SUNSETS AND SUPERNOVAE

Sunsets — pure visual poetry: peaceful, meditative, mesmerizing.

What is sunlight, actually? Yes, it's light from the Sun but so much more than that. Sunlight is both light and energy. Once it reaches Earth, we call this energy, "insolation," a fancy term for solar radiation. The amount of energy the Sun gives off changes over time in a never-ending cycle.

Solar flares (hotter) and sunspots (cooler) on the Sun's surface impact the amount of radiation headed to Earth. These periods of extra heat or extra cold (well, cold by Sun standards...) can last for weeks, sometimes months. The beams that reach us and warm our skin are electromagnetic waves that bring with them heat and radiation, by-products of the nuclear fusion happening as hydrogen nuclei fuse and shift violently to form helium, a process that fires every star in the sky.

Our bodies convert the ultraviolet rays to Vitamin D. Plants use the rays for photosynthesis, a process of converting carbon dioxide to sugar and using it to power their growth (and clean our atmosphere!) That process looks something like this: carbon dioxide + water + light energy — and glucose + oxygen = 6 CO2(g) + 6 H2O + photons → C6H12O6(aq) + 6 O2(g).

Photosynthetic organisms convert about 100–115 thousand million metric tonnes of carbon to biomass each year, about six times more power than used us mighty homo sapien sapiens. Our plants, forests and algae soak up this goodness and much later in time, we harvest this energy from fossil fuels.

We've yet to truly get a handle on the duality between light as waves and light as photons. The duality of the two-in-oneness of light; of their waves and alter-ego, particle photons is a physicists delight. Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity in part by thinking about what it would be like to ride around on these waves. What would space look and feel like? How would time occur? It bends the mind to consider. His wave-particle view helped us to understand that these seemingly different forms change when measured. To put this in plain English, they change when viewed, ie. you look them "in the eye" and they behave as you see them.

Light fills not just our wee bit of the Universe but the cosmos as well, bathing it in the form of cosmic background radiation that is the signature of the Big Bang and the many mini-big bangs of supernovae as they go through cycles of reincarnation and cataclysmic death — exploding outward and shining brighter than a billion stars.

In our solar system, once those electromagnetic waves leave the Sun headed for Earth, they reach us in a surprising eight minutes. We experience them as light mixed with the prism of beautiful colours. But what we see is actually a trick of the light. As rays of white sunlight travel through the atmosphere they collide with airborne particles and water droplets causing the rays to scatter.

We see mostly the yellow, orange and red hues (the longer wavelengths) as the blues and greens (the shorter wavelengths) scatter more easily and get bounced out of the game rather early.

WOOLLY MAMMOTHS: ANCIENT SNOW POUGHS

Woolly Mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius,  have always held wonder for me. These massive, hairy — and likely very smelly beasts — lived alongside us for a time. 

If you stood beside him and reached way up, you might be able to touch his tusks but likely not reach up to his mouth or even his eyes. 

He had a shaggy coat of light or dark coloured hair with long outer hair strands covering a dense thick undercoat. His oil glands would have worked overtime to secrete oils, giving him natural waterproofing. Some of the hair strands we have recovered are more than a meter in length. These behemoth proboscideans boasted long, curved tusks, little ears, short tails and grazed on leaves, shrubs and grasses that would have been hard work to get at as much of his world was covered in ice and snow during his reign.

We first see Woolly Mammoths in northeastern Siberia dating back 700,000 years. We find them in East Asia as far back as 800,000 years ago. They arose from the massive steppe mammoths, Mammuthus trogontherii, slowly evolving traits we see in this older species to the mammoths we think of today. 

Over time, their body size shrank and their teeth and tusks evolved to take advantage of the tough vegetation available to those few animals who could chew their way through ice and snow and work these tundra grasses into a digestible form. 

The enamel plates of their cheek teeth multiplied while the enamel itself became thinner. Tusks slowly took on more of a curved to act as ploughs for the snow. 

Those smaller than their predecessors, they were still formidable. Their size offered protection against predators once full grown. Sadly for the juveniles, they offered tasty prey to big cats like Homotherium who roamed these ancient grasslands alongside them.

The Mammoths of the Steppe spread to the northern areas of Eurasia, down through Europe, into the British Isles to Spain and crossed over to populate North America via the Bering Isthmus. It was the lowered sea levels during the last Ice Age that exposed dry land between Asia and the Americas. Here in this flat, grassy treeless plain known as the Bering Land Bridge or Isthmus, animals, including humans, could migrate from Europe west into North America.

The woolly mammoth coexisted with our ancestors who made good use of their bones and tusks for tools, housing, art and food. The last of their lineage died out relatively recently on Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago — a time when we were making our first harps and flutes in Egypt, dams, canals and stone sculptures in Sumer, using numbers for the first time and using tin to make tools.

UPPER CRETACEOUS MOTORCROSS SITE: VANCOUVER ISLAND

Steller's Jay, Cyanocitta stelleri

One of the classic Vancouver Island fossil localities is the Santonian-Maastrichtian, Upper Cretaceous Haslam Formation Motocross Pit near Brannen Lake, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada.

The quarry is no longer active as such though there is a busy little gravel quarry a little way down the road closer to Ammonite falls near Benson Creek Falls.

Today it is an active motocross site and remains one of the classic localities of the Nanaimo Group. We find well-preserved nautiloids and ammonites — Canadoceras, Pseudoschloenbachia, Epigoniceras — the bivalves — Inoceramus, Sphenoceramus— gastropods, and classic Nanaimo Group decapods — Hoploparia, Linuparus. We also find fossil fruit and seeds which tell the story of the terrestrial history of Vancouver Island.

Upper Cretaceous Haslam Formation Motocross Pit near Brannen Lake

It was John Fam, Vice-Chair, Vancouver Island Paleontological Society (VanPS), who originally told me about the locality. John is one of the most delightful and knowledgeable people you'd be well-blessed to meet.

While he lived on Vancouver Island, he was an active member of the VanPS back when I was Chair. Several of the best joint VIPS/VanPS paleontological expeditions were planned with or instigated by his passion for fossils. I tip my hat to him for his passion and shared love of all things paleo.

John grew up 15 minutes from the motocross locality and used to collect there a few times a week with his father. John has wonderful parents and since marrying his childhood sweetheart, the amazing Grace, those excellent genetics, curiosity and love of fossils are now being passed to a new generation. It's lovely to see John and Grace continuing tradition with two boys of their own.

I met John way back then and did an overnight at his parent's house the Friday before a weekend field trip to Jurassic Point. It was a joy to have him walk me through his collections and tell his stories from earlier years. After learning about the site from John, I headed up to the Motocross Pit with my Uncle Doug. He was a delightful man who grew up on the coast and had explored much of it but not the fossil site just 10-minutes from his home. It was wonderful to walk through time with him so many years ago and then again solo this past year with sadness in my belly that one of the best I've ever known has left this Earth.

Upper Cretaceous Haslam Formation Motocross Pit near Brannen Lake

There were some no trespassing signs up but no people around, so I walked the periphery looking for the bedrock of the Haslam.

The rocks we find here were laid down south of the equator as small, tropical islands. They rode across the Pacific heading north and slightly east over the past 80 million years to where we find them today.

