today.

This specimen is now housed in the Courtenay and District Museum on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The jaw and associated bones are tagged as a mosasaur, but exactly what kind will need more study. We may be looking at a Tylosaurus, a very large mosasaur with an elongated, cylindrical premaxilla (snout) from which it takes its name. These were the big boys of our ancient seas who snacked on plesiosaurs and other smaller marine reptiles.

T. proriger specimen found with a plesiosaur in its stomach
In 1918, Charles H. Sternberg found a Tylosaurus, with the remains of a plesiosaur in its stomach while collecting in the Smoky Hill Chalk of Logan County, Kansas. You can visit the specimen at the Smithsonian.

Like many other mosasaurs, the early history of this taxon is complex and involves the infamous rivalry between two early American palaeontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Cope wins the day in terms of longevity in his naming of these mighty beasts.

Though many species of Tylosaurus have been named over the years, only a few are now recognized by scientists as taxonomically valid. They are: Tylosaurus proriger (Cope, 1869), from the Santonian and lower to middle Campanian of North America (Kansas, Alabama, Nebraska) and Tylosaurus nepaeolicus (Cope, 1874), from the Santonian of North America (Kansas). Tylosaurus kansasensis, named by Everhart in 2005 from the late Coniacian of Kansas, has been shown to be based on juvenile specimens of T. nepaeolicus.

It is likely that T. proriger evolved as a paedomorphic variety of T. nepaeolicus, retaining juvenile features into adulthood while attaining a much larger adult size.

Along with plesiosaurs, sharks, fish, and other mosasaurs, Tylosaurus was a dominant predator of the Western Interior Seaway during the Late Cretaceous. The genus was among the largest of the mosasaurs — along with Mosasaurus hoffmannii — with the possibly conspecific Hainosaurus bernardi reaching lengths up to 12.2 meters (40 ft), and T. pembinensis reaching comparable sizes. T. proriger, the largest species of Tylosaurus, reached a whopping 14 m (46 ft). While the Dove Creek Mosasaur was half that size, it may be one of T. proriger's smaller cousins.

Photo One: Dove Creek Mosasaur by Heidi Henderson. Courtenay Museum Collection.
Photo Two: Urakawites heteromorph ammonite by Rick Ross. RBCM Collection
Photo Three: T. proriger specimen which was found with a plesiosaur in its stomach. By Ryan Somma - Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9004614

Monday 21 February 2022

A LUCKY PALEONTOLOGIST & THE TALE OF THREE SPLENDID CANADIAN FOSSILS

Palaeontology Lecture Series — March 20, 2022
Join us for an exciting talk with Kirk Johnson — A Lucky Paleontologist & the Tale of Three Splendid Canadian Fossils. 

In this lecture, Kirk draws on his experience as a working paleontologist who has led expeditions in eighteen US states and eleven countries.

Kirk is a geologist, paleobotanist, and the Sant Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. His research focuses on fossil plants and the extinction of the dinosaurs, and he is known for his scientific articles, popular books, museum exhibitions, documentaries, and collaborations with artists. 

His recent documentaries include “Making North America” (2015) and “Polar Extremes” (2019). His recent books include “Cruisin’ the Fossil Coastline: The Travels of an Artist and a Scientist along the Shores of the Prehistoric Pacific” (2018); “Visions of Lost Worlds, the Paleoart of Jay Matternes” (2019); and “Trees are made of Gas, The Story of Carbon and Climate” (2021). Johnson is originally from Bellevue, Washington. 

Fossil Road Trip? Heck, Yeah!

Cruisin' the Fossil Coastline
Who's up for a fossil road trip? Paleoartist Ray Troll and paleobotanist Kirk Johnson published a travelogue of their journey to check out the fossils of the American west called Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway. 

It is not your average paleo book. Filled with Troll's whimsical pop-art illustrations — how many dinosaur books feature sauropods crossing the road? — and Johnson's entertaining descriptions of their journey, the book is simultaneously entertaining and informative. 

The equally entertaining Cruisin' the Fossil Coastline is a must-read and will do you proud as an addition to your library.

To read Riley Black's article for the Smithsonian on Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway, visit: 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/cruisin-the-fossil-freeway-59717763/

Fossil Talks & Field Trips — Palaeontology Lecture Series

To get the live Zoom link to Kirk Johnson's Free Lecture as part of the 2022 Palaeontology Lecture Series, visit: www.fossiltalksandfieldtrips.com

Sunday 20 February 2022

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

From Russia with love. This lovely inflated ammonite is the female macroconch, Cadochamoussetia tschernyschewi (Sokolov, 1912) from the Jurassic, Lower Callovian, Elatmae Zone, Subpatruus Subzone, Stupachenkoi Horizon, Unzha River, Makarev-Manturovo, Kostroma Region, Russia.

This beautiful — fully Бомба — specimen is courtesy of Emil Black and one of the finest in his collection. 

It has a chunkiness that reminds me of the Cadoceras we find in the Pacific Northwest, particularly the macroconch Cadoceras comma from the Callovian Mysterious Creek Formation near Harrison Lake in British Columbia.

In the last decade, the Siberian zonal scale of the Callovian has been considerably revised because of new ammonite collections from the Callovian reference sections in Siberia. Species of Cadoceratinae thought of as exclusively European were recorded for the first time in Siberia. 

