LOVE LANGUAGE OF THE NORTH

Nunatsiarmiut Mother and Child, Baffin Island, Nunavut

Warm light bathes this lovely Nunatsiarmiut mother and child from Baffin Island, Nunavut. 

They speak Inuktitut, the mother tongue of the majority of the Nunatsiarmiut who call Baffin Island home. 

Baffin is the largest island in the Arctic Archipelago in the territory of Nunavut in Canada's far north—the chilliest region of Turtle Island. 

As part of the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, Baffin Island is home to a constellation of remote Inuit communities each with a deep cultural connection to the land—Iqaluit, Pond Inlet, Pangnirtung, Clyde River, Arctic Bay, Kimmirut and Nanisivik. 

The ratio of Inuit to non-Inuit here is roughly three to one and perhaps the reason why the Inuktitut language has remained intact and serves as the mother tongue for more than 36,000 residents. Inuktitut has several subdialects—these, along with a myriad of other languages—are spoken across the north.  

If you look at the helpful visual below you begin to get a feel for the diversity of these many tongues. The languages vary by region. There is the Iñupiaq of the Inupiatun/Inupiat; Inuvialuktun of the Inuinnaqtun, Natsilingmiutut, Kivallirmiutut, Aivilingmiutut, Qikiqtaaluk Uannanganii and Siglitun. Kalaallisut is spoken by many Greenlandic peoples though, in northwest Greenland, Inuktun is the language of the Inughuit.

We use the word Inuktitut when referring to a specific dialect and inuktut when referring to all the dialects of Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun.

Northern Language Map (Click to Enlarge)

Should you travel to the serene glacier-capped wilds and rolling tundra of our far north, you will want to dress for the weather and learn a few of the basics to put your best mukluk shod feet forward. 

The word for hello or welcome in Inuktitut is Atelihai—pronounced ahh-tee-lee-hi. And thank you is nakurmiik, pronounced na-kur-MIIK.  

Perhaps my favourite Inuktitut expression is Naglingniq qaikautigijunnaqtuq maannakautigi, pronounced NAG-ling-niq QAI-kau-ti-gi-jun-naqtuq MAAN-na-KAU-ti-gi. This tongue-twister is well worth the linguistic challenge as it translates to love can travel anywhere in an instant. Indeed it can. 

So much of our Indigenous culture is passed through stories, so language takes on special meaning in that context. It is true for all societies but especially true for the Inuit. Stories help connect the past to the present and future. They teach how to behave in society, engage with the world and how to survive in the environment. They also help to create a sense of belonging. 

You have likely seen or heard the word Eskimo used in older books to refer to the Inuit, Iñupiat, Kalaallit or Yupik. This misnomer is a colonial term derived from the Montagnais or Innu word ayas̆kimew—netter of snowshoes. 

It is a bit like meeting a whole new group of people who happen to wear shoes and referring to them all as cobblers—not as a nickname, but as a legal term to describe populations from diverse communities disregarding the way each self-refer. 

Inukshuk / Inuksuk Marker Cairn

For those who identify as Inupiaq or Yupik, the preferred term is Inuit meaning people—though some lingering use of the term Eskimo lives on. The Inuit as a group are made up of many smaller groups. 

The Inuit of Greenland self-refer as Kalaallit or Greenlanders when speaking Kalaallisut. 

The Tunumiit of Tunu (east Greenland), speak Tunumiit oraasiat ("East Greenlandic"); and the Inughuit of north Greenland, speak Inuktun "Polar Eskimo."

The Inupiat of Alaska, or real people, use Yupik as the singular for real person and yuk to simply mean person.

When taken all together, Inuit is used to mean all the peoples in reference to the Inuit, Iñupiat, Kalaallit and Yupik. Inuit is the plural of inuk or person. 

You likely recognize this word from inuksuk or inukshuk, pronounced ih-nook-suuk — the human-shaped stone cairns built by the Inuit, Iñupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of the Arctic regions of northern Canada, Greenland, and Alaska—as helpful reference markers for hunters and navigation. 

The word inuksuk means that which acts in the capacity of a human, combining inuk or person and suk, as a human substitute. 

A World of Confusion

You may be disappointed to learn that our northern friends do not live in igloos. I remember answering the phone as a child and the fellow calling was hoping to speak to my parents about some wonderful new invention perfect for use in an igloo. 

The call came while I was in the kitchen of our family home in Port Hardy. He was disappointed to hear that I was standing in a wooden house with the standard four walls to a room and a handy roof topping it off. 

I also had my own room with Scooby-Doo wallpaper, but he was having nothing of it.

"Well, what about your neighbours? Surely, a few of them live in igloos..." 

It seems that some atlases in circulation at the time, and certainly the one he was looking at, simply blanketed everything north of the 49th parallel in a snowy white. His clearly showed an igloo sitting proudly in the centre of the province.

Interestingly, I only learned this morning (thank you, Jen) that that type of playful map is called a Counter Map and can be used in delightful ways to draw the reader in to the mapping of a landscape, region, people or culture—often out of scale and with many wonderful images added to give you a beautiful sense of the people, plants, animals and topography of a place.

My cousin Shawn brought one such simplified book back from his elementary school in California. British Columbia had a nice image of a grizzly bear and a wee bit further up, a polar bear grinned smugly. 

British Columbia's beaver population would be sad to know that they did not inhabit the province though there were two chipper beavers with big bright smiles—one in Ontario and another gracing the province of Quebec. Further north, where folk do build igloos, their icy domes were curiously lacking. 

Igloos are used for winter hunting trips much the same way we use tents for camping. The Inuit do not have fifty words for snow—you can thank the ethnographer Franz Boas for that wee fabrication—but within the collective languages of the frozen north there are more than fifty words to describe it. And kisses are not nose-to-nose. To give a tender kiss or kunik to a loved one, you press your nose and upper lip to their forehead or cheek and rub gently. 

Fancy trying a wee bit of Inuktitut yourself? This link will bring you to a great place to start: https://inhabitmedia.com/inuitnipingit/

Inuit Language Map:  By Noahedits - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0. If you want to the image full size, head to this link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85587388

PRETTY IN PINK: FLAMINGOS

At ungodly-o’clock in the morning, while the rest of us are still grumbling into our pillows, European flamingos are out there looking like someone spilled a sunrise into the Mediterranean. 

Pale peach, rose, and full-on “salmon mousse,” these birds glide across mirror-flat lagoons on legs that appear to have been stolen from a straw factory.

Their down-curved bills are evolutionary multi-tools — built not for glamour, but for vacuuming up brine shrimp and algae with the intensity of someone cleaning nacho dust out of a keyboard. It’s not chic, but it works, and in science points, it’s a 10/10.

But here’s the kicker: Phoenicopterus roseus isn’t just a pretty face in a wetland spa. It’s the last surviving branch of a lineage forged way back — we’re talking more than 30 million years, mid-Eocene hangover era, when Europe had giant lakes, strange mammals, and nobody worrying about the price of olive oil.