Jim Haggart and Peter Ward have done much to increase our understanding of the molluscan fauna of the Nanaimo Group. Personally, both personify the charming Indiana Jones school of rugged manly palaeontologists you picture in popular film. Professionally, their singular contributions and collaborative efforts have helped shape our understanding of the correlation of Nanaimo Group fauna to those we find in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia and down in the San Juan Islands of Washington State.

Their work builds on the work of Usher (1952), Matsumoto (1959a, 1959b) and Mallory (1977). A healthy nod goes out to the work of Muller and Jeletzky (1970) for untangling the lithostratigraphic and biostratigraphic foundation for our knowledge of the Nanaimo Group.

Candoceras yokoyama, Photo: John Fam, VanPS

As I walked along the bedrock of the Haslam, a Steller's Jay, Cyanocitta stelleri, followed me from tree to tree making his guttural shook, shook, shook call. Instructive, he seemed to be encouraging me, timing his hoots to the beat of my hammer. Vancouver Island truly has glorious flora and fauna.

Fancy some additional reading? Check out a paper published in the Journal of Paleontology back in 1989 by Haggard and Ward on new Nanaimo Group Ammonites from British Columbia and Washington State.

In it, they look at the ammonite species Puzosia (Mesopuzosia) densicostata Matsumoto, Kitchinites (Neopuzosia) japonicus Spath, Anapachydiscus cf. A. nelchinensis Jones, Menuites cf. M. menu (Forbes), Submortoniceras chicoense (Trask), and Baculites cf. B. boulei Collignon are described from Santonian--Campanian strata of western Canada and northwestern United States.

Stratigraphic occurrences and ranges of the species are summarized and those taxa important for correlation with other areas in the north Pacific region and Late Cretaceous ammonite fauna of the Indo-Pacific region. Here's the link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1305358?seq=1

Peter Ward is a prolific author, both of scientific papers and more popularized works. I highly recommend his book Gorgon: Paleontology, Obsession, and the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History. It is an engaging romp through a decade's research in South Africa's Karoo Desert.

Photo: Candoceras yokoyamai from Upper Cretaceous Haslam formation (Lower Campanian) near Nanaimo, British Columbia. One of the earliest fossils collected by John Fam (1993). Prepared using only a cold chisel and hammer. Photo & collection of John Fam, VIPS.

THE DUDLEY BUG: ROLLED TRILOBITE

A lovely rolled trilobite, Calymene blumenbachii,  from outcrops in the UK. This wee beauty is in the collections of the deeply awesome Theresa Paul Spink Dunn — or perhaps in her daughter Layla's collections as she is quite the budding palaeontologist. This Silurian beauty is from the Homerian, Wenlock Series, Wrens Nest, Dudley, UK.

Calymene blumenbachii, sometimes erroneously spelled blumenbachi, is a species of trilobite found in the limestone quarries of the Wren's Nest in Dudley, England.

Nicknamed the Dudley Bug or Dudley Locust by an 18th-century quarryman, it became a symbol of the town and featured on the Dudley County Borough Council coat-of-arms. Calymene blumenbachii is commonly found in Silurian rocks (422.5-427.5 million years ago) and is thought to have lived in the shallow waters of the Silurian, in low energy reefs.

This particular species of Calymene — a fairly common genus in the Ordovician-Silurian — is unique to the Wenlock series in England and comes from the Wenlock Limestone Formation in Much Wenlock and the Wren's Nest in Dudley. 

These sites seem to yield trilobites more readily than any other areas on the Wenlock Edge, and the rock here is dark grey as opposed to yellowish or whitish as it appears on other parts of the Edge, just a few miles away, in Church Stretton and elsewhere suggesting local changes in the environment in which the rock was deposited. 

The Wenlock Edge quarry is closed now to further collecting but may be open to future research projects. We shall have to wait and see.

CRAB: HEART OF A WARRIOR

Look how epic this little guy is! 

He is a crab — and if you asked him, the fiercest warrior that ever lived. While that may not be strictly true, crabs do have the heart of a warrior and will raise their claws, sometimes only millimetres into the air, to assert dominance over their world. 

Crabs are decapod crustaceans of the Phylum Arthropoda. 

In the Kwak'wala language of the Kwakwaka'wakw of the Pacific Northwest, this brave fellow is ḵ̓u'mis — both a tasty snack and familiar to the supernatural deity Tuxw'id, a female warrior spirit. Given their natural armour and clear bravery, it is a fitting role.

They inhabit all the world's oceans, sandy beaches, many of our freshwater lakes and streams. Some few prefer to live in forests.

Crabs build their shells from highly mineralized chitin — and chitin gets around. It is the main structural component of the exoskeletons of many of our crustacean and insect friends. Shrimp, crab, and lobster all use it to build their exoskeletons.

Chitin is a polysaccharide — a large molecule made of many smaller monosaccharides or simple sugars, like glucose. 

It is handy stuff, forming crystalline nanofibrils or whiskers. Chitin is actually the second most abundant polysaccharide after cellulose. It is interesting as we usually think of these molecules in the context of their sugary context but they build many other very useful things in nature — not the least of these are the hard shells or exoskeletons of our crustacean friends.

Crabs in the Fossil Record

The earliest unambiguous crab fossils date from the Early Jurassic, with the oldest being Eocarcinus from the early Pliensbachian of Britain, which likely represents a stem-group lineage, as it lacks several key morphological features that define modern crabs. 

Most Jurassic crabs are only known from dorsal — or top half of the body — carapaces, making it difficult to determine their relationships. Crabs radiated in the Late Jurassic, corresponding with an increase in reef habitats, though they would decline at the end of the Jurassic as the result of the decline of reef ecosystems. Crabs increased in diversity through the Cretaceous and represented the dominant group of decapods by the end.

We find wonderful fossil crab specimens on Vancouver Island. The first I ever collected was at Shelter Point, then again on Hornby Island, down on the Olympic Peninsula and along Vancouver Island's west coast near Nootka Sound. They are, of course, found globally and are one of the most pleasing fossils to find and aggravating to prep of all the specimens you will ever have in your collection. Bless them.

JURASSIC SEA URCHIN: AM'DA'MA

This lovely little biscuit is a Holectypus sea urchin from 120 million-year-old deposits from the Lagniro Formation of Madagascar.

The specimen you see here is in the collections of my beautiful friend Ileana. She and I were blessed to meet in China many years ago and formed an unbreakable bond that happens so few times in one's life. 

Holectypus are a genus of extinct echinoids related to modern sea urchins and sand dollars. They were abundant from the Jurassic to the Cretaceous (between 200 million and 65.5 million years ago).

This specimen is typical of Holectypus with his delicate five-star pattern adorning a slightly rounded test and flattened bottom. The specimen has been polished and was harvested both for its scientific and aesthetic value. 

I have many wonderful memories of collecting their modern cousins that live on the north end of Vancouver Island and along the beaches of Balaklava Island. In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, sea urchins are known as a̱m'da̱'ma and it is this name that I hear in my head when I think of them.

In echinoids, the skeleton is almost always made up of tightly interlocking plates that form a rigid structure or test — in contrast with the more flexible skeletal arrangements of starfish, brittle stars, and sea cucumbers. Test shapes range from nearly globular, as in some sea urchins, to highly flattened, as in sand dollars. 

Sea Urchin Detail

Living echinoids are covered with spines, which are movable and anchored in sockets in the test. These spines may be long and prominent, as in typical sea urchins and most have lovely raised patterns on their surface. 