Both these newly recovered specimens and recent studies have considerably expanded our knowledge on the taxonomic composition of genera and species of Callovian ammonites and revision of the generic classification and stratigraphic position of genera and species of the family Cardioceratidae. The proposed Lower Callovian ammonite scale largely coincides with the East European scale and correlates with the scales of East Greenland, Arctic Canada, and Alaska (Kniazev et al., 2009, 2010, 2011, 2015; Nikitenko et al., 2013).

Jurassic deposits crop out on the right bank of the
Anabar River between the mouths of the Srednyaya
and Sodiemykha rivers, over a length of about 24 km.

During recent fieldwork at the Middle-Upper Jurassic of the Anabar River basin, a lovely representative ammonite collection was assembled, amongst which was the Early Callovian genus Cadochamoussetia (Mitta, 1996). 

Cadochamoussetia is widespread in East European sections but these beauties were the first recorded specimen of this chunky species from the Anabar.

The genus Cadochamoussetia (Mitta, 1996) was established in European Russian (Gerasimov et al., 1996) and later in England (Navarro et al., 2005).

In the lower Callovian of European Russia, beds with Cadochamoussetia were originally considered part of the Cadochamoussetia subpatruus upper subzone of the Cadoceras elatmae Zone (Mitta, 2000). 

In 2005 and 2009, proposals were made to move these beds from subzone to zone (Gulyaev, 2005, 2009). However, the Unified Regional Stratigraphic Scheme of Jurassic Deposits of the East European Platform (2012), suggested it remained a subzone. The Anabar section contains two species of Сadochamoussetia, which were used as the basis of the Сadochamoussetia tschernyschewi Zone.

In previous papers (Kniazev et al., 2010), considered the composition of the genus Cadoceras as it was interpreted in (Treatise, 1957). 

Several groups of species are now recognized within the genus: Cadoceras elatmae group, including C. frearsi, C. harveyi, C. sublaeve, including species widespread in the Arctic C. tolype, C. emelianzevi, C. septentrionale, C. durum, etc. 

Kniazev et al. proposed assigning a group of Bathonian species Catacadoceras laptievi, C. barnstoni, C. perrarum, C. subcatastoma, and C. nageli.

Photos: Cadochamoussetia tschernyschewi (12 cm) graciously shared by the deeply awesome of Emil Black. He has shared many wonderful specimen photos and stories with me over the years and I am honoured by his generosity in doing so. It is because of him that I am able to share these with all of you! So a collective, Спасибо, мой друг. Spasibo, moy drug. 

I have placed views of this lovely Cadochamoussetia tschernyschewi into a teaching tool that includes the specimen name, length and provenance.

References:
  • The Early Callovian genus Сadochamoussetia (Ammonoidea, Cardioceratidae) in the lower reaches of the Anabar River, Northern Central Siberia; Original Russian Text © V.G. Kniazev, S.V. Meledina, A.S. Alifirov, B.L. Nikitenko, 2017, published in Stratigrafiya, Geologicheskaya Korrelyatsiya, 2017, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 26–41.
  • Kniazev, V.G., Meledina, S.V., Alifirirov, A.S., and Kutygin, R.V., The Middle Callovian stage of evlution of Siberian cardioceratids, in Sovremennye problemy izucheniya golovonogikh mollyuskov. Morfologiya, sistematika, evolyutsiya, ekologiya i biostratigrafiya. Vyp. 4 (Current Problems in Study of Cephalopods: Morphology, Systematics, Evolution, Ecology, and Biostratigraphy. Iss. 4), Moscow: Paleontol. Inst. Ross. Akad. Nauk, 2015, pp. 40–45.
  • Meledina, S.V, Correlation of the Bajocian and Bathonian zones in light of new paleontological data, Stratigr. Geol. Correl., 2014, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 594–605.
  • Kniazev, V.G., Meledina, S.V., Alifirirov, A.S., and Kutygin, R.V., The Middle Callovian stage of evlution of Siberian cardioceratids, in Sovremennye problemy izucheniya golovonogikh mollyuskov. Morfologiya, sistematika, evolyutsiya, ekologiya i biostratigrafiya. Vyp. 
  • If you do not speak Russian that roughly translates to: Current Problems in Study of Cephalopods: Morphology, Systematics, Evolution, Ecology, and Biostratigraphy. Iss. 4, Moscow: Paleontol. Inst. Ross. Akad. Nauk, 2015, pp. 40–45.
  • Meledina, S.V, Correlation of the Bajocian and Bathonian zones in light of new paleontological data, Stratigr. Geol. Correl., 2014, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 594–605.
  • Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Pt. L. Mollusca 4, Cephalopoda, Ammonoidea, N.Y. Lawrence: Geol. Soc. Amer., Univ. Kansas Press, 1957, vol. 4. TSCreatorProvisualization of Enhanced Geologic Time Scale 2004 database (Vers. 6.2, 2014). http://www.tscreator. org, 2014.
  • Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Pt. L. Mollusca 4, Cephalopoda, Ammonoidea, N.Y. Lawrence: Geol. Soc. Amer., Univ. Kansas Press, 1957, vol. 4. TSCreatorProvisualization of Enhanced Geologic Time Scale 2004 database (Vers. 6.2, 2014). http://www.tscreator. org, 2014.

Saturday 19 February 2022

CRESTED BEAUTY: PARASAUROLOPHUS

A delightful red crested hadrosaur
What do elephants, whales and duckbill dinosaurs have in common? A huge trumpeting sound. That's right.

Parasaurolophus was 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. 

You can image these crested dinosaurs signaling the morning reveille, joy or sounding the alarm over great distances with their bugle-like calls to the other plant-eating members of their herd. 