The flamingo story starts with Palaelodus — the awkward teen phase of flamingo evolution. Imagine a tall bird, very leggy, somewhat unsure of its angles, but tragically lacking the extreme bendy straw beak we now know and love. Fossils in France, Germany, and North America show it poking around ancient alkaline lakes like a bird who had not yet received the memo about being fabulous.

Then came the Miocene (aka the “Let’s Try Flamingos For Real” chapter). Suddenly, ancient Spain, Italy, Hungary, and Greece are full of lakebeds stuffed with flamingo bones and trackways. Flamingo highways! Flamingo stomping grounds! Flamingos everywhere! 

And honestly — they looked more or less like the modern ones, suggesting evolution took one glance and said: “Perfect. Don’t change a thing.”

For years, scientists tried to figure out who flamingos were related to. Were they storks? Herons? Ducks? Feathered mystery cryptids? At one point the evolutionary family tree was basically a messy group chat. 

Then genetics swooped in and declared flamingos and grebes — yes, the chunky diving birds — as siblings in a clade called Mirandornithes. 

One is a pink runway model, the other is a potato with scuba certification, but the ancestry checks out.

Modern flamingos have claimed the best real estate the Mediterranean can offer: the Camargue, Doñana, Sicily, Sardinia, Turkey’s salt pans, and the lagoons of North Africa. Their blushing pink comes from carotenoid pigments in their food, proving once and for all that you literally are what you eat — even if what you eat is tiny shrimp smoothies.

Their mud-tower nests are a direct callback to their Miocene ancestors, preserved not just in rock but in behaviour, which is basically evolution’s way of saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t reinvent the flamingo.”

So the next time you see a flock drifting across a salt lagoon like pastel confetti on stilts, remember you’re looking at one of evolution’s longest-running success stories. Flamingos nailed their niche early, kept the receipts, and have been slaying the alkaline wetlands scene ever since.

Thirty million years. Zero design revisions. Pink forever. Epic and awesome. Bless them!

WEST COAST OYSTERS: T'LOXT'LOX

One of the now rare species of oysters in the Pacific Northwest is the Olympia oyster, Ostrea lurida, (Carpenter, 1864).  

While rare today, these are British Columbia’s only native oyster. 

Had you been dining on their brethren in the 1800s or earlier, it would have been this species you were consuming. Middens from Port Hardy to California are built from Ostrea lurida.

These wonderful invertebrates bare their souls with every bite. Have they lived in cold water, deep beneath the sea, protected from the sun's rays and heat? Are they the rough and tumble beach denizens whose thick shells tell us of a life spent withstanding the relentless pounding of the sea? Is the oyster in your mouth thin and slimy having just done the nasty—spurred by the warming waters of Spring? 

Is this oyster a local or was it shipped to your current local and, if asked, would greet you with "Kon'nichiwa?" Not if the beauty on your plate is indeed Ostrea lurida. 

Oyster in Kwak'wala is t̕łox̱t̕łox̱

We have been cultivating, indeed maximizing the influx of invasive species to the cold waters of the Salish Sea for many years. 

But in the wild waters off the coast of British Columbia is the last natural abundant habitat of the tasty Ostrea lurida in the pristine waters of  Nootka Sound. 

The area is home to the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations who have consumed this species boiled or steamed for thousands of years. 

Here these ancient oysters not only survive but thrive — building reefs and providing habitat for crab, anemones and small marine animals. 

Oysters are in the family Ostreidae — the true oysters. Their lineage evolved in the Early Triassic — 251 - 247 million years ago. 

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, an oyster is known as t̕łox̱t̕łox̱. 

I am curious to learn if any of the Nuu-chah-nulth have a different word for an oyster. If you happen to know, I would be grateful to learn.

STEGOSAURUS: PLATED GIANT OF THE JURASSIC

Few dinosaurs are as instantly recognizable as Stegosaurus, with its double row of towering bony plates and spiked tail. 

This herbivore, whose name means “roofed lizard,” roamed western North America about 155–150 million years ago during the Late Jurassic. 

Fossils of Stegosaurus have been found primarily in the Morrison Formation, a magnificent rock unit famous for preserving one of the most diverse dinosaur ecosystems ever discovered.

Stegosaurus could reach up to 9 meters (30 feet) in length but had a disproportionately small head with a brain roughly the size of a walnut. 

Despite this, it thrived as a low-browser, feeding on ferns, cycads, and other ground-level plants using its beak-like mouth and peg-shaped teeth. Its most iconic features were the dermal plates, some nearly a meter tall, running down its back. 

Their function remains debated—some have proposed they were used for display, species recognition, or thermoregulation.

At the end of its tail, Stegosaurus bore four long spikes, known as the thagomizer. 

Evidence from fossilized injuries on predator bones suggests these were formidable weapons, capable of piercing the flesh of even the largest carnivores.

Stegosaurus did not live in isolation. It shared its world with a cast of iconic dinosaurs and other ancient animals:

• Sauropods such as Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, and Brachiosaurus dominated the floodplains, their long necks sweeping across the tree canopy.
• Predators like Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus stalked the ecosystem, preying on herbivores. The spikes of Stegosaurus would have been a key defense against these hunters.
• Ornithopods, including Camptosaurus and Dryosaurus, grazed alongside Stegosaurus, representing smaller, quicker plant-eaters.
• Early mammals, small and shrew-like, scurried through the underbrush, while flying pterosaurs soared overhead.
• Freshwater systems hosted fish, turtles, and crocodile relatives, rounding out the ecosystem.

Interesting Facts

• The brain-to-body ratio of Stegosaurus is one of the smallest of any dinosaur, fueling the myth that it had a “second brain” in its hips—an idea no longer supported by science.
• Tracks attributed to stegosaurs suggest they may have moved in small groups, possibly for protection.
• Despite its fearsome appearance, Stegosaurus was strictly an herbivore. Its teeth were too weak to chew tough vegetation, meaning it likely swallowed food in large chunks.
• And, being one of my best loved dinosaurs, I chose Stegosaurus as one of my logos for the Fossil Huntress. This gentle giant is one of my all time favourites!

Stegosaurus lived tens of millions of years before the rise of dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex, and remains one of the most beloved prehistoric creatures. 

Its strange mix of delicate feeding adaptations and heavy defensive weaponry highlights the balance of survival in the Jurassic ecosystem.

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

HUNTERS OF PANTHALASSAN SEAS: SHONISAURUS

Shonisaurus sikanni / Sikanni Chief River

More than 200 million years ago, when the supercontinent Pangaea was still knitting the world together, a leviathan moved through the warm Panthalassan seas that covered what is now northeastern British Columbia. 

Shonisaurus sikanniensis was colossal. At an estimated 21 metres (about 70 feet) in length, it rivals or exceeds the largest whales alive today. 

This was no scaly sea dragon but an ichthyosaur: a dolphin-shaped marine reptile with immense paddle-like limbs, a long, tapering snout, and eyes built for the dim light of deep water. 