In sand dollars and heart urchins, however, the spines are very short and form an almost felt-like covering. The mouth of most echinoids is provided with five hard teeth arranged in a circle, forming an apparatus known as Aristotle’s lantern.

Echinoids are classified by the symmetry of the test, the number and arrangement of plate rows making up the test, and the number and arrangement of respiratory pore rows called petals. Echinoids are divided into two subgroups: regular echinoids, with nearly perfect pentameral (five-part) symmetry; and irregular echinoids with altered symmetry.

Because most echinoids have rigid tests, their ability to fossilize is greater than that of more delicate echinoderms such as starfish, and they are common fossils in many deposits. The oldest echinoids belong to an extinct regular taxon called the Echinocystitoidea. 

They first appeared in the fossil record in the Late Ordovician. Cidaroids or pencil urchins appear in the Mississippian (Early Carboniferous) and were the only echinoids to survive the mass extinction at the Permo-Triassic boundary. Echinoids did not become particularly diverse until well after the Permo-Triassic mass extinction event, evolving the diverse forms we find them in today. 

True sea urchins first appear in the Late Triassic, cassiduloids in the Jurassic, and spatangoids or heart urchins in the Cretaceous. Sand dollars, a common and diverse group today, do not make an appearance in the fossil record until the Paleocene. They remain one of my favourite echinoderms and stand tall amongst the most pleasing of the invertebrates.

CHUCKANUT DRIVE: EOCENE TROPICAL PARADISE

A trip along Chuckanut Drive, in northwestern Washington is a chance to view incredible diversity from sea to sky.

An amazing array of plants and animals call this coastline home. 

For the fossil enthusiast, it is a chance to slip back in time and have a bird’s eye view of a tropical paradise preserved in the Eocene strata of various fossil sites. 

Snug up against the Pacific Ocean, this 6000m thick exposure yields a vast number of tropical and flowering plants that you might see in Mexico today. Easily accessible by car, this rich natural playground makes for an enjoyable daytrip just one hour south of the US Border.

Over vast expanses of time, powerful tectonic forces have massaged the western edge of the continent, smashing together a seemingly endless number of islands to produce what we now know as North America and the Pacific Northwest. Intuition tells us that the earth’s crust is a permanent, fixed outer shell – terra firma.

Aside from the rare event of an earthquake or the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s, our world seems unchanging, the landscape constant. In fact, it has been on the move for billions of years and continues to shift each day. As the earth’s core began cooling, some 4.5 billion years ago, plates, small bits of continental crust, have become larger and smaller as they are swept up in or swept under their neighboring plates. 

Large chunks of the ocean floor have been uplifted, shifted and now find themselves thousands of miles in the air, part of mountain chains far from the ocean today or carved by glacial ice into valleys and basins.

Two hundred million years ago, Washington was two large islands, bits of continent on the move westward, eventually bumping up against the North American continent and calling it home. Even with their new fixed address, the shifting continues; the more extreme movement has subsided laterally and continues vertically. 

The upthrusting of plates continues to move our mountain ranges skyward – the path of least resistance. This dynamic movement has created the landscape we see today and helped form the fossil record that tells much of Washington’s relatively recent history – the past 50 million years.

Chuckanut Drive is much younger than other parts of Washington. The fossils found there lived and died some 40-55 million years ago, very close to where they are now, but in a much warmer, swampy setting. The exposures of the Chuckanut Formation were once part of a vast river delta; imagine, if you will, the bayou country of the Lower Mississippi. The siltstones, sandstones, mudstones and conglomerates of the Chuckanut Formation were laid down about 40-54 million years ago during the Eocene epoch, a time of luxuriant plant growth in the subtropical flood plain that covered much of the Pacific Northwest.

This ancient wetland provided ideal conditions to preserve the many trees, shrubs & plants that thrived here. Plants are important in the fossil record because they are more abundant and can give us a lot of information about climate, temperature, the water cycle and humidity of the region. 

The Chuckanut flora is made up predominantly of plants whose modern relatives live in tropical areas such as Mexico and Central America. If you are interesting in viewing a tropical paradise in your own backyard, look no further than the Chuckanut. 

Images and tag lines: Glyptostrobus, the Chinese swamp cypress, is perhaps the most common plant found here. Also abundant are fossilized remains of the North American bald cypress, Taxodium; Metasequoia (dawn redwood), Lygodium (climbing fern), large Sabal (palm) and leaves from a variety of broad leaf angiosperm plants such as (witch hazel), Laurus (laurel), Ficus (fig) and Platanus (sycamore), and several other forms.

While less abundant, evidence of the animals that called this ancient swamp home are also found here. Rare bird, reptile, and mammal tracks have been immortalized in the outcrops of the Chuckanut Formation. Tracks of a type of archaic mammal of the Orders Pantodonta or Dinocerata (blunt foot herbivores), footprints from a small shorebird, and tracks from an early equid or webbed bird track give evidence to the vertebrates that inhabited the swamps, lakes and river ways of the Pacific Northwest 50 million years ago.

The movement of these celebrity vertebrates was captured in the soft mud on the banks of a river, one of the only depositional environments favorable for track preservation.

MAMMOTHS LAST MEAL

One of the first scientific accounts of a well-preserved woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, frozen in Siberia described the meat as enticingly red and marbled but smelling so putrid that researchers could only tolerate a minute in its proximity.

Despite this initial review, numerous apocryphal tales exist of dinners made from centuries-old mammoths found frozen whole in clear blocks of ice. 

These accounts have not only enchanted the public but also heavily influenced early scientific thought on Quaternary extinctions and climate; many researchers resorting to catastrophism to explain the instantaneous freezing necessary to preserve palatable meat.

The possibility of cloning is now the major draw of frozen mammoths but the public remains curious about eating prehistoric meat, especially because some modern paleontologists have credibly described tasting mammoth and extinct bison found preserved in permafrost.

Although less publicized today, eating study specimens was once common practice for researchers. Charles Darwin belonged to a club dedicated to tasting exotic meats, and in his first book wrote almost three times as much about dishes like armadillo and tortoise urine than he did on the biogeography of his Galapagos finches.

One of the most famously strange scientific meals occurred on January 13, 1951, at the 47th Explorers Club Annual Dinner (ECAD) when members purportedly dined on frozen woolly mammoth. The prehistoric meat was supposedly found on Akutan Island in Alaska, USA, by the eminent polar explorers Father Bernard Rosecrans Hubbard, “the Glacier Priest,” and Captain George Francis Kosco of the US Navy.

This much-publicized meal captured the public’s imagination and became an enduring legend and source of pride for the Club, popularizing an annual menu of “exotics” that continues today, making the Club as well-known for its notorious hors d’oeuvres like fried tarantulas and goat eyeballs as it is for its notable members such as Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.

The Yale Peabody Museum holds a sample of meat preserved from the 1951 meal, interestingly labelled as a South American Giant Ground Sloth, Megatherium, not Mammoth.

Green Sea Turtle, Chelonia mydas

The specimen of meat from that famous meal was originally designated BRCM 16925 before a transfer in 2001 from the Bruce Museum to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History (New Haven, CT, USA) where it gained the number YPM MAM 14399.

The specimen is now permanently deposited in the Yale Peabody Museum with the designation YPM HERR 19475 and is accessible to outside researchers. 