These herbivorous ornithopod dinosaurs lived in what is now North America — and possibly Asia — during the Late Cretaceous, about 76.5–73 million years ago. 

Parasaurolophus had an interesting jaw structure with dental batteries containing hundreds of teeth that allowed these plant-eaters to tackle their meals with a sort of grinding motion analogous to chewing. 

With all that grinding came significant wear and tear on their specialized dentition so they evolved to have extra teeth waiting in reserve. They dined on plants from the ground up to a height of 4 metres or 13 feet. Once chosen, they would bite their chosen vegetarian meal, begin grinding and any extra green, leafy bits were held in their jaws by a cheek-like organ.  

Hadrosaur Eggs
As noted by the awesome American, cowboy hat-wearing palaeontologist Bob Bakker, lambeosaurines have narrower beaks than hadrosaurines, implying that Parasaurolophus and its relatives fed more selectively than their broad-beaked, crestless counterparts.

Parasaurolophus was a hadrosaurid, part of a diverse family of Cretaceous dinosaurs known for their range of bizarre head adornments. This genus is known for its large, elaborate cranial crest, which at its largest forms a long curved tube projecting upwards and back from the skull. 

Charonosaurus from China, which may have been its closest relative, had a similar skull and potentially a similar crest. Visual recognition of both species and sex, acoustic resonance, and thermoregulation has been proposed as functional explanations for the crest beyond its trumpeting roar. 

It may have produced low-frequency noises, similar to elephants, that you and I wouldn't hear but help them keep in touch over vast distances. The infrasounds of elephants are between 1 to 20 Hertz and can be heard by the herd up to 10 kilometres away. 

Enter Charles H. Sternberg in New Mexico

Charles H. Sternberg, American Palaeontologist
In 1921, Charles H. Sternberg recovered a partial skull (PMU.R1250) from what is now known as the slightly younger Kirtland Formation in San Juan County, New Mexico. 

Sternberg was an American fossil collector and palaeontologist active in the field from 1876 to 1928. He collected fossils for a whose who of famous folk and museums including Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel C. Marsh, and for the British Museum, the San Diego Natural History Museum and other museums. 

He sent his specimen to Uppsala, Sweden, where Carl Wiman described it as a second species, P. tubicen, in 1931. The specific epithet is derived from the Latin tǔbǐcěn  or trumpeter

A second, nearly complete P. tubicen skull (NMMNH P-25100) was found in New Mexico in 1995. Using computed tomography scanning of the skull, Robert Sullivan and Thomas Williamson gave the genus a thorough analysis and interpretation of its anatomy and taxonomy, including various hypothesis for the functions of its crest. Williamson later published an independent review of the remains challenging the previous taxonomic placement.

John Ostrom described another good specimen (FMNH P27393) from New Mexico as P. cyrtocristatus in 1961. Ostrom was an American palaeontologist who revolutionized our understanding of dinosaurs in the 1960s. 

His find from New Mexico included a partial skull with a short, rounded crest, and much of the postcranial skeleton except for the feet, neck, and parts of the tail. Its specific name was derived from the Latin curtus "shortened" and cristatus "crested." The specimen was reported as being found at the top of the Fruitland Formation but was likely from the base of the overlying Kirtland Formation. 

The range of this species was expanded in 1979, when David B. Weishampel and James A. Jensen described a partial skull with a similar crest (BYU 2467) from the Campanian-age Kaiparowits Formation of Garfield County, Utah. Since then, another skull has been found in Utah with the short/round P. cyrtocristatus crest morphology.



References:
  • Abel, Othenio (1924). "Die neuen Dinosaurierfunde in der Oberkreide Canadas". Jarbuch Naturwissenschaften (in German). 12 (36): 709–716. Bibcode:1924NW.....12..709A. doi:10.1007/BF01504818.
  • Bakker, R.T. (1986). The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mysteries of Dinosaurs and their Extinction. William Morrow. p. 194. ISBN 978-0-8217-2859-8.
  • Benson, R.J.; Brussatte, S.J.; Anderson; Hone, D.; Parsons, K.; Xu, X.; Milner, D.; Naish, D. (2012). Prehistoric Life. Dorling Kindersley. p. 342. ISBN 978-0-7566-9910-9.
  • Brett-Surman, Michael K.; Wagner, Jonathan R. (2006). "Appendicular anatomy in Campanian and Maastrichtian North American hadrosaurids". In Carpenter, Kenneth (ed.). Horns and Beaks: Ceratopsian and Ornithopod Dinosaurs. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. pp. 135–169. ISBN 978-0-253-34817-3.
  • Carr, T.D.; Williamson, T.E. (2010). "Bistahieversor sealeyi, gen. et sp. nov., a new tyrannosauroid from New Mexico and the origin of deep snouts in Tyrannosauroidea". Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. 30 (1): 1–16. doi:10.1080/02724630903413032.

Friday 18 February 2022

BOAS, ANNIE SPENCER, LUCY HOMISKANIS, CADWALLADER AND LYON

In 1885, at the age of twenty-seven, Franz Boas received the assignment of cataloguing a First Nation mask, which the explorer Johan Adrian Jacobsen had purchased on northern Vancouver Island and sent back to the Royal Museum of Ethnology. 

Boas was a German-born American anthropologist who spent considerable time on the west coast — much of it with my extended family. 

During the previous year, the museum had seized upon the German Empire’s expansion to assemble the world’s largest collection of bones and curios from “vanishing” cultures.