Its vertebrae alone are the size of dinner plates. When it swam, it would have moved with powerful sweeps of its crescent tail, master of a Late Triassic ocean teeming with ammonites and early marine reptiles.

The type specimen of Shonisaurus sikanniensis was discovered along the banks of the Sikanni Chief River and painstakingly excavated over three ambitious field seasons led by Dr. Betsy Nicholls of the Royal Tyrrell Museum. 

A Rolex Laureate and one of Canada’s most respected vertebrate palaeontologists, Dr. Nicholls undertook what remains one of the most formidable fossil excavations ever attempted in this country. 

The animal lay entombed in limestone, and freeing it required extraordinary logistics, teamwork, and resolve over many field seasons.  

That immense skeleton — the largest marine reptile ever described — reshaped our understanding of just how big ichthyosaurs could become.

Many dedicated researchers have contributed to expanding the story of Shonisaurus and its kin. Scholars such as Dean Lomax and Sven Sachs, among others, continue to refine our understanding of ichthyosaur anatomy, growth patterns, and evolutionary relationships. 

Recent work on giant ichthyosaurs from the Triassic of Europe and North America suggests that extreme body size evolved rapidly after the end-Permian mass extinction. New discoveries of enormous jaw fragments and vertebrae hint that multiple lineages independently pushed the limits of marine reptile gigantism. 

These animals were likely deep-diving specialists, feeding on abundant soft-bodied cephalopods and fish, filling ecological roles that whales would not occupy for another 150 million years.

The Sikanni Chief River flows through the traditional territory of the Kaska Dena, whose stewardship of these lands spans countless generations. Any scientific work in this region exists within that broader and much older human story, and it is important to acknowledge the enduring relationship between the land, the river, and the people who know it best.

Today, the bones of Shonisaurus sikanniensis rest in Alberta, but its story stretches far beyond a museum gallery. It is a tale of deep time, bold fieldwork, collaboration across continents, and the simple human wonder that arises when we uncover something vast and ancient from stone. 

From the warm Triassic seas to the careful hands of modern researchers, the story of Shonisaurus reminds us that our planet has always been capable of producing giants — and that with patience, teamwork, and curiosity, we can bring their stories joyfully back into the light.

FRACTAL BUILDING: AMMONITES

Argonauticeras besairei, Collection of José Juárez Ruiz.

An exceptional example of fractal building of an ammonite septum, in this clytoceratid Argonauticeras besairei from the awesome José Juárez Ruiz.

Ammonites were predatory, squid-like creatures that lived inside coil-shaped shells.

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.

The Ammonoidea can be divided into six orders:

• Agoniatitida, Lower Devonian - Middle Devonian
• Clymeniida, Upper Devonian
• Goniatitida, Middle Devonian - Upper Permian
• Prolecanitida, Upper Devonian - Upper Triassic
• Ceratitida, Upper Permian - Upper Triassic
• Ammonitida, Lower Jurassic - Upper Cretaceous

Ammonites have intricate and complex patterns on their shells called sutures. The suture patterns differ across species and tell us what time period the ammonite is from. If they are geometric with numerous undivided lobes and saddles and eight lobes around the conch, we refer to their pattern as goniatitic, a characteristic of Paleozoic ammonites.

If they are ceratitic with lobes that have subdivided tips; giving them a saw-toothed appearance and rounded undivided saddles, they are likely Triassic. For some lovely Triassic ammonites, take a look at the specimens that come out of Hallstatt, Austria and from the outcrops in the Humboldt Mountains of Nevada.

Hoplites bennettiana (Sowby, 1826).

If they have lobes and saddles that are fluted, with rounded subdivisions instead of saw-toothed, they are likely Jurassic or Cretaceous. If you'd like to see a particularly beautiful Lower Jurassic ammonite, take a peek at Apodoceras. Wonderful ridging in that species.

One of my favourite Cretaceous ammonites is the ammonite, Hoplites bennettiana (Sowby, 1826). This beauty is from Albian deposits near Carrière de Courcelles, Villemoyenne, near la région de Troyes (Aube) Champagne in northeastern France.

At the time that this fellow was swimming in our oceans, ankylosaurs were strolling about Mongolia and stomping through the foliage in Utah, Kansas and Texas. Bony fish were swimming over what would become the strata making up Canada, the Czech Republic and Australia. Cartilaginous fish were prowling the western interior seaway of North America and a strange extinct herbivorous mammal, Eobaatar, was snuffling through Mongolia, Spain and England.

In some classifications, these are left as suborders, included in only three orders: Goniatitida, Ceratitida, and Ammonitida. Once you get to know them, ammonites in their various shapes and suturing patterns make it much easier to date an ammonite and the rock formation where is was found at a glance.

Ammonites first appeared about 240 million years ago, though they descended from straight-shelled cephalopods called bacrites that date back to the Devonian, about 415 million years ago, and the last species vanished in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.

They were prolific breeders that evolved rapidly. If you could cast a fishing line into our ancient seas, it is likely that you would hook an ammonite, not a fish. They were prolific back in the day, living (and sometimes dying) in schools in oceans around the globe. We find ammonite fossils (and plenty of them) in sedimentary rock from all over the world.

In some cases, we find rock beds where we can see evidence of a new species that evolved, lived and died out in such a short time span that we can walk through time, following the course of evolution using ammonites as a window into the past.

For this reason, they make excellent index fossils. An index fossil is a species that allows us to link a particular rock formation, layered in time with a particular species or genus found there. Generally, deeper is older, so we use the sedimentary layers rock to match up to specific geologic time periods, rather the way we use tree-rings to date trees. A handy way to compare fossils and date strata across the globe.

References: Inoue, S., Kondo, S. Suture pattern formation in ammonites and the unknown rear mantle structure. Sci Rep 6, 33689 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep33689
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33689?fbclid=IwAR1BhBrDqhv8LDjqF60EXdfLR7wPE4zDivwGORTUEgCd2GghD5W7KOfg6Co#citeas

Photo: Hoplites Bennettiana from near Troyes, France. Collection de Christophe Marot

MAMMOTH AT THE MUSEUM

Mammoths are a personal favourite of mine and there is a particularly fetching specimen in the Natural History Museum, London. 

Amongst its Ice Age treasures stands the mighty woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius — a shaggy titan of the Pleistocene whose kind roamed the frozen steppes of Europe, Asia, and North America until just 4,000 years ago.

The museum’s mammoth skeleton, with its great spiralled tusks curving forward like ivory crescents, is both imposing and oddly elegant. 

These animals were close cousins of modern elephants, adapted for cold with thick insulating fur, a layer of fat beneath the skin, and small ears to conserve heat. 

Their molars — massive, ridged grinding plates — were built for chewing tough Ice Age grasses across windswept tundra.

Britain itself once hosted mammoths during colder phases of the last Ice Age. As glaciers advanced and retreated, herds wandered across what is now the North Sea basin — then dry land known as Doggerland — and into southern England. 