The meat was never fixed in formalin and was initially stored in isopropyl alcohol before being transferred to ethanol when it arrived at the Peabody Museum. DNA extraction occurred at Yale University in a clean room with equipment reserved exclusively for DNA analyses.

In 2016, Jessica Glass and her colleagues sequenced a fragment of the mitochondrial cytochrome-b gene and studied archival material to verify its identity, which if genuine, would extend the range of Megatherium over 600% and alter views on ground sloth evolution. Their results showed that the meat was not Mammoth or Megatherium, but a bit of Green Sea Turtle, Chelonia mydas. So much for elaborate legends. 

The prehistoric dinner was likely meant as a publicity stunt. Glass's study emphasizes the value of museums collecting and curating voucher specimens, particularly those used for evidence of extraordinary claims. Not so long before Glass et al. did their experiment, a friend's mother (and my kayaking partners) served up a steak from her freezer to dinner guests in Castlegar that hailed from 1978. Tough? Inedible? I have it on good report that the meat was surprisingly divine.

Reference: Glass, J. R., Davis, M., Walsh, T. J., Sargis, E. J., & Caccone, A. (2016). Was Frozen Mammoth or Giant Ground Sloth Served for Dinner at The Explorers Club?. PloS one, 11(2), e0146825. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146825

The image of the mammoth you see here is by the very talented Daniel Eskridge. To see more of his work, and indeed purchase it, head over to: https://daniel-eskridge.pixels.com/

FOSSIL FAUNA OF HAIDA GWAII

This lovely slate grey and beige ammonite with the fine ribbing is Brewericeras hulenense (Anderson 1938) — a fast-moving, nektonic (no idle floating here!) carnivorous ammonite from the Lower Cretaceous (Albian) of Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada.

This specimen is just over 12cm in length, a little under the average of 13.4cm. There are several localities in the islands of Haida Gwaii where Brewericeras can be found — six that I know of and likely plenty more.

The islands of Haida Gwaii lay at the western edge of the continental shelf due west of the central coast of British Columbia. 

They form Wrangellia, an exotic tectonostratigraphic terrane that includes Vancouver Island, parts of western British Columbia and Alaska.

It is always interesting to see who was making a living and co-existing in our ancient oceans at the time these fossils were laid down. 

We find multiple beautifully preserved specimens of the spiny ammonite, Douvelleiceras spiniferum along with Brewericeras hulenense (shown here), Cleoniceras perezianum and many cycads in concretion.

The Lower Jurassic ammonite faunas found at Haida Gwaii are very similar to those found in the Eastern Pacific around South America and in the Mediterranean. 

The strata exposed at Maple Island, Haida Gwaii are stratigraphically higher than the majority of Albian localities in Skidegate Inlet. The macrofossil fauna belonged to the Upper part of the Sandstone Member of the Haida formation.

The western end of the island contains numerous well-preserved inoceramids such as Birostrina concentrica and a few rare ammonites of Desmoceras bearskinese. 

The eastern shores are home to unusual ammonite fauna in the finer-grained sandstones. Here we find the fossils as extremely hard concretions while others were loose in the shale. Species include Anagaudryceras sacya and Tetragonites subtimotheanus. A large whorl section of the rare Ammonoceratites crenucostatus has also been found here. 

LIVING FOSSILS: PERFECTION CAUGHT IN TIME

Horseshoe crabs are marine and brackish water arthropods of the order Xiphosura — a slowly evolving, conservative taxa.

Much like (slow) Water Striders (Aquarius remigis), (relatively sluggish) Coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) and (the current winner on really slow evolution) Elephant Sharks (Callorhinchus milii), these fellows have a long history in the fossil record with very few anatomical changes. 

But slow change provides loads of great information. It makes our new friend, Yunnanolimulus luoingensis, an especially interesting and excellent reference point for how this group evolved. 

We can examine their genome today and make comparisons all the way back to the Middle Triassic (with this new find) and other specimens from further back in the Ordovician — 445 million years ago. 

These living fossils have survived all five mass extinction events. They are generalists who can live in shallow or deep water and will eat pretty much anything they can find on the seafloor.

The oldest horseshoe crab fossil, Lunataspis aurora, is found in outcrops in Manitoba, Canada. Charmingly, the name means crescent moon shield of the dawn. It was palaeontologist Dave Rudkin and team who chose that romantic name. Finding them as fossils is quite remarkable as their shells are made of protein which does not mineralized like typical fossils.

Even so, the evolution of their exoskeleton is well-documented by fossils, but appendage and soft-tissue preservation are extremely rare. 

A new study analyzes details of the appendage and soft-tissue preservation in Yunnanolimulus luoingensis, a Middle Triassic (ca. 244 million years old) horseshoe crab from Yunnan Province, SW China. The remarkable anatomical preservation includes the chelicerae, five pairs of walking appendages, opisthosomal appendages with book gills, muscles, and fine setae permits comparison with extant horseshoe crabs.

The close anatomical similarity between the Middle Triassic horseshoe crabs and their recent analogues documents anatomical conservatism for over 240 million years, suggesting persistence of lifestyle.

The occurrence of Carcinoscorpius-type claspers on the first and second walking legs in male individuals of Y. luoingensis tells us that simple chelate claspers in males are plesiomorphic for horseshoe crabs, and the bulbous claspers in Tachypleus and Limulus are derived.

As an aside, if you hadn't seen an elephant shark before and were shown a photo, you would likely say, "that's no freaking shark." You would be wrong, of course, but it would be a very clever observation.

Callorhinchus milii look nothing like our Great White friends and they are not true sharks at all. Rather, they are ghost sharks that belong to the subclass Holocephali (chimaera), a group lovingly known as ratfish. They diverged from the shark lineage about 400 million years ago.

If you have a moment, do a search for Callorhinchus milii. The odd-looking fellow with the ironic name, kallos, which means beautiful in Greek, sports black blotches on a pale silver elongate body. And their special feature? It is the fishy equivalent of business in the front, party in the back, with a dangling trunk-like projection at the tip of their snout and well-developed rectal glands near the tail.

As another small point of interest with regards to horseshoe crabs, John McAllister collected several of these while working on his MSc to see if they had microstructures similar to trilobites (they do) and whether their cuticles were likewise calcified. He found no real calcification in their cuticles, in fact, he had a rather frustrating time getting anything measurable to dissolve in acid in his hunt for trace elements. 

Likewise, when looking at oxygen isotopes (16/18) to get a handle on water salinity and temperature, his contacts at the University of Waterloo had tons of fun getting anything at all to analyze. It made for some interesting findings. Sadly, for a number of reasons, he abandoned the work, but you can read his very interesting thesis here: https://dr.library.brocku.ca/handle/10464/1959

Ref: Hu, Shixue & Zhang, Qiyue & Feldmann, Rodney & Benton, Michael & Schweitzer, Carrie & Huang, Jinyuan & Wen, Wen & Zhou, Changyong & Xie, Tao & Lü, Tao & Hong, Shuigen. (2017). Exceptional appendage and soft-tissue preservation in a Middle Triassic horseshoe crab from SW China. Scientific Reports. 7. 10.1038/s41598-017-13319-x.

INKY BEAUTY: AMMONITE OF PONGO DE MANSERICHE

This inky beauty is Prolyelliceras ulrichi (Knechtel, 1947) a fast-moving nektonic carnivorous ammonite from Cretaceous lithified, black, carbonaceous limestone outcrops in the Pongo de Manseriche gorge in northwest Peru. 