But this mask was no artefact of the past. It was in use until the moment its owner removed it from her box of treasures. 

The mask belonged to Lucy Homiskanis known as T’łaliłi’lakw, the wife of George Hunt (1864-1932), first born son of Robert Hunt and Mary Ebbets. Lucy had contributed to her husband’s ascent among the Kwakiutl of Fort Rupert by displaying her dances—property rights that Hunt, the son of HBC Factor Robert Hunt and his highborn Tlingit wife— Mary Ebbets, Anisalaga, mixed with wealth, rhetoric, and political genius to join the Kwakiutl nobility.

As a teenager Lucy had disappeared while digging for clams, leaving only a pile of clothes on the beach. For a month she was thought to be gone—until the winter ceremonies when the dance leaders of Fort Rupert called the people to their secret spot in the woods to compose two songs for the supposedly vanished girl. 

That night a Killer Whale dancer appeared in the house, spouting water from his blowhole. Suddenly he pulled a hidden string, splitting his face in two and revealing the form of a supernatural Monster Fish said to have taken the girl away. Following this transformation, and shocking those who thought her gone, Lucy emerged to dance, enacting her role as a bearer of wealth for her family.

Boas, who printed a picture of this mask in 1897, would not learn the identity of its owner, much less the dramatic story of Lucy’s disappearance and reappearance, until the early 1920s, when Lucy had been dead for more than a decade. 

George Hunt, now approaching his seventies, sent Boas a list of corrections to their monumental, coauthored ethnography. Almost as if posing a counter-point to the classifying outlook Boas expressed in his title for the book, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians,

George Hunt titled his latest work “name of the masks on the Book and who there Belong to.” 

In each sentence, Hunt contradicted Boas’s pursuit of the typical and tribal with an account of the personal and particular—beginning with his own family. “This mask,” Hunt wrote Boas, “was my wife's Killer Whale mask.”

It was Hunt, it turns out, who had sent the mask to Germany. 

500+ Kwakwaka’wakw Ceremonial Objects Send to Berlin 

In 1881, Hunt had served as Jacobsen’s guide, aiding in his collection of the more than five hundred Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial objects now in Berlin that stirred in Boas visions of a foreign world. “My fancy was first struck,” Boas recalled, “by the flight of imagination exhibited in the works of art of the British Columbians as compared to the severe sobriety of the eastern Eskimo.” 

Sea monsters, fantastical birds of prey, tangle-haired hags assaulted his senses, striking him as strange, “grotesque.” But as he held the masks in hand, noting mouths, eyes, snapping mandibles, faces that divided by the pull of a string to reveal a second face within, Boas realized “what a wealth of thought” lay hidden behind the designs.

Boas’s newfound interest in masks, a layer interposed between the self and the world, was more than a metaphor for his interest in culture. Boas lived behind a kind of mask—a look at his face revealed cracks in the facade: three scars over the eye, one across the nose, and a long, cruel slash from cheek to ear.

Boas had earned his Schmisse while fencing at university between 1877 and 1881 when a revived version of the Judenfrage or Jewish question, posed by the distinguished historian Hein-rich von Treitschke gripped the country, and students rallied to “emancipate the German people from a kind of foreign domination.”

Boas, a secular Jew, fought several duels to defend his honour against attacks from anti-Semites, but his attempt to escape his outsider’s identity, living by the code of his German secret society, marked him as the outsider he did not wish to be.

Few frontal portraits of Boas survive today because he tended to present his profile to the camera, leaving the scarred side in shadow.

The violence inscribed on Boas’s face signified a deeper conflict between his self-image as a romantic explorer and the flesh-and-blood reality of a scientist measuring humans in an age of empire.

Inspired by the globetrotting humanism of Alexander von Humboldt, whose magnum opus,

Cosmos, offered Europeans a vision of New World grandeur, Boas had set off in 1883 to live with the Inuit of Baffin Island, there awakening to the radical variety of human practice, the universality of human experience, and the sordid power performances involved in extracting information about both.

He returned in 1885 to an altered Germany, which had acquired an empire in his absence and now possessed colonies in Africa and the Pacific. The merging of imperial politics and romantic science provoked a profound crisis for Boas now defined at home as the ethnic outsider he had travelled so far to see.

As his mentors, Rudolf Virchow and Adolf Bastian received packets of salted skin, hair, and severed hands from German collectors around the globe, Boas groped for a new self-understanding. 

He came to the conclusion that science must change. Though categorizing experience and generalizing data to form laws of nature could be one way of seeing the world, one must not lose one's sense of feeling. The “effective” search for the inner nature of the thing itself, rather than the way one might define it from the outside, could reveal a different form of truth.

Just as he came to this insight, the Northwest Coast artwork arrived, opening a door to affective perception. Lucy’s transformation mask, representing two faces, linked three states of being, those of the human (Dancer), animal (Killer Whale), and supernatural (Monster Fish) realms. It was an image of interconnection, portraying the relationships of humans with the nonhuman members of an animate cosmos. 

Even as Boas classified the mask, categorizing it by region and tribe, the object escaped his grasp, permeating the borders of being that locked Boas 

in place. This global consciousness remained dead to Boas so long as the mask remained severed from the message. But a potential existed. 

If the mask and the message could be reunited, they would transmit to Boas an Indigenous narrative. Through this opening, this crack in thought danced “die Bella Coola.” In the Hamburg animal merchant Carl Hagenbeck, who would later contribute to the invention of the modern zoo, toured Germany with an exhibition of humans.