Fossils dredged from gravel pits and offshore sediments remind us that mammoths were not exotic strangers but part of Britain’s own prehistoric fauna.

Standing beneath those sweeping tusks in the museum, you can almost feel the cold breath of the Ice Age. It is a wonderful place to spend the afternoon. If you go, wear comfortable shoes!

LOOPS, LURCHES AND LATE CRETACEOUS SEAS: MEET AUDOULICERAS

Audouliceras Heteromorph Ammonite

There are sensible ammonites… and then there are the heteromorphs.

Audouliceras belongs firmly in the second camp.

This wonderfully eccentric Cretaceous ammonite abandoned the classic tight spiral that most of its kin wore so elegantly and instead opted for something that looks, at first glance, like a shell having second thoughts. 

Its whorls uncoil, loop, and flare in ways that feel almost rebellious — as though the blueprint for “proper ammonite” was politely ignored.

Audouliceras lived during the Late Cretaceous, roughly 100–90 million years ago, when warm epicontinental seas flooded vast stretches of the globe. 

In North America, its fossils are found in marine sediments laid down by the Western Interior Seaway — that immense inland ocean that once split the continent in two. 

Beautiful specimens have turned up in Cretaceous deposits of Alberta, British Columbia, Montana, and the U.S. Great Plains, preserved in shales and sandstones that were once quiet seafloors.

Across the Atlantic realm, relatives occur in European Cretaceous deposits as well, reflecting the broad distribution of ammonites in the world’s warm, shallow seas. 

These were not shoreline creatures; Audouliceras drifted or swam in open marine environments, buoyed by gas-filled chambers within its shell. Like other ammonites, it controlled its position in the water column through a siphuncle — a delicate tube threading through its chambers, regulating buoyancy with remarkable precision.

What did it eat? Likely small crustaceans, plankton, and other tiny drifting life. Its soft body would have extended from the final chamber, equipped with tentacles and a beak-like mouth similar to that of modern squids and nautiluses. 

Heteromorph ammonites are often interpreted as slower, more vertical drifters compared to their tightly coiled cousins — perhaps hovering, bobbing, or gently pulsing through the water column rather than actively cruising.

And the seas they inhabited? Oh, they were anything but quiet.

Audouliceras shared its world with formidable predators and strange contemporaries. Giant marine reptiles patrolled the waters — long-necked plesiosaurs, sleek mosasaurs, and swift ichthyosaurs in earlier intervals. 

Sharks like Cretoxyrhina cruised the depths. Teleost fishes flashed through sunlit waters. Other ammonites — some tightly coiled, some extravagantly uncoiled — drifted alongside them, along with belemnites and rudist bivalves building reef-like structures on the seafloor.

In the fossil record, Audouliceras appears in Upper Cretaceous marine strata, often serving as a useful biostratigraphic marker. Ammonites evolved rapidly and had wide geographic ranges, making them excellent timekeepers for geologists. 

When you find Audouliceras in a rock layer, you are almost certainly standing in the Late Cretaceous.

Heteromorph ammonites like this one remind us that evolution is not a straight line toward efficiency or elegance. It experiments. It loops. It spirals outward and occasionally lets go of symmetry altogether.

And then — at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago — they vanished with the non-avian dinosaurs, casualties of the mass extinction that closed the chapter on the Mesozoic.

What remains are these curious, uncoiled shells in stone — records of a warm sea long gone, and of a lineage that was never afraid to look a little different.

MEET THE NIGER RIVER'S TOP PREDATOR: SUCHOMINUS

Here is a fellow to strike terror into your heart. 

Meet Suchomimus tenerensis, a large, long-snouted spinosaurid theropod who prowled what is now Niger during the Early Cretaceous, roughly 125 million years ago. 

If you imagine a T. rex that fell headfirst into a river ecosystem and decided fish were the future, you’re getting close. 

This was no blunt-faced bone-crusher. Suchomimus had a narrow, crocodile-like snout lined with over a hundred slender, conical teeth perfectly suited for gripping slippery prey.

The fossils come primarily from the Elrhaz Formation in the Ténéré Desert of the Sahara. Today, it is an expanse of sand and heat shimmer. In the Early Cretaceous, it was a lush floodplain threaded with rivers, swamps, and seasonal lakes. Think mangroves, ferns, and conifers rather than dunes. It was discovered in the 1990s by a team led by Paul Sereno, and its name fittingly means “crocodile mimic.”

Suchomimus shared this watery paradise with a lively cast of characters. The sail-backed Ouranosaurus browsed on vegetation nearby. 

The stocky, heavily armored Nigersaurus grazed low-growing plants with its astonishing vacuum-cleaner jaw. Small, nimble theropods darted through the undergrowth. And lurking in the water were giant crocodyliforms like Sarcosuchus imperator, the so-called “SuperCroc,” who could grow over 11 metres long. Imagine the tension at the riverbank. You go fishing and something bigger than your canoe is watching you fish.

Diet-wise, Suchomimus was likely a specialized piscivore, meaning fish were firmly on the menu. Its long jaws, studded with conical teeth and a subtle rosette at the tip, were built for snapping shut on struggling prey. The teeth lack the serrations you see in typical meat-slicing theropods, suggesting it wasn’t primarily designed for tearing chunks from large dinosaurs. 

That said, it was still a 10–11 metre predator with powerful forelimbs and a thumb claw that could make an impression. Fish may have been the specialty, but opportunism is practically a dinosaur hobby. Small terrestrial prey would not have been safe if they wandered too close.

Hunting probably involved a patient, semi-aquatic strategy. Its long snout allowed it to dip into shallow water with minimal disturbance, and the conical teeth helped trap wriggling fish. 

Some spinosaurids show evidence of sensory pits in their snouts, similar to modern crocodilians, suggesting they could detect movement in water. While direct evidence for this in Suchomimus is still debated, the resemblance is striking enough to make you wonder whether it had a similar trick up its sleeve. Or, more accurately, up its snout.

Unlike its later and more extreme cousin Spinosaurus, Suchomimus does not appear to have had a towering sail. Instead, it sported a low ridge of elongated neural spines along its back, perhaps forming a modest hump or ridge. Stylish, but not showy. Think understated riverbank chic.

One of the fun quirks of Suchomimus is its place in the spinosaurid family tree. It sits in the Baryonychinae, closely related to Baryonyx from England. Yes, England. So while one cousin stalked Early Cretaceous river systems in what is now West Africa, another was doing much the same in Surrey. Spinosaurids, it seems, were cosmopolitan anglers.

And then there are those arms. Strong, well-developed forelimbs with large claws, including a prominent thumb claw, suggest it could grapple with prey or perhaps haul itself along muddy banks. It was not the tiny-armed stereotype of later theropods. 

If Suchomimus reached out to grab something, it likely succeeded.