If you look closely, you can see that this specimen shows a pathology, a slight deviation to the side of the siphonal of the ammonite. We see Prolyelliceras from the Albian to Middle Albian from five localities in Peru.

The canyons of the Amazon River system in the eastern ranges of the Andes of Peru are known by the Indian name pongo. 

The most famous of these is the Pongo de Manseriche, cut by the Marañon River through the eastern range of the Andes, where it emerges from the cordillera into the flat terrane of the Amazon Basin. The fossil exposures here are best explored by boat. The reality of the collecting is similar to the imagined. I was chatting with Betty Franklin, VIPS, about this. They float along and pick up amazing specimen after amazing specimen. When the water rises, the ammonites are aided in their erosion out of the cliffs.  

The Pongo de Manseriche lies nearly 500 miles upstream from Iquitos, and consequently nearly 3,000 miles above the mouth of the Amazon River. It is situated in the heart of the montaña, in a vast region the ownership of which has long been in dispute between Peru and Ecuador, but over which neither country exercises any police or other governmental control. There is an ancient tradition of the indigenous people of the vicinity that one of their gods descended the Marañón and another ascended the Amazon to communicate with him. Together they opened the pass called the Pongo de Manseriche.

Reference: M. M. Knechtel. 1947. Cephalopoda. In: Mesozoic fossils of the Peruvian Andes, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Geology 15:81-139

W. J. Kennedy and H. C. Klinger. 2008. Cretaceous faunas from Zululand and Natal, South Africa. The ammonite subfamily Lyelliceratinae Spath, 1921. African Natural History 4:57-111. The beauty you see here is in the collection of the deeply awesome José Juárez Ruiz.

EXPLORING WRANGELLIA: HAIDA GWAII

Misty shores, moss covered forests, a rich cultural history, dappled light, fossils and the smell of salt air—these are my memories of Haida Gwaii.

The archipelago of Haida Gwaii lays at the western edge of the continental shelf due west of the central coast of British Columbia.

They form part of Wrangellia, an exotic tectonostratigraphic terrane that includes Vancouver Island, parts western British Columbia and Alaska.

The Geological Survey of Canada sponsored many expeditions to these remote islands and has produced numerous reference papers on this magnificent terrain, exploring both the geology and palaeontology of the area.

Joseph Whiteaves, the GSC's chief palaeontologist in Ottawa, published a paper in 1876 describing the Jurassic and Cretaceous faunas of Skidegate Inlet, furthering his reputation globally as both a geologist, palaeontologist as well as a critical thinker in the area of science.

The praise was well-earned and foreshadowed his significant contributions to come. Sixteen years later, he wrote up and published his observations on a strange Mount Stephen fossil that resembled a kind of headless shrimp with poorly preserved appendages. 

Because of the unusual pointed shape of the supposed ventral appendages and the position of the spines near the posterior of the animal, Whiteaves named it Anomalocaris canadensis. The genus name "Anomalocaris" means "unlike other shrimp" and the species name "canadensis" refers to the country of origin.

Whiteaves work on the palaeontology of Haida Gwaii provided excellent reference tools, particularly his work on the Cretaceous exposures and fauna that can be found there.

One of our fossil field trips was to the ruggedly beautiful Cretaceous exposures of Lina Island. We had planned this expedition as part of our “trips of a lifetime.” 

Both John Fam, the Vice Chair of the Vancouver Paleontological Society and Dan Bowen, the Chair of both the British Columbia Paleontological Alliance and Vancouver Island Palaeontological Society, can be congratulated for their efforts in researching the area and ably coordinating a warm welcome by the First Nations community and organizing fossil field trips to some of the most amazing fossil localities in the Pacific Northwest.

With great sandstone beach exposures, the fossil-rich (Albian to Cenomanian) Haida formation provided ample specimens, some directly in the bedding planes and many in concretion. Many of the concretions contained multiple specimens of typical Haida Formation fauna, providing a window into this Cretaceous landscape.

It is always interesting to see who was making a living and co-existing in our ancient oceans at the time these fossils were laid down. We found multiple beautifully preserved specimens of the spiny ammonite, Douvelleiceras spiniferum along with Brewericeras hulenense, Cleoniceras perezianum and many cycads in concretion.

Douvelliceras spiniferum, Cretaceous Haida Formation

Missing from this trip log are tales of Rene Savenye, who passed away in the weeks just prior. While he wasn't there in body, he was with us in spirit. I thought of him often on the mist-shrouded days of collecting. 

Many of the folk on who joined me on those outcrops were friends of Rene's and would go on to receive the Rene Savenye Award for their contributions to palaeontology. There is a certain poetry in that. 

The genus Douvilleiceras range from Middle to Late Cretaceous and can be found in Asia, Africa, Europe and North and South America. 

We have beautiful examples in the early to mid-Albian from the archipelago of Haida Gwaii in British Columbia. Joseph F. Whiteaves was the first to recognize the genus from Haida Gwaii when he was looking over the early collections of James Richardson and George Dawson.

My collections from Haida Gwaii will all be lovingly prepped and donated to the Haida Gwaii Museum in Skidegate, British Columbia.

HUNTING NEUTRINOS AND DARK MATTER

Deep inside the largest and deepest gold mine in North America scientists are looking for dark matter particles and neutrinos instead of precious metals. It may not seem exciting on the surface — but it was far below!

The Homestake Gold Mine in Lawrence County, South Dakota was a going concern from about 1876 to 2001.

The mine produced more than forty million troy ounces of gold in its one hundred and twenty-five-year history, dating back to the beginnings of the Black Hills Gold Rush.

To give its humble beginnings a bit of context, Homestake was started in the days of miners hauling loads of ore via horse and mule and the battles of the Great Sioux War. Folk moved about via horse-drawn buggies and Alexander Graham Bell had just made his first successful telephone call.

Wyatt Earp was working in Dodge City, Kansas — he had yet to get the heck outta Dodge — and Mark Twain was in the throes of publishing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  — And our dear Thomas Edison had just opened his first industrial research lab in Menlo Park. The mine is part of the Homestake Formation, an Early Proterozoic layer of iron carbonate and iron silicate that produces auriferous greenschist gold. What does all that geeky goodness mean? If you were a gold miner it would be music to your ears. They ground down that schist to get the glorious good stuff and made a tiny wee sum doing so. But then gold prices levelled off — from 1997 ($287.05) to 2001 ($276.50) — and rumblings from the owners started to grow. They bailed in 2001, ironically just before gold prices started up again.

But back to 2001, that levelling saw the owners look to a new source of revenue in an unusual place. One they had explored way back in the 1960s in a purpose-built underground laboratory that sounds more like something out of a science fiction book. The brainchild of chemist and astrophysicists, John Bahcall and Raymond Davis Jr. from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the laboratory was used to observe solar neutrinos, electron neutrinos produced by the Sun as a product of nuclear fusion

AMMONITES FROM THE GAULT

The chunky ammonite Proeuhoplites subtuberculatus, bed II (iv), Folkstone Gault Clay, county of Kent, southeast England.

This matrix you see here is the Gault Clay, known locally as the Blue Slipper. This fine muddy clay was deposited 105-110 million years ago during the Lower Cretaceous (Upper and Middle Albian) in a calm, fairly deep-water continental shelf that covered what is now southern England and northern France.