Nine Nuxalk dancers from Bella Coola, a village north of Hunt’s home in Kwak’wala land, spent a year performing in zoos, hotels, and theaters across Germany.

The ethnographer Aurel Krause, who had recently returned from a stay with the Tlingit of Alaska, invited Boas to join him on a visit to the performers at Krolls Establishment, the amusement centre where they lived and danced.

The following days proceeded for Boas like a dreamer a vision as the dancers took the artefacts he had been struggling to lock into place and spun them, for a moment, into splendid motion. Donning the masks collected by Hunt, cocking their beaks to the beat, the Nuxalk posed as supernatural cranes and ravens. They rolled up their sleeves to display their scars, explained to Boas that the masks were tied to the secret societies of the Northwest Coast, and described the arduous initiation rituals—an experience to which Boas, a secret society initiate himself, could relate. 

A conversation began. 

The Nuxalk taught Boas their local trade jargon. They sang of love, and of loss, in the Puget Sound hop fields (“Ya, that is good! Ya, that is good! That worthless woman does not like me”).

One man, a skilled storyteller named Nuskilusta, taught Boas the rudiments of the Nuxalk language.

After four days Boas wrote to his fiancée, Marie Krackowizer, that he felt “wie in Himmel,” as if he were in heaven. By the time the group left for Breslau he had recorded four songs, sent a report to the Berliner Tageblatt, described the Nuxalk language, and written a sketch for the American magazine Science.

Boas had found his effective inspiration, a message for his developing medium.

The performers offered Boas an Indigenous education, a Bella Coola Bildung.

Making use of another people’s masks as found objects, they code-switched Boas to their mnemonic logic, transmitting their messages to him. The embodied materialism of this meeting, in which ideas moved through masks, blankets, and even scars, accommodated Boas’s German ideas about culture, for the ornate carvings of the Northwest Coast showed that this so-called “primitive” people, in fact, possessed a richly developed civilization.

When the Nuxalk danced, Boas wrote, “We saw ourselves transported into a foreign world whose outlook, whose customs, have taken a quite different course from ours, but which we must acknowledge as a high cultural state.”

Yet even by altering his judgment, Boas retained the authority to be the judge. A more powerful transformation was underway, one concerning the question of agency.

Transformation Masks

As he studied the artwork displayed by the Nuxalk, Boas noted an aesthetic feature of the Northwest Coast: the eye design.

This “repeated motif” deco-rated nearly every spoon, blanket, and mask that he saw. Boas did not yet know that sight—vision—was a central idea on the Northwest Coast. Visions of encounters with animals and spirits were a form of social currency. By performing visions, elites claimed their ancestral privileges and responsibilities. By experiencing visions, shamans received their healing powers. Stories were visions shared by a teller, pictures painted in words.

Through visions, through the metaphor of vision, the people of the coast depicted themselves as Eyes, not Others: vision seekers, vision speakers. Ultimately it is the person with vision, the person who glimpses a potential that others have missed, who is capable of altering a situation, thus bringing about a transformation. At the heart of this transformation was the idea of a mask. In the European outlook familiar to Boas, a mask concealed: it hid the wearer’s true identity, superimposing a false front. 

For the Nuxalk and for the Kwakwaka’wakw, masks were not merely coverings but skins, part and parcel of the substance beneath. A mask enabled its wearer to alter states, to don a second face. It provided a new way of being and of seeing.

Rather than hiding behind the mask, the people of the Northwest Coast took on the mask’s identity. When they put on their masks, they positioned themselves not as objects of anthropology but as subjects of history. Agents of change, they possessed the power to transform. There is no evidence to suggest that Boas felt tempted to wear one of these masks, thus donning the skin of the Nuxalk and their neighbours, seeing the world through their eyes. If he did so, quietly and out of view, we have no record of it.

We do know that Boas sought the meanings behind the masks. He asked what each design depicted, but the performers from Bella Coola could not tell him. The masks collected by Jacobsen were not their masks, they said. They did not know the stories behind them.

Once intrigued, Boas now found himself confronted by a mystery, and with this mystery, the door opened wider. To findout more, it would be necessary to visit the place where the masks were made. Twenty-five years later Boas would look back upon this moment, the moment of his Bella Coola

Bildung, as the beginning of his own transformation. The performers from Bella Coola, Boas wrote, offered him a chance to “cast a brief glimpse behind the veil that covered the life of these people.

Had it not been for the Nuxalk performers, Boas might very easily have remained at home, where he would have become a professor of geography in Germany and, had he lived long enough, a stumbling stone on the streets of present-day Berlin.

It was due to the influence of Indigenous performers that his life veered in a new direction and began to take consequential shape. 

In 1886, Boas took leave of the museum to travel to the Northwest Coast. “The attraction,” he later wrote, “was irresistible.”

DRIFTED ASHORE HOUSE

Boas arrived on Vancouver Island like a parody of a detective, clutching sketches of the masks as his clues. The only drawback to these clues was that they lacked any connection to a case. Boas envisioned the masks as signs that Natives could connect to referents, lifting the veil that obscured their world of thought. But the masks were not signs. They were property that related the histories of their owners, and knowledge of the designs was limited to the circle whose history they discussed. No one else had a right to talk. 

After a week of sodden searching in the labour camps of Victoria, poking his head into tents, sharing pictures, requesting information in the shards of Chinook trade jargon he had learned from the Nuxalk, Boas had come no closer to the meanings that had eluded him in Berlin. He gave up his hunt in order to buy new masks, thus creating a clean set of signs and referents.