In the fossil record, Suchomimus helps us understand the early evolution of spinosaurids before they became even more specialized. It represents a moment when dinosaurs were experimenting with ecological niches beyond the classic terrestrial predator role. River margins were not just crocodile territory. They were contested real estate.

So picture it: 125 million years ago, on a warm Cretaceous floodplain in what is now the Sahara, a long-snouted predator stands at the water’s edge. 

Fish scatter beneath the surface. A distant Ouranosaurus snorts. Somewhere, a SuperCroc slides silently into the river. 

And Suchomimus waits, patient and perfectly adapted, the elegant angler of the dinosaur world.

Not every theropod needed to rule the land. Some were quite happy ruling the river.

CREAMY APORRHAIS FOSSIL GASTROPOD

This creamy, beige specimen of Aporrhais sp., is a fossil marine gastropod from the Goodland Formation of Fort Worth, Texas, a limestone unit laid down during the Lower Cretaceous (Albian), roughly 113–100 million years ago. 

At that time, north-central Texas lay beneath a warm, shallow epicontinental sea connected to the broader Western Interior Seaway, an environment ideal for shelled invertebrates to flourish.

Aporrhais is a thick-shelled sea snail, part of a lineage well adapted to life on carbonate seafloors. Its inflated, smoothly rounded whorls and robust form suggest a slow-moving grazer or detritivore, creeping across soft sediments in calm, sunlit waters. 

The pale colouration you see today reflects mineral replacement during burial, with the original aragonitic shell long since altered to limestone.

The Goodland Formation is famous for its diverse fossil assemblage. Alongside gastropods, collectors and researchers regularly find ammonites (including forms such as Douvilleiceras), bivalves like oysters and rudists, echinoids (sea urchins), corals, and occasional crustaceans. Together, these fossils paint a vivid picture of a thriving Cretaceous reef-adjacent ecosystem.

Exposures of the Goodland around Fort Worth have been known and collected since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often through quarrying and construction cuts. Early geological and paleontological work in the region was carried out by figures such as Robert T. Hill, W. S. Adkins, and T. W. Stanton, whose studies helped establish the stratigraphy and fossil content of the Texas Cretaceous. 

Since then, generations of professional paleontologists and dedicated local collectors have continued to document and refine our understanding of this richly fossiliferous formation.

This specimen was collected by Jack Whittles in the 1990s, shared with the Pacific Museum of the Earth (the precursor museum to the one now at UBC, and then shared with me...)

ARMADILLOS: NATURE'S TINY TANK

Armadillos, part tank, part roly-poly

If you’ve ever seen an armadillo, you know they look like something straight out of a prehistoric cartoon—part mouse, part tank, part roly-poly. 

I saw my first of these tiny tanks while in Mexico and was instantly entranced!

These fascinating creatures didn’t just roll into the scene yesterday; their ancestors have been roaming Earth for tens of millions of years! 

Let’s dig into the story of armadillos, from fossil giants to today’s armor-clad adventurers.

Armadillos belong to a family of mammals called Xenarthrans, which includes sloths and anteaters. 

Their ancient relatives first show up in the fossil record around 60 million years ago, not long after the dinosaurs vanished.

Back then, South America was an isolated continent—like a giant tropical island—and it became the perfect place for armadillos’ ancestors to evolve. 

One of the most impressive was the Glyptodon, a prehistoric giant that lived about 2.5 million years ago during the Ice Age. Picture an armadillo the size of a small car, with a bony shell thick enough to deflect the bite of a sabre-toothed cat! Glyptodons even had spiked tails, a bit like medieval maces.

When the Panama land bridge formed about 3 million years ago, armadillos and their relatives marched north into North America. 

That’s why today you can find their descendants, like the Nine-Banded Armadillo, as far north as the southern United States—and they’re still creeping slowly farther north each year.

Today, there are 21 species of armadillos, most living in Central and South America. 

The Nine-Banded Armadillo is the most widespread and is famous for its habit of jumping straight up when startled—sometimes up to 1.5 metres into the air! (It’s a funny trick, though not always helpful when cars are involved.)

Armadillos live in grasslands, rainforests, deserts, and scrublands, where they dig burrows to sleep during the day and come out at night to hunt for food. 

Their name comes from Spanish and means “little armoured one”—a perfect fit for their bony shell made of osteoderms, plates of bone covered by keratin (the same stuff in your fingernails).

Armadillos are expert insect-hunters. They use their super-sensitive noses and long, sticky tongues to sniff out and slurp up ants, termites, beetles, and grubs. Some species also eat fruit, small amphibians, and even carrion (dead animals). Their clawed forefeet are perfect for digging through soil, logs, and leaf litter to find a crunchy snack.

And get this—armadillos can hold their breath for up to six minutes and even walk underwater across small streams in search of food. When they reach deeper water, they just inflate their stomach and intestines like balloons and float across!

Baby Armadillos and Family Life — Armadillo families are just as curious as their armour. Most species give birth once a year, after a long nap-like period called delayed implantation, where the fertilised egg just hangs out for months before growing into an embryo.

The Nine-Banded Armadillo is especially famous for giving birth to identical quadruplets—four baby armadillos from one egg, each a perfect genetic copy of the others! The babies, called pups, are born with soft, pink shells that harden as they grow. Mothers care for them in cozy burrows until they’re ready to explore on their own.

Cool Armadillo Facts — 

• Armadillos can roll into a ball—well, some can! Only the Three-Banded Armadillo can fully curl up and seal itself tight like a living pinball.
• Their low body temperature and slow metabolism make them less likely to get sick, but they can catch diseases like leprosy (which scientists study carefully—don’t worry, they’re not spreading it around your backyard).
• Armadillos are important for ecosystems: their digging helps aerate soil and spread plant seeds.
• Fossils of ancient armadillos have been found across both Americas, showing how they survived massive climate changes, Ice Ages, and the rise of humans.

From Fossils to Forests — From the car-sized Glyptodon to the jumpy Nine-Banded Armadillo, these armoured mammals have been Earth’s quiet diggers for millions of years. 

They’ve crossed continents, survived predators, and evolved into some of the most unique animals alive today. If you happen to be lucky enough to see an armadillo waddling beside the road or across a field—or just a photo of one—you’re looking at the tiny descendant of an Ice Age tank. 

And that’s one seriously cool survivor.

COILED PERFECTION: LYTOCERAS

A superbly prepped and extremely rare Lytoceras (Suess, 1865) ammonite found as a green ammonite nodule by Matt Cape in the Lower Lias of Dorset. 

Lytoceras are rare in the Lower Lias of Dorset — apart from the Belemnite Stone horizon — so much so that Paul Davis, whose skilled prep work you see here, initially thought it might be a Becheiceras hidden within the large, lumpy nodule. 

One of the reasons these lovelies are rarely found from here is that they are a Mediterranean Tethyian genus. The fossil fauna we find in the United Kingdom are dominated by Boreal Tethyian genera. 