Lack of brackish or freshwater fossils indicates that the gault was laid down in open marine environments away from estuaries. The maximum depth of the Gault is estimated 40-60m a figure which has been reached by the presence of Borings made by specialist Algal-grazing gastropods and supported by a study made by Khan in 1950 using Foraminifera. Estimates of the surface water temperatures in the Gault are between 20-22°c and 17-19°c on the seafloor. These estimates have been reached by bulk analysis of sediments which probably register the sea surface temperature for calcareous nanofossils.

It is responsible for many of the major landslides around Ventnor and Blackgang the Gault is famous for its diverse fossils, mainly from mainland sites such as Folkestone in Kent.

Folkestone, Kent is the type locality for the Gault clay yielding an abundance of ammonites, the same cannot be said for the Isle of Wight Gault, however, the south-east coast of the island has proved to be fossiliferous in a variety of ammonites, in particular, the Genus Hoplites, Paranahoplites and Beudanticeras.

While the Gault is less fossiliferous here on the island it can still produce lovely marine fossils, mainly ammonites and fish remains from these muddy mid-Cretaceous seas. The Gault clay marine fossils include the ammonites (such as Hoplites, Hamites, Euhoplites, Anahoplites, and Dimorphoplites), belemnites (such as Neohibolites), bivalves (notably Birostrina and Pectinucula), gastropods (including the lovely Anchura), solitary corals, fish remains (including shark teeth), scattered crinoid remains, and crustaceans (look for the crab Notopocorystes).

Occasional fragments of fossil wood may also be found. The lovely ammonite you see here is from the Gault Clays of Folkstone. Not all who name her would split the genus Euhoplites. There’s a reasonable argument for viewing this beauty as a very thick form of E. loricatus with Proeuhoplites being a synonym of Euhoplites. Collected, photographed and prepped by Thomas Miller. Approx 35mm across.

Jack Wonfor shared a wealth of information on the Gault and has many lovely examples of the ammonites found here in his collections. If you wish to know more about the Gault clay a publication by the Palaeontological Association called 'Fossils of the Gault clay' by Andrew S. Gale is available in Dinosaur Isle's gift shop.

There is a very good website maintained by Fred Clouter you can look at for reference. It also contains many handy links to some of the best fossil books on the Gault Clay and Folkstone Fossil Beds. Check it out here: http://www.gaultammonite.co.uk/

BACK IN THE USSR: BEADANTICERAS OF THE NORTHERN CAUCASUS

This lovely oil in water coloured ammonite is the beauty Beudanticeras sp. from the Lower Cretaceous (Upper Aptian), Krasnodar region, Northern Caucasus, southern Russia. 

This area of the world has beautiful fossil specimens with their distinct colouring. The geology and paleontological history of the region are fascinating as is its more recent history. 

The territory of present Krasnodar Krai was inhabited as early as the Paleolithic, about 2 million years ago. It was inhabited by various tribes and peoples since ancient times. There were several Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast, which later became part of the Kingdom of the Bosporus. In 631, the Great Bulgaria state was founded in the Kuban. In the 8th-10th centuries, the territory was part of Khazaria.

In 965, the Kievan Prince Svyatoslav defeated the Khazar Khanate and this region came under the power of Kievan Rus, Tmutarakan principality was formed. At the end of the 11th century, in connection with the strengthening of the Polovtsy and claims of Byzantium, Tmutarakan principality came under the authority of the Byzantine emperors (until 1204).

In 1243-1438, this land was part of the Golden Horde. After its collapse, Kuban was divided between the Crimean Khanate, Circassia, and the Ottoman Empire, which dominated in the region. Russia began to challenge the protectorate over the territory during the Russian-Turkish wars.

In 1783, by decree of Catherine II, the right-bank Kuban and Taman Peninsula became part of the Russian Empire after the liquidation of the Crimean Khanate. In 1792-1793, Zaporozhye (Black Sea) Cossacks resettled here to protect new borders of the country along the Kuban River. 

During the military campaign to establish control over the North Caucasus (Caucasian War of 1763-1864), in the 1830s, the Ottoman Empire for forced out of the region and Russia gained access to the Black Sea coast.

Prior to the revolutionary events of 1917, most of the territory of present Krasnodar Krai was occupied by the Kuban region, founded in 1860. In 1900, the population of the region was about 2 million people. In 1913, it ranked 2nd by the gross harvest of grain, 1st place for the production of bread in the Russian Empire.

The Kuban was one of the centres of resistance after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In 1918-1920, there was a non-Bolshevik Kuban People’s Republic. In 1924, North-Caucasian krai was founded with the centre in Rostov-on-Don. In 1934, it was divided into Azov-Black Sea krai (Rostov-on-Don) and North Caucasus krai (Stavropol).

September 13, 1937, the Azov-Black Sea region was divided into the Rostov region and Krasnodar Krai that included Adygei autonomous oblast. During the Second World War, the region was captured by the Germans. After the battle for the Caucasus, it was liberated. There are about 1,500 monuments and memorials commemorating heroes of the war on the territory of Krasnodar Krai.

The lovely block you see here is in the collections of the awesome John Fam, Vice-Chair of the Vancouver Paleontological Society in British Columbia, Canada.

TURTLE SHELLS: HOME SWEET ARMOUR

Turtle shells are different from the body armour or armoured shells we see adorning dinosaurs like the ankylosaurs. 

Ankylosaurs were blessed with huge plates of bone embedded into their skin that acted as a natural shield against predators. Crocodilians have these same bony plates, or osteoderms, embedded in their skin to give them extra protection. 

We find similar body armour on armadillos. Yet, armadillos, crocodiles and ankylosaurs each evolved body armour that differs significantly from that found in turtles. 

Remarkably, the carapace we see in fully grown turtles is formed from different parts of their skeletons. And, once fully formed, turtle shell fully integrates with the backbone and ribs, growing over the animal in a domed carapace — both protection and home sweet home. 

When we look to the oldest known members of the turtle lineage, Proterochersis and Proganochelys, found as fossils in 210 million-year-old outcrops in present-day Germany and Poland. Like the turtles we find today, these stem-turtles already had fully formed shells — special bony or cartilaginous shell that originates in their ribs. It is a useful adaptation to help deter predators as their soft interior makes for a tasty snack. 

Though I have never eaten turtle (and never will), it was a common and sought after meat for turtle soup. Years ago, I read of Charles Darwin craving it after trying it for the first time on his trip in 1831 aboard the HMS Beagle. It seems Charlie like to taste every exotic new species he had the opportunity to try.

Turtle armour is made of dermal bone and endochondral bones from their vertebrae and rib cage. It is fundamentally different from the armour seen on our other vertebrate friends and the design creates some unique features in turtles. 

Because turtle ribs fuse together with some of their vertebrae, they have to pump air in and out of the lungs with their leg muscles. 

Another unusual feature in turtles is their limb girdles, pectoral and pelvic, which have come to lie within their rib cage, a feature that allows some turtles to pull their limbs inside the shell for protection. 

Sea turtles didn't develop this behaviour or ability and do not retract into their shells like other turtles.

Armadillos have armour formed by plates of dermal bone covered in relatively small, overlapping epidermal scales called scutes, composed of bone with a covering of horn. In crocodiles, their exoskeletons form their armour, similar to ankylosaurs. A bit of genius design, really. It is made of protective dermal and epidermal components that begin as rete Malpighii: a single layer of short, cylindrical cells that lose their nuclei over time as they transform into a horny layer.