As he headed north on an old steamer toward Kwakwaka’wakw country, a case of tobacco and a bolt of cotton by his side, Boas formed the perfect caricature of the white man’s globalization. Money for masks, tobacco for tales, was Europe’s colonial calculus. Boas, no exception, needed masks to fund his trip. His pursuit of “handsome” objects to sell to Bastian in Berlin formed the subtext of his dealings at Newitti, a remote island town off the northern tip of Vancouver Island, twice razed by British gunboats yet still a bastion of the potlatch, the outlawed form of Indigenous governance that took place through a reciprocal exchange of feasts, dances, and most important to Boas, the display of masks.

The potlatch was an answer and an ode to the experience of modernity. It had taken a new form after the smallpox epidemic of 1862 when more than 50 per cent of the people died within a year, some villages vanished, and Northwest Coast peoples faced the possibility of imminent destruction. 

The potlatch was their survival strategy, a gift-giving system that soldered bonds between peoples, redistributed wealth—often in the form of fabricated metal plates known as coppers that were worth thousands of trade blankets—and spread stories across a thousand-mile coastline from the salmon-fishing grounds of the Columbia River to the eulachon harvesting spots by the Nass. 

Through this system of material and intellectual exchange, thousands of people responded to the existential threat that Western networks of power and pathogens posed to their homes, families, and communities. They fashioned a new Indigenous life world, drawing one another into an ongoing conversation that constructed a peaceful, pan coastal community. Because the potlatch system perpetuated Indigenous independence, Canada’s government had banned it in 1884.

But this did not stop the Kwakwaka’wakw, who determined to live—as one chief now put it to Boas—by “the strict law that bids us dance.

The people of Newitti greeted Boas quizzically. Why would a white visitor ask to see the same dances that the white government had only just banned? Boas, compelled to communicate, clarified that he was not a missionary or a government agent but a traveller who had come to learn. “I do not wish to interfere with your celebration,” he promised the head chief, who had called a town meeting, asking the foreigner to explain his purposes. “My people live far away,” Boas said, “and would like to know what people in distant lands do.. . . And so I went and I came here and I saw you eat and drink, sing and dance. And I shall go back and say: ‘See, that is how the people there live. They were good to me and asked me to live with them.’”

In response to the stimulus provided by the people of Newitti, Boas had begun to reconsider his research methods. He talked about himself as the people wanted to see him, not as a collector but as a transmitter of information. During the next week, as Boas put together his 

During the next week, as Boas put together his collection, the people took time out from their dances to chat with the visitor. “Everyone,” Boas wrote, “is most anxious to tell me something.”

By revealing what they valued—their stories—those assembled at Newitti turned Boas from the material products that possessed Western value to the narratives that the objects encoded, which held greater wealth in the Indigenous world. Boas saw the masks in the context of their makers, who expressed their social history in carvings—masks and also poles, posts, family benches, and feasting dishes—all of which related the narratives of their owners.

At night, the head chief of Newitti gathered his people around the fire, where he related legends that Boas scribbled down with the help of a young translator. Sitting on the chief’s settee, carved with the heraldry of his lineage, Boas realized that the designs surrounding him told the history of the house. 

The people of Newitti lived within their narratives, enfolded by their stories. Although Boas styled himself as the intellectual, it was the Kwakwaka’wakw who turned him from objects to ideas.

Boas continued to collect, and he would succeed in paying for his trip by selling his collection (the “best masks available,” he reported home, including, “all the ornaments that belong to one dance”).

But the object of his interest shifted from the masks that brought him there to the storytelling style of theNorthwest Coast. So eager was Boas to hear more stories, and to see stories play out in dances, that he placed his masks at risk to do so, travelling through a severe storm to reach some potlatches at the town of Alert Bay. 

When his guide, blown ashore, refused to venture out again, Boas hired a Native boatman, stowed the masks in his craft, and pushed off into a ferocious wind. They might have died and were once pushed into a rocky peninsula, but somehow Boas and his new pilot managed to catch a friendly gust and steer for the totem poles of Alert Bay. 

A crowd rushed to bring the boat in, Boas springing out so eagerly that his guide burst into laughter. “You were just like a deer,” he said, “so quickly you jumped ashore!” 

Relieved, Boas walked to the dock to find George Hunt’s brother-in-law Stephen Allen Spencer, the owner of the local salmon cannery, whose attention immediately gravitated toward the masks, the constant object of imperial interest. “The first thing he told me,” Boas wrote, “was that my belongings would be locked up.”

Despite all the effort Boas had expended on masks—first to determine the meanings of the masks he had seen in Berlin, then to collect the second group of masks at Newitti, and finally to transport and secure them—his attempt to “cast a glimpse behind the veil” was a failure. 

The masks were not signs that could be lifted out of the Northwest Coast to generate principles. They were mediums, which their owners used to transmit messages. Even as Boas attempted to collect, and by collecting to categorize a culture, the people of the Northwest Coast attempted to communicate, and by communicating to transmit a history that defied categorization. As a result, Boas’s interest began to shift from masks to the mnemonic knowledge they encoded. It was in this context—the play between categorization and communication—that he met the Hunt family and, without realizing it, learned their family story.

Dinner with Stephen Allen Spencer, Harry Tennyson Cadwallader and Alexander Matthew Lyon

On his first night in Alert Bay, after dinner with Stephen Allen Spencer and his two brothers-in-law, each, like Spencer, was married to a sister of Hunt — Boas spent some hours in conversation with Annie Spencer (1856-1924), the younger sister to George (1864-1932) and William (1866-1952) Hunt, who regaled him with First Nation tales. 