We do find Lytoceras sp. in the Luridum subzone of the Pliensbachian showing that there was an influx of species from the Mediterranean realm during this time. This is the first occurrence of a Lytoceras that he has ever seen in a green nodule and Paul's seen quite a few. 

This absolutely cracking specimen was found and is in the collections of the awesome Matt Cape. Matt recognized that whatever was hidden in the nodule would take skilled and careful preparation using air scribes. Indeed it did. It took more than five hours of time and skill to unveil the lovely museum-worthy specimen you see here. 

We find Lytoceras in more than 1,000 outcrops around the globe ranging from the Jurassic through to the Cretaceous, some 189.6 to 109.00 million years ago. Once this specimen is fully prepped with the nodule material cut or scraped away, you can see the detailed crinkly growth lines or riblets on the shell and none of the expected coarse ribbing. 

Lytoceras sp. Photo: Craig Chivers

If you imagine running your finger along these, you would be tracing the work of decades of growth of these cephalopods. 

While we cannot know their actual lifespans, but we can make a healthy guess. 

The nautilus, their closest living cousins live upwards of 20 years — gods be good — and less than three years if conditions are poor.

The flanges, projecting flat ribs or collars, develop at the edge of the mouth border on the animal's mantle as they grow each new chamber. 

Each delicate flange grows over the course of the ammonites life, marking various points in time and life stages as the ammonite grew. There is a large variation within Lytoceras with regards to flanges. They provide both ornamentation and strength to the shell to protect it from water pressure as they moved into deeper seas.

The concretion prior to prep

This distinctive genus with its evolute shells are found in the Cretaceous marine deposits of: 

Antarctica (5 collections), Austria (19), Colombia (1), the Czech Republic (3), Egypt (2), France (194), Greenland (16), Hungary (25), Italy (11), Madagascar (2), Mexico (1), Morocco (4), Mozambique (1), Poland (2), Portugal (1), Romania (1), the Russian Federation (2), Slovakia (3), South Africa (1), Spain (24), Tanzania (1), Trinidad and Tobago (1), Tunisia (25); and the United States of America (17: Alaska, California, North Carolina, Oregon).

We also find them in Jurassic marine outcrops in:

Austria (15), Canada (9: British Columbia), Chile (6), France (181), Germany (11), Greenland (1), Hungary (189), India (1), Indonesia (1), Iran (1), Italy (50), Japan (14), Kenya (2), Luxembourg (4), Madagascar (2), Mexico (1), Morocco (43), New Zealand (15), Portugal (1), Romania (5), the Russian Federation (1), Slovakia (1), Spain (6), Switzerland (2), Tunisia (11), Turkey (12), Turkmenistan (1), Ukraine (5), the United Kingdom (12), United States (11: Alaska, California) — in at least 977 known collections. 

References:

Sepkoski, Jack (2002). "A compendium of fossil marine animal genera (Cephalopoda entry)". Bulletins of American Paleontology. 363: 1–560. Archived from the original on 2008-05-07. Retrieved 2017-10-18.

Paleobiology Database - Lytoceras. 2017-10-19.

Systematic descriptions, Mesozoic Ammonoidea, by W.J Arkell, Bernhard Kummel, and C.W. Wright. 1957. Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology, Part L. Geological Society of America and University of Kansas press.

LURKING IN THE LATE CRETACEOUS: RAJASAURUS

Rajasaurus narmadensis

In the humid, fern-thick forests of Late Cretaceous India — about 67 million years ago — a flash of red moves between the tree trunks.

Think oxidized iron and dried blood — deep crimson-orange broken by pale white striping and bold black bands along the flanks and tail. 

In dappled forest light, those stripes would fracture the animal’s outline, a trick modern tigers use to unnerving effect. Camouflage is not new. Evolution figured that out long before mammals started prowling.

This is Rajasaurus narmadensis, the “king lizard of the Narmada,” known from the Lameta Formation of central India. 

At roughly 6–7 meters long and weighing perhaps a metric ton, it was not the largest theropod of its time — but it did not need to be. It was built for hunting.

Rajasaurus belongs to the Abelisauridae, a clade of short-snouted, deep-skulled theropods that dominated the southern continents of Gondwana. If you squint, you can see its relatives in Madagascar’s Majungasaurus, Argentina’s Carnotaurus, and Africa’s Rugops. These animals were the southern answer to the tyrannosaurs of the north.

Unlike the long-snouted, banana-toothed elegance of Tyrannosaurus rex, abelisaurids had blunt, boxy skulls and often elaborate cranial ornamentation. Rajasaurus sported a single low horn or dome on its forehead — not a unicorn spike, but a thickened bony crest. 

It likely served for display, species recognition, or perhaps ritualized head-shoving contests. Theropods were dramatic. This is not speculation; this is pattern recognition across deep time.

Its forelimbs? Tiny. Comically so. Abelisaurids doubled down on arm reduction — evolution looked at the T. rex blueprint and said, “Let’s go smaller.” The arms were functionally irrelevant in prey capture. This was a head-driven predator. And what a head it was.

Rajasaurus lived in interesting times. Late Cretaceous India was not yet welded to Asia. It was a drifting island continent, sliding northward across the Tethys Ocean. The climate was warm, seasonally dry, punctuated by monsoonal rains. River systems braided across floodplains. Forests of conifers, palms, and flowering plants thickened along waterways. Ferns and horsetails crowded the understory.

Sharing that forest were enormous titanosaurian sauropods, including forms like Isisaurus and Jainosaurus. Long-necked, barrel-bodied giants moved in herds, stripping vegetation and reshaping the landscape as they fed. Their hatchlings and juveniles would have been very much on Rajasaurus’s radar.

Small ornithischian dinosaurs darted through the brush. Crocodyliforms basked along muddy riverbanks. Turtles paddled in oxbow lakes. Mammals — small, mostly nocturnal insectivores — kept wisely out of sight.

Pterosaurs likely wheeled overhead. Insects buzzed. The forest was noisy, layered, alive.

And somewhere within it, Rajasaurus was listening.

Abelisaurids had thick necks and reinforced skulls. Biomechanical studies of relatives like Majungasaurus suggest a predatory style focused less on bone-crushing bite force and more on repeated, slashing bites combined with powerful neck musculature. Think controlled violence rather than single catastrophic impact.

Rajasaurus likely relied on ambush. In dense forest cover, speed over short distances would matter more than marathon endurance. Its hind limbs were strong and proportioned for bursts of acceleration.

Picture it waiting — body low, tail held rigid for balance. A subadult titanosaur lingers near the herd’s edge. A misstep. A moment of distraction. The red-and-white predator explodes from cover.

The jaws close around soft tissue — flank, neck, perhaps hind limb — and then release. Another strike. And another. Blood loss and shock do the rest. Abelisaurids may not have grappled like dromaeosaurs or crushed like tyrannosaurs, but they were efficient.

And they were persistent.

There is even evidence of cannibalism among some abelisaurids (looking at you, Majungasaurus), so it’s not unreasonable to suspect Rajasaurus would not waste protein when opportunity presented itself. 

