CERVUS CANADENSIS: MAGNIFICENT ELK

Nature awes me everyday. Quiet moments often shared solo or if lucky, with a good friend or one of the amazing animals that walk this Earth.

I was especially lucky to have many of them while staying in Banff, Alberta. 

A morning stroll became an epic moment shared with a herd of wild but nonplussed elk enjoying their breakfast.

There is something quietly magnificent about an elk moving through fresh snow — head lowered, breath curling into the cold air, long legs parting the white silence of a winter morning in Banff. It feels timeless. And in a way, it is.

The elk you see here, Cervus canadensis, belongs to a lineage that stretches deep into the Pleistocene — a time when ice sheets advanced and retreated across much of North America, reshaping landscapes and the lives within them. 

Elk are members of the family Cervidae, a group that first appears in the fossil record during the Early Miocene, roughly 20 million years ago. These early deer were small, forest-dwelling creatures, lacking the impressive antlers we associate with their modern kin.

By the Late Miocene and into the Pliocene, cervids began to diversify in both form and habitat. Antlers — those seasonal crowns of bone — became more elaborate, evolving as tools of display and combat. 

The genus Cervus, which includes modern elk, appears later, with fossils known from Eurasia before spreading into North America via the Bering Land Bridge during the Pleistocene, likely within the last 2 million years.

Once here, elk flourished.

Pleistocene deposits across North America — from tar seeps like Rancho La Brea in California to river gravels and cave assemblages further north — preserve their bones alongside an Ice Age cast of giants: mammoths, mastodons, dire wolves and short-faced bears. 

Elk held their own in this formidable company, adaptable grazers and browsers able to navigate shifting climates and changing ecosystems.

In Canada, elk fossils are known from a number of Quaternary sites, including Alberta and the Yukon, where their remains speak to a long history on these lands. 

As the glaciers withdrew at the end of the last Ice Age, elk expanded into newly opened habitats, tracking the spread of grasslands and open forests.

What you are seeing in Banff today is the continuation of that story — a survivor of ice and upheaval, still moving with quiet purpose through a landscape shaped by deep time.

I've been lucky enough to get to spend some time in Banff, looking for fossils, as an artist and exploring nature in all its glory.  It was heartwarming to see Elk most every day there and snow multiple times a week—and all this in April and May!

CAMBRIAN CROWN: THE SPINED ELEGANCE OF ORGMASPIS

This calcified beauty is Orygmaspis (Parabolinoides) spinula (Westrop, 1986), an Upper Cambrian trilobite recovered from the McKay Group near Tanglefoot Mountain in the Kootenay Rockies—one of those quietly extraordinary places where deep time peeks through in layered stone.

A member of the Order Asaphida, Orygmaspis carries the elegant geometry so characteristic of its kin: an inverted, egg-shaped outline, a broad and gently arched cephalon, modestly sized eyes, and a thorax adorned with a procession of finely spined segments. 

Twelve thoracic segments form its articulated middle, each bearing spines that lengthen progressively toward the ninth before tapering again—a subtle rhythm of form that feels almost architectural in its precision.

Asaphids themselves tell a longer, more dramatic story. Emerging in the Cambrian and flourishing into the Ordovician, they diversified into six superfamilies—Anomocaroidea, Asaphoidea, Cyclopygoidea, Dikelocephaloidea, Remopleuridoidea and Trinucleioidea—each experimenting with variations on a successful marine design. 

Some evolved remarkable visual adaptations, including the long-stalked eyes of Asaphus kowalewskii, which would have lifted their gaze above the seafloor haze, scanning for both prey and peril in the shifting Ordovician seas.

By the close of the Ordovician, a great extinction event swept away five of these six lineages, claiming roughly 60% of marine life. Only the resilient Trinucleioidea persisted, carrying the torch a little further into the Silurian before another global upheaval drew the final curtain on the Asaphida (Fortey & Chatterton, 1988).

Returning to our Kootenay traveller, the cephalon of Orygmaspis is parabolic, less than twice as wide as long, with a well-defined glabella—the central raised axis—measuring roughly three-quarters as wide as it is long. Its surface is modestly convex, tapering forward with faint lateral furrows and a clearly expressed occipital ring marking the posterior boundary. The preglabellar field is short, about a quarter the length of the glabella, giving the headshield a compact, purposeful look.

The eyes, small but well placed, sit between the anterior and mid-length of the glabella, positioned about one-third of the way out from the axis. Surrounding cheeks—the fixigenae and librigenae—are relatively flat, divided by facial sutures that trace an elegant path: diverging just before the eyes, running parallel near the border, then sweeping inward again in a graceful convergence. 

Behind the eyes, these sutures arc outward and back at roughly 45°, cutting the posterior margin in classic opisthoparian fashion.

At the rear, a diminutive pygidium—just a third the width of the cephalon—completes the form. It is twice as wide as long, with a central axis composed of up to four rings that nearly reach the margin. The pleural fields are gently expressed, their segmentation subdued, while the posterior edge carries three to four pairs of spines, each diminishing toward the rear like the final notes of a fading refrain.

Altogether, Orygmaspis spinula is a study in balance—armoured, yes, but refined. A small, spined voyager from Cambrian seas, preserved in stone and beautifully calcified yet still whispering of movement, adaptation, and survival in a world more than half a billion years removed from our own.

The fingers you see holding this specimen are those of the deeply awesome Chris Jenkins. If you're reading this, Chris, I owe you a visit!