“Mrs. Spencer was very gracious and told me many stories,” Boas wrote to Krackowizer, “which I recorded later in the evening.”

Four days later, Boas mentioned in a new note to his fiancée that he had visited Annie Spencer again and asked her to tell more tales. “She relates well and is very gracious,” he emphasized. “Unfortunately she is not well or I should really bother her.”

Nevertheless, Boas trod back to the Spencers’ home the same day. There he found Hunt’s sister either improved or doubly gracious, for she was “kind enough to tell me all I wanted to know. . . . The information I obtained from her was the most valuable I received in Alert Bay.”

The stories of Annie Hunt Spencer (1856-1924) daughter to Mrs. Mary Ebbits, Anisalaga, opened a vista on a narrative legacy linking all the peoples from Yakutat Bay to the Columbia River, who, though divided by physical and linguistic differences and by histories of conflict, held in common a heritage of thought. 

The Raven Cycle

A centrepiece of this heritage was the Raven Cycle, one of the oldest and largest bodies of oral literature in the Americas. In the bards who performed the Raven tales, and who daily altered them, were members not of a single school but of a living tradition whose members had innovated a stance toward the world in response to cycles of change from the Ice Age to the smallpox apocalypse. They had created a body of thought about people’s relationships to one another and to the cosmos, the beings within it, and the capacity of humans to right those relationships.

The star of the drama was Raven, scheming, ravenous, bumbling in his arrogance toward ever-greater disgrace, yet always surviving, evolving, and through his accidents and exploits establishing the present state of affairs.

Born before the earth had acquired its form, it was Raven—Old One, Great Inventor, Chief of the Ancients, Heaven Maker, Giving to the End, Going Around—who established the tools and forms of existence.

With the world veiled in darkness, Raven stole the box that held the sun and opened it, lighting the world by his ingenuity. 

He made man from grass and elderberry bushes, brought salmon to the people, fed the rivers with eulachon. He established the shapes and traits of his fellow animals and gave them their present powers and appearances. And though affairs could hardly change as radically in contemporary times as in the days of beginning, by his actions and infractions Raven pointed toward a way of being human. “So many stories are told about him,” Boas remarked during his first visit to the coast, “that they have a saying that human life is not long enough to tell all of them.”

Every First Nation of the Northwest Coast was woven into the fabric of the Raven Cycle through the warp and weft of a storytelling practice that linked speakers and listeners—messengers and mediums—within a pattern of call and response. There were no galleries around the fire, no lines dictating who paid and who performed. There were no observers, no outsiders, no Others. People did not merely listen to the Raven Cycle; they took part, asking questions, repeating refrains, goading the storyteller toward feats of ingenuity.

There was saltiness and sport in the Raven tales, sex and waste, greed and hate. The bards were like Raven: they begged, borrowed, stole, and in doing so created. They were origin poets who fostered possibilities by defying the rules of the system they had made.

The stories they told, often ending in just-so pronouncements—explaining, say, how wolves had come to behave so diffidently around humans (“they really became wolves after this,” one storyteller put it)—wove a fabric of thought that embraced every notable rock, tree, and stream in the neighbourhood, encompassing the human community within an animate cosmos. 

"I remember with the greatest pleasure many trips in colourful canoes with Indian guides who did not stop telling tales,” Boas wrote in one account of this storytelling culture for a German audience. 

“It was that mountain peak which alone reached above the waters during the great flood, and from this peak, the earth was populated again. Here, the battle took place in which the stone giants were outwitted and killed by the brave Indians. A dangerous rapid, formed in prehistoric times in a narrow strait, reminds us of the Son of God, who killed and sank a dangerous sea monster into the ocean at that place. Each strange place is woven into a legend.”

Origins of the World through Raven from the North

Yet, while the storytelling tradition of the Northwest Coast had survived long enough to envelop the landscape, the Raven Cycle had emerged from only a portion of it. As Boas’s first conversation with an elderly storyteller in Victoria revealed, only the northern peoples, including George Hunt’s mother’s people, related the origins of the world through the exploits of Raven.

Other peoples credited competing narratives, starring different figures.

Origins of the World through Mink in the South

Among the Kwakiutl people of Fort Rupert, the hero associated with light was not Raven but Mink, the son of the supernatural man who carried the sun across the sky. Much like Raven, Mink possessed an insatiable appetite, but not for food. A priapic scavenger after advantageous marriages, Mink lusted after women.

It was said of the mischievous Mink that he had sliced off a girl’s clitoris and attached it to a branch, wearing it on his forehead as a ludicrous headpiece. On another occasion, he convinced a flock of female ducks to enter the forest and there sit upon a rare type of elongated mushroom, which turned out to be Mink’s penis.

If Raven was Ego, Mink was Id. He pointed toward the urge within, the pre-socialized desire. The Kwakiutl went so far as to envision Mink as a child, given today dreams and pranks. When performing the role of Mink, they revelled in his youth by making the grammatical mistakes of a child.

But there was more than comedy in the Kwakiutl depiction of Mink’s youth, for the child had attained a precious status in a society that now possessed precious few children. 

Among the Kwakwaka’wakw, Mink—T' łisalagi’lakw, or “Born to Be the Sun”— was the most sympathetic of figures, the fatherless child. While the Tlingit tradition was to pass down rights through the matriline, the rights of the Kwakwaka’wakw were passed from father to son, meaning that Mink had to make his own way in the world.