The predators of the Late Cretaceous were not sentimental.

Phylogenetically, Rajasaurus sits within Abelisaurinae, closely related to Majungasaurus of Madagascar and South American forms such as Carnotaurus sastrei. This distribution tells a broader tectonic story — these predators evolved across the southern fragments of Gondwana before continental breakup isolated their lineages.

India’s northward drift preserved a snapshot of this southern evolutionary experiment just before the asteroid impact that would end the non-avian dinosaurs.

Rajasaurus lived within a few million years of that event. Which means this red-striped hunter walked forests that would soon vanish under global firestorms, impact winter, and ecological collapse.

The gorgeous illustration you see here is by the supremely talented Daniel Eskridge, licensed for use. Appreciate you, Daniel. 

Timing, as ever, is everything.

ALBERTONIA FROM THE CRANBROOK MUSEUM COLLECTION

Albertonia sp., Cranbrook Museum Collection

This beauty, with its graceful sail-like fins and armour of lustrous, diamond-shaped scales, is Albertonia sp., an Early Triassic ganoid fish from the ancient seas of what is now British Columbia and Alberta. 

Belonging to the family Parasemionotidae—among the most advanced and abundant of the Triassic subholosteans—Albertonia is one of the real showstoppers of Canada’s Early Triassic fossil record.

Specimens of this lovely are known from the Vega-Phroso Siltstone Member of the Sulphur Mountain Formation near Wapiti Lake in northeastern British Columbia, as well as from the Lower Triassic Montney Formation of Alberta. These units are part of the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin, a region that preserves some of the finest Early Triassic fish faunas anywhere on Earth.

The Wapiti Lake exposures, in particular, are world-class. Here, a rich assemblage of exquisitely preserved bony fishes—armoured in heavy ganoid and cosmoid scales—has been uncovered. Four genera dominate these ancient marine beds: the ray-finned actinopterygians Albertonia, Bobasatrania, and Boreosomus, alongside the lobe-finned coelacanth Whiteia. 

Together, they form a window into life during a time of ecological recovery following the end-Permian mass extinction.

Albertonia is easily one of my favourites. Most specimens measure around 35–40 cm in length and display a striking, streamlined silhouette. The most distinctive feature is the tall, sail-shaped dorsal fin, paired with long, elegant pectoral fins that also flare like miniature sails. The ventral fins are comparatively small, giving the fish a unique balance and profile unlike anything in today’s oceans.

These fishes inhabited deeper marine waters, feeding on plankton and other small organisms drifting through the Early Triassic seas. 

The extraordinary preservation of many specimens—right down to the crisp geometry of each square-shaped ganoid scale—suggests rapid burial in calm, anoxic seafloor sediments where scavengers and decay could not disturb them. In some fossils, the sculptural quality of the ganoine coating is still visible, each scale a tiny gleaming tessera in a mosaic more than 245 million years old.

Together, Albertonia and its Triassic companions help tell a story of resilience and renewal. In the wake of Earth’s greatest extinction event, life returned to the oceans with new forms, new strategies, and unexpected beauty. And in the fine-grained rocks of Wapiti Lake and the Montney Formation, that beauty has been preserved in breathtaking detail, scale by scale, fin by fin, across deep time.

WHALE REMAINS AT JOUGLA POINT, PORT LOCKROY

Blue Whale Remains, Balaenoptera musculus

Along the stony shore of Jougla Point, near Port Lockroy on the Antarctic Peninsula, a scatter of great bones lies open to the wind. 

The skeleton is that of a blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, the largest animal ever known to have lived on Earth, though the assemblage may include bones from other baleen whales discarded during the industrial whaling era. 

Visitors approach in Zodiacs to find vertebrae the size of millstones, jaw elements curved like crossed oars, and ribs arcing across the gravel. 

It is a stark and unsentimental record of the 20th-century hunt that once emptied Antarctic waters of their giants.

Blue whales are baleen mysticetes within the rorqual family, engineered for long migrations and high-volume filter feeding. 

Adults can exceed 30 meters in length and reach masses over 150 tonnes — a scale that eclipses even the largest dinosaurs. Their fossil record is surprisingly young. 

Although whale ancestors arose in the Eocene (~50 million years ago), the lineage leading to modern rorquals, including blue whales, diversifies during the Miocene and Pliocene (roughly 23–2.6 million years ago). 

Fossil mysticetes from California, Italy, Peru, and New Zealand document that transition: from toothed baleen ancestors to fully edentulous filter feeders with vaulting skulls and expandable throats built for krill-rich seas. 

True “blue whale–like” forms appear only in the Pleistocene and Holocene, making these colossal cetaceans a relatively recent evolutionary experiment.

In life today, blue whales occupy vast swaths of the global ocean, moving seasonally between high-latitude feeding grounds and lower-latitude calving areas. Major populations persist in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, eastern tropical Pacific, Southern Ocean, and waters off Australia and New Zealand. 

Their preferred summer feeding grounds lie in zones of upwelling and krill abundance — places like the California Current, the Subantarctic Front, and the Scotia Sea.

The industrial era nearly erased them. 

Prior to commercial hunting, global numbers likely exceeded 250,000 individuals. By the 1970s, after decades of relentless Antarctic whaling, their numbers crashed to less than 1% of pre-exploitation levels. 

With international protections in place, blue whales are recovering slowly but unevenly. 

Current estimates hover around 10,000–25,000 animals worldwide — still critically small for a species of such enormous ecological footprint.

Despite their rarity, blue whales remain visible to those who seek them. They are encountered off California and Baja, around Sri Lanka, in the Gulf of Corcovado, the Tasman Sea, the Kerguelen Plateau, and sporadically across the Southern Ocean. 

In these places, the sea shines with plankton and the long low blows of a whale may hang in the air like cold breath.

At Jougla Point, the story is told through bones weathering in chilly silence — a natural museum without walls. I am generally in search of fossil remains, but these hit all those same emotions. Barring our intervention and natural disaster, these great beasts can live to be more than 100 years old. What they must see over those long years.   

And, how do we know how old they are? We can estimate age by reading earplug layers (like tree rings) in deceased whales — each waxy layer marks a period of life, helping confirm those long lifespans.

HIGH-NOSED ON THE CRETACEOUS PLAINS: THE RISE OF ALTIRHINUS

This Early Cretaceous herbivore—living about 113 to 100 million years ago during the Albian—roamed what is now Mongolia. 

Its name means “high nose,” and once you see the skull, you understand why. 

The nasal bones rise into a tall, arched crest, giving Altirhinus a profile that looks like it’s perpetually catching a good breeze across the ancient floodplains.

Altirhinus kurzanovi is what happens when evolution decides to experiment with architecture.

Altirhinus belongs to the iguanodontians, a group of ornithopod dinosaurs that sit evolutionarily between the earlier, more lightly built Jurassic forms and the later, highly specialized duck-billed hadrosaurs. 