Depending on the species and age of the turtle, turtles eat all kinds of food including seagrass, seaweed, crabs, jellyfish, and shrimp,. That tasty diet shows up in the composition of their armour as they have oodles of great nutrients to work with. The lovely example you see here is from the Oxford Museum collections.

FOSSIL BIRDS OF SOOKE'S FORESHORE

Stemec suntokum, Sooke Formation

The diving bird you see here is Stemec suntokum, a Fossil Plopterid from Sooke, British Columbia, Canada.

We all dream of finding new species, and new fossil species in particular. This happens more than you think. As impossible as it sounds, it has happened numerous times at many fossils sites in British Columbia including Sooke on Vancouver Island.

The upper Oligocene Sooke Formation outcrops at Muir Beach on southwestern Vancouver Island, British Columbia where it is flanked by the cool, clear waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

While the site has been known since the 1890s, my first trip here was in the early 1990s as part of a Vancouver Paleontological Society (VanPS) fossil field trip. This easy, beach walk locality is a wonderful place to collect fossils and is especially good for families. If you are solar-powered, you will enjoy the sun playing off the surf from May through September. If you are built of hardier stuff, then the drizzle of Spring or Autumn is a lovely, un-people-y time to walk the beachfront.

As well as amazing west coast scenery, the beach site outcrop has a lovely soft matrix with well-preserved fossil molluscs, often with the shell material preserved (Clark and Arnold, 1923).

By the Oligocene ocean temperatures had cooled to near modern levels and the taxa preserved here as fossils bear a strong resemblance to those found living beneath the Strait of Juan de Fuca today. Gastropods, bivalves, echinoids, coral, chitin and limpets are common-ish — and on rare occasions, fossil marine mammals, cetacean and bird bones are discovered.

Fossil Bird Bones 

Back in 2013, Steve Suntok and his family found fossilized bones from a 25-million-year-old wing-propelled flightless diving bird while out strolling the shoreline near Sooke. Not knowing what they had found but recognizing it as significant, the bones were brought to the Royal British Columbia Museum to identify.

The bones found their way into the hands of Gary Kaiser. Kaiser worked as a biologist for Environment Canada and the Nature Conservatory of Canada. After retirement, he turned his eye from our extant avian friends to their fossil lineage. The thing about passion is it never retires. Gary is now a research associate with the Royal British Columbia Museum, published author and continues his research on birds and their paleontological past.

Kaiser identified the well-preserved coracoid bones as the first example from Canada of a Plotopteridae, an extinct family that lived in the North Pacific from the late Eocene to the early Miocene. In honour of the First Nations who have lived in the area since time immemorial and Steve Suntok who found the fossil, Kaiser named the new genus and species Stemec suntokum.

Magellanic Penguin Chick, Spheniscus magellanicus

This is a very special find. Avian fossils from the Sooke Formation are rare. We are especially lucky that the bird bone was fossilized at all.  These are delicate bones and tasty. Scavengers often get to them well before they have a chance and the right conditions to fossilize.

Doubly lucky is that the find was of a coracoid, a bone from the shoulder that provides information on how this bird moved and dove through the water similar to a penguin. It's the wee bit that flexes as the bird moves his wing up and down.

Picture a penguin doing a little waddle and flapping their flipper-like wings getting ready to hop near and dive into the water. Now imagine them expertly porpoising —  gracefully jumping out of the sea and zigzagging through the ocean to avoid predators. It is likely that the Sooke find did some if not all of these activities.

When preservation conditions are kind and we are lucky enough to find the forelimbs of our plotopterid friends, their bones tell us that these water birds used wing-propelled propulsion to move through the water similar to penguins (Hasegawa et al., 1979; Olson and Hasegawa, 1979, 1996; Olson, 1980; Kimura et al., 1998; Mayr, 2005; Sakurai et al., 2008; Dyke et al., 2011).

Kaiser published on the find, along with Junya Watanabe, and Marji Johns. Their work: "A new member of the family Plotopteridae (Aves) from the late Oligocene of British Columbia, Canada," can be found in the November 2015 edition of Palaeontologia Electronica. If you fancy a read, I've included the link below.

The paper shares insights into what we have learned from the coracoid bone from the holotype Stemec suntokum specimen. It has an unusually narrow, conical shaft, much more gracile than the broad, flattened coracoids of other avian groups. This observation has led some to question if it is, in fact, a proto-cormorant of some kind. We'll need to find more of their fossilized lineage to make any additional comparisons.

Sooke, British Columbia and Juan de Fuca Strait

Today, fossils from these flightless birds have been found in outcrops in the United States and Japan (Olson and Hasegawa, 1996). They are bigger than the Sooke specimens, often growing up to two metres.

While we'll never know for sure, the wee fellow from the Sooke Formation was likely about 50-65 cm long and weighed in around 1.72-2.2 kg — so roughly the length of a duck and weight of a small Magellanic Penguin, Spheniscus magellanicus, chick. 

To give you a visual, I have included a photo of one of these cuties here showing off his full range of motion and calling common in so many young.

The first fossil described as a Plotopteridae was from a wee piece of the omal end of a coracoid from Oligocene outcrops of the Pyramid Hill Sand Member, Jewett Sand Formation of California (LACM 8927). Hildegarde Howard (1969) an American avian palaeontologist described it as Plotopterum joaquinensis. Hildegarde also did some fine work in the La Brea Tar Pits, particularly her work on the Rancho La Brea eagles.

In 1894, a portion of a pelagornithid tarsometatarsus, a lower leg bone from Cyphornis magnus (Cope, 1894) was found in Carmanah Group on southwestern Vancouver Island (Wetmore, 1928) and is now in the collections of the National Museum of Canada as P-189401/6323. This is the wee bone we find in the lower leg of birds and some dinosaurs. We also see this same bony feature in our Heterodontosauridae, a family of early and adorably tiny ornithischian dinosaurs — a lovely example of parallel evolution.

While rare, more bird bones have been found in the Sooke Formation over the past decade. In 2013, three avian bones were found in a single year. The first two were identified as possibly being from a cormorant and tentatively identified as Phalacrocoracidae tibiotarsi, the large bone between the femur and the tarsometatarsus in the leg of a bird.

They are now in the collections of the Royal BC Museum as (RBCM.EH2013.033.0001.001 and RBCM.EH2013.035.0001.001). These bones do have the look of our extant cormorant friends but the specimens themselves were not very well-preserved so a positive ID is tricky.

The third (and clearly not last) bone, is a well-preserved coracoid bone now in the collection at the RBCM as (RBCM.EH2014.032.0001.001).

The fossil bird find was the first significant find by the Suntok family but not their last. Just last year, they found part of a fish dental plate was studied by Russian researcher Evgeny Popov who named this new genus and species of prehistoric fish Canadodus suntoki, which translates to the "Tooth from Canada." Perhaps not quite as inspired as Kaiser, but a lovely homage to these Citizen Scientists.