The Kwakwaka’wakw traced the origins of modern times to Mink’s response to his fate. Teased by the other children because he had no father, Mink came home depressed, whereupon his mother related a wondrous tale. Mink did have a father, his mother assured him, and he was not just any father. He was the man who lit up the world by carrying the sun across the sky.

Hoping to meet his father, Mink shot an arrow into the sky, then a second arrow into the back of the first, and a third into the second, constructing a ladder of arrows that he ascended to the Upper World. Warmly greeted by his father, he was invited to try out his future occupation. Mink began well enough, walking calmly across the sky with the sun in his arms, but soon he grew impatient. He began to run, scorching the earth and bringing about a deluge. Disgraced, Mink was thrown to the earth by his father, fated to spend his life among men.

In the Kwakwa ka’wakw version of history, the origin of modern life was a great mistake, an ecological disaster that unleashed a scourge upon humankind.

The hero was a fallen child. His actions warned of the dangers of hubris, a trait ever-present in the avaricious fur trade. But the Kwakwaka’wakw storytellers who related the narrative were careful to show that the disaster did not befall an individual only; it impacted everybody. Mink tales epitomized the dark humour of the Northwest Coast, a tone infused with portentous irony. 

They had bravado, an acute awareness of human foibles, and epic warnings about the transitory nature of greatness—a style that had risen to prominence in a period of existential horror inhabited by many human Minks, many father-less children struggling for survival on a broken coast scorched by smallpox. Transformation—making change—not only created the world, it was what enabled people to make their way in it, negotiating a path through the currents of destruction. 

Mink’s essence as a transformer, as a hero, consisted not in his creation of the apocalypse but in his response to the apocalypse of everyday life. Smaller and weaker than the others, bearing no special talents, Mink survived by his wits—and it was his terrible wit, his deadeye for the jugular, that especially pleased the Kwakiutl of Fort Rupert. 

Tlowitsis First Nation Village of Kalugwis on Turnour Island
Mink, they said, had lived at nearby Turnour Island in Johnstone Strait, where the sons of the Wolf chief had terrorized him, stealing his salmon from his trap. 

Threatened with starvation, Mink grabbed his spear, lay in wait for Wolf’s sons, and slaughtered them. But this was only the beginning of his revenge, for it was the insult, not the injury, that offended Mink—and which he aimed, in turn, to deliver.

By decapitating the eldest son of the Wolf and converting his head into a mask, Mink managed to impersonate his persecutor. In this blood-drenched costume, he arrived at the Wolf chief’s winter ceremonies to perform the dances of his heir. Three times Mink circled the fire, displaying the Wolf’s winter dances. On the fourth circuit he revealed his true form, throwing off his mask to mock his host: “Yahai, yahai, Mink wears as his cap the face of the son of the Wolf!” 

This was genocide: Mink had assassinated the Wolf’s heirs, taken their dances, and arrived at the crucial moment to deliver the coup de grâce. When he raised the head of his enemy, Mink announced a new future for his descendants, the Kwakiutl. This, it was said, was the origin of the winter dances that Boas had come to see.

At the centre of the dances was a single mask: a mask that allowed Mink to assume the form and take the name of a Wolf. Only by wearing this mask could Mink cross a boundary, enter the realm of the Wolves, and claim his prize. Mink transformed not because he was born to do so, but because he possessed vision. He saw and seized his chance to act, writing for himself a new history. 

Although the Mink stories emerged from an ancient tradition, that tradition had altered as Indigenous people reshaped it into something new. Mink’s actions were an outgrowth of and an answer to the experience of modernity. The tales Boas studied as generalities, looking for ideas that defined social groups, were the product of personal genealogies, formulated by storytellers whose innovations shaped the intellectual material of the coast to their purposes. 

This was especially true of the Hunt family, possessed of numerous storytellers, including Annie Hunt Spencer. Among the tales she shared with Boas was one about Raven and Mink, which would come to be of such importance to Boas that the story is worth recounting in full.

The first part of the story relates an adventure of Raven and Mink, who met at the Nass River, made friends, and decided to wander the earth together. (This was where Robert Hunt and Mary Ebbets had met and married, and Mary's mother had drowned)

Because they had no means of getting across the ocean, they were forced to rely on their wits. Coming upon Whale, they mentioned their desire to cross the water. “Won’t you take us across?” they asked. Whale opened his mouth and Raven and Mink stepped in. They had not been inside the Whale for long when Raven pinched Mink, who let out a scream. “Why does the little one cry?” Whale asked. 

When Raven replied that Mink was hungry, Whale generously offered a piece of himself. “I have lots of meat,” he said. “Cut him off a piece.” Raven and Mink soon finished their meal, whereupon Raven pinched Mink again. “What’s happening now?” Whale asked. “The little one is hungry,” Raven said. “Take as much as you want,” Whale consented, “only don’t cut my throat, because that would kill me" — whereupon Raven cut Whale's throat.

Isaiah Lorado Wilner; Yale University Press; Chapter Title: Transformation Masks: Recollecting the Indigenous Origins of Global Consciousness; Chapter Author(s): Isaiah Lorado Wilner; Book Title: Indigenous Visions; Book Subtitle: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas; Book Editor(s): Ned Blackhawk, Isaiah Lorado Wilner; Published by: Yale University Press. (2018) 

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Alexander Mathew Lyon (1863-1950); Harry Tennyson Cadwallader (1874-1932)