Sooke Fossil Fauna

Along with these rare bird bones, the Paleogene sedimentary deposits of the Carmanah Group on southwestern Vancouver Island have a wonderful diversity of delicate fossil molluscs (Clark and Arnold, 1923). Walking along the beach, look for boulders with white shelly material in them. You'll want to collect from the large fossiliferous blocks and avoid the cliffs. The lines of fossils you see in those cliffs tell the story of deposition along a strandline. Collecting from them is both unsafe and poor form as it disturbs nearby neighbours and is discouraged.

Sooke Formation Gastropods, Photo: John Fam

We find nearshore and intertidal genera such as Mytilus (mussels) and barnacles, as well as more typically subtidal predatory globular moon snails (my personal favourite), surf clams (Spisula, Macoma), and thin, flattened Tellin clams.

The preservation here formed masses of shell coquinas that cemented together but are easily worked with a hammer and chisel. Remember your eye protection and I'd choose wellies or rubber boots over runners or hikers.

You may be especially lucky on your day out. Look for the larger fossil bones of marine mammals and whales that lived along the North American Pacific Coast in the Early Oligocene (Chattian).

Concretions and coquinas on the beach have yielded desmostylid, an extinct herbivorous marine mammal, Cornwallius sookensis (Cornwall, 1922) and 40 cm. skull of a cetacean Chonecetus sookensis (Russell, 1968), and a funnel whale, a primitive ancestor of our Baleen whales. 

A partial lower jaw and molar possibly from a large, bear-like beach-dwelling carnivore, Kolponomos, was also found here. A lovely skull from a specimen of Kolponomos clallamensis (Stirton, 1960) was found 60 km southwest across the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the early Miocene Clallam Formation and published by Lawrence Barnes and James Goedert. That specimen now calls the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County home and is in their collections as #131148.

Directions to Muir Creek Fossil Site at Sooke: 

From the town of Sooke west of Victoria, follow Highway 14 for about 14 kilometres. Just past the spot where the highway crosses Muir Creek, you will see a gravel parking area on your left. Pull in and park here. 

From the barrier, walk out to the beach and turn right (west) and walk until you see the low yellow-brown sandstone cliffs about 400 metres ahead. 

Look at the grey sandstone boulders on the beach with bits of white flecks in them. The fossil material here will most often be a whitish cream colour. Check for low tide before heading out and choose rubber boots for this beach adventure.

References: 

L. S. Russell. 1968. A new cetacean from the Oligocene Sooke Formation of Vancouver Island, British Colombia. Canadian Journal of Earth Science 5:929-933
Barnes, Lawrence & Goedert, James. (1996). Marine vertebrate palaeontology on the Olympic Peninsula. Washington Geology, 24(3):17-25.

Fancy a read? Here's the link to Gary Kaiser's paper: https://palaeo-electronica.org/content/2015/1359-plotopterid-in-canada. If you'd like to head to the beach site, head to: 48.4°N 123.9°W, paleo-coordinates 48.0°N 115.0°W.

PHYLLOCERAS VELLEDAE OF MADAGASCAR

This specimen of Phylloceras velledae (Michelin) has a shell with a small umbilicus, arched, acute venter, and at some growth stage, falcoid ribs that spring in pairs from umbilical tubercles, disappearing on the outer whorls.

This specimen has been polished to show the sutures to great effect. These ammonites are common in rock shops and plentiful on the internet.

These ammonites make a lovely addition to any teaching collection as they provide a lot of detail and can be handled quite well by small, less gentle hands. 

Like other cephalopods, ammonites had sharp, beak-like jaws inside a ring of squid-like tentacles that extended from their shells. 

They used these tentacles to snare prey, — plankton, vegetation, fish and crustaceans — similar to the way a squid or octopus hunt today.

Catching a fish with your hands is no easy feat, as I'm sure you know. But the Ammonites were skilled and successful hunters. They caught their prey while swimming and floating in the water column. 

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

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

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

SACRED CEPHALOPODS: OCTOPUS / TAK'WA

This lovely with her colourful body is an octopus. Like ninety-seven percent of the world's animals, she lacks a backbone. 

To support their bodies, these spineless animals — invertebrates — have skeletons made of protein fibres. 

This flexibility can be a real advantage when slipping into nooks and crannies for protection and making a home in seemingly impossible places.

On the east side of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, there is an area called Madrona Point where beneath the surface of the sea many octopus have done just that. This is the home of the Giant Pacific Octopus, Enteroctopus dofleini, the largest known octopus species.

The land above is the home of the Snuneymuxw First Nation of the Coast Salish who live here, on the Gulf Islands, and along the Fraser River. In Hul'q'umin'um' — the lingua franca of the Snuneymuxw First Nation, a living language that expresses their worldview and way of life — the word for octopus is sqi'mukw'. In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, further north on Vancouver Island, octopus or devil fish are known as ta̱k̕wa.

I have gone scuba diving at Madrona Point many times and visited the octopus who squeeze into the eroded sections of a sandstone ledge about 18 metres or 60 feet below the surface. 

On one of those trips, my friend Suzanne Groulx ran into one of the larger males swimming just offshore. I was surfacing as I heard her shriek clear as a bell. Sound moves through water about four times faster than it does through the air — faster than a jet plane. 

On that day, I suspect Suzanne was neck and neck both in sound and motion. Seconds later, she popped up a good three feet above the surf, still screaming. I have never seen anyone surface quite so quickly — dangerous and impressive in equal measure. It was on another of those trips that I met Philip Torrens, with whom I would later co-author, In Search of Ancient BC.     

While the entire coastline is beautiful to explore, it was visiting the octopus that drew me back time and time again. I have seen wee octopus the size of the palm of your hand, large males swimming and feeding and the lovely females tucked into their nursery homes.

After forty days of mating, the female Giant Pacific Octopus attach strings of small fertilized eggs to the rocks within these crevices and call it home for a time — generally five months or 160 days. When I visit, I sometimes bring crab or sea urchin for her to snack on as the mothers guarding these eggs do not leave to hunt, staying ever vigilante protecting their brood from predators. All the while she is here, she gently blows fresh water over the eggs.

And sadly, this will be her only brood. Octopus breed once in their too-short lives. Males die directly after mating and females die once their young have hatched. They live in all the world's oceans and no matter the species, their lifespans are a brief one to five years. I rather hope they evolve to live longer and one day outcompete the humans who like to snack on them.

Octopus are soft-bodied, eight-limbed molluscs of the order Octopoda. They have one hard part, their beaks, which they use to crack open clams, crab and crustaceans. They are ninja-level skilled at squeezing through very tight holes, particularly if it means accessing a tasty snack. The size of their beaks determines exactly how small a hole they can fit through. Looking, you would likely guess it could not be done, but they are amazing — and mesmerizing!

At the Vancouver Aquarium, they have been known to unscrew lids, sneak out of one tank to feed in another then slip back so you do not notice, open simple hooks and latches — burglars of the sea. They can also change the colour and texture of their skin to blend perfectly into their surroundings. You can look for them around reefs and rocky shores. There are 300 species of octopus grouped within the class Cephalopoda, along with squid, cuttlefish, and nautiloids. 

The oldest fossil octopus at 300 million years old is Pohlsepia mazonensis from Carboniferous Mazon Creek fossil beds in Illinois. The only known specimen resembles modern octopuses with the exception of possessing eight arms and two tentacles (Kluessendorf and Doyle 2000).

My favourite fossil octopus is the darling Keuppia levante (Fuchs, Bracchi & Weis, 2009), an extinct genus of octopus that swam our ancient seas back in the Cretaceous.