It still carried the classic iguanodontian thumb spike—likely useful for defense or perhaps a bit of pointed persuasion during intraspecies disagreements—but it also shows early hints of the sophisticated chewing system that would later make hadrosaurs the undisputed salad bar champions of the Late Cretaceous.

In the fossil record, Altirhinus appears in the Khuren Dukh Formation of southeastern Mongolia. The sediments there were laid down in river channels and floodplains—lush, seasonally wet environments ideal for large plant-eaters. Several well-preserved skeletons have been recovered, including remarkably complete skull material that lets paleontologists appreciate that lofty nasal arch in detail. The crest was probably soft-tissue enhanced in life and may have functioned in display, species recognition, or vocal resonance. It’s hard not to imagine a low, booming call rolling across the Cretaceous wetlands.

If you'd like to see the bones found from Altirhinus, you will want to head to Mongolia. Most of the fossils found to date are housed in Mongolian institutions and have been studied internationally, particularly following expeditions in the 1990s that helped clarify its anatomy and evolutionary position. 

Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, which now feels stark and wind-scoured, continues to yield beautifully preserved dinosaur remains—proof that deserts can be excellent librarians of deep time.

Altirhinus did not live alone. Its ecosystem included predatory theropods such as dromaeosaurids—swift, feathered carnivores with a talent for coordinated hunting—and larger theropods that would have regarded a juvenile Altirhinus as an opportunity rather than a neighbor. 

Early ceratopsians, ankylosaurs armored like ambulatory fortresses, and other ornithopods shared the same landscapes. It was a dynamic, competitive world of herds, hunters, and seasonal change.

What makes Altirhinus particularly interesting is its timing. It lived during a pivotal evolutionary interval when ornithopods were refining their skulls and dental batteries. 

Its elevated nasal region and increasingly complex chewing apparatus foreshadow the full-blown hadrosaur condition that would dominate later in the Cretaceous. In that sense, Altirhinus is both a character in its own right and a transitional figure in a much larger story.

So while Tyrannosaurus tends to steal the spotlight, spare a thought for Altirhinus—the high-nosed grazer of Cretaceous Mongolia. 

It may not have had the teeth of a super-predator, but it carried itself with a certain cranial confidence, grazing its way through history and quietly shaping the future of duck-billed dinosaurs.

Image credit: The gorgeous illustration you see here is by the supremely talented Daniel Eskridge, licensed for use. Appreciate you, Daniel. 

FOSSILS, TEXTILES AND URINE: YORKSHIRE HISTORY

Yorkshire Coast

You may recall the eight-metre Type Specimen of the ichthyosaur, Temnodontosaurus crassimanus, found in an alum quarry in Yorkshire, northern England.

The Yorkshire Museum was given this important ichthyosaur fossil back in 1857 when alum production was still a necessary staple of the textile industry. Without that industry, many wonderful specimens would likely never have been unearthed.

These quarries are an interesting bit of British history as they helped shape the Yorkshire Coast, created an entirely new industry and gave us more than a fixative for dyes. 

With them came the discovery of many remarkable fossil specimens and, oddly, local employment in the collection of urine.

In the 16th century, alum was essential in the textile industry as a fixative for dyes. 

By the first half of the 16th century, the clothing of the Low Countries, German states, and Scandinavia had developed in a different direction than that of England, France, and Italy, although all absorbed the sobering and formal influence of Spanish dress after the mid-1520s. Those fashions held true until the Inquisition when religious persecution, politics and fashion underwent a much-needed overhaul to something lighter.

Fashion in Medieval Livonia (1521): Albrecht Dürer

Elaborate slashing was popular, especially in Germany. In the depiction you see here, an artist pokes a bit of fun at Germanic fashion from the time. Bobbin lace arose from passementerie in the mid-16th century in Flanders, the Flemish Dutch-speaking northern portion of Belgium. Black was increasingly worn for the most formal occasions.

This century saw the rise of the ruff, which grew from a mere ruffle at the neckline to immense, slightly silly, cartwheel shapes. They adorned the necklines of the ultra-wealthy and uber-stylish men and women of the age.

At their most extravagant, ruffs required wire supports and were made of fine Italian reticella, a cutwork linen lace. You can imagine the many hours of skill and patience that would have gone into each piece to create the artful framework of these showy lace collars.

16th Century Fashion / Ruff Collars and Finery

In contrast to all that ruff, lace and cutwork linen, folk needed dyed fabrics. And to fix those dyes, they needed Alum. For a time, Italy was the source of that alum.

The Pope held a tidy monopoly on the industry, supplying both alum and the best dyes. He also did a nice trade in colourful and rare pigments for painting. And for a time, all was well with dandy's strutting their finery to the local fops in Britain.

All that changed during the Reformation. Great Britain, heathens as they were, were cut off from their Papal source and needed to fend for themselves.

The good Thomas Challoner took up the charge and set up Britain's first Alum works in Guisborough. Challoner looked to palaeontology for inspiration. Noticing that the fossils found on the Yorkshire coast were very similar to those found in the Alum quarries in Europe, he hatched a plan to set-up an alum industry on home soil. 

As the industry grew, sites along the coast were favoured as access to the shales and subsequent transportation was much easier.

Alum House, Photo: Joyce Dobson and Keith Bowers

Alum was extracted from quarried shales through a large scale and complicated process which took months to complete. 

The process involved extracting then burning huge piles of shale for 9 months, before transferring it to leaching pits to extract an aluminium sulphate liquor. This was sent along channels to the alum works where human urine was added.

At the peak of alum production, the industry required 200 tonnes of urine every year. That's the equivalent of all the potty visits of more than 1,000 people. Yes, strange but true.

The steady demand was hard to keep up with and urine became an imported resource from markets as far away as London and Newcastle upon Tyne in the northeast of England. Wooden buckets were left on street corners for folk to do their business then carted back to the south to complete the alum extraction process. The urine and alum would be mixed into a thick liquid. Once mixed, the aromatic slosh was left to settle and then the alum crystals were removed.

I'm not sure if this is a folktale or plain truth, but as the story goes, one knows when the optimum amount of alum had been extracted as you can pop an egg in the bucket and it floats on its own.

Alum House. Photo: Ann Wedgewood and Keith Bowers

The last Alum works on the Yorkshire Coast closed in 1871. This was due to the invention of manufacturing synthetic alum in 1855, then subsequently the creation of aniline dyes that contained their own fixative.

Many sites along the Yorkshire Coast bear evidence of the alum industry. These include Loftus Alum Quarries where the cliff profile is drastically changed by extraction and huge shale tips remain.

Further South are the Ravenscar Alum Works, which are well-preserved and enable visitors to visualize the processes which took place. The photos you see here are of Alum House at Hummersea. The first shows the ruin of Alum House printed on a postcard from 1906. The second (bottom) image shows the same ruin from on high with Cattersty Point in the background.

The good folk at the National Trust in Swindon are to thank for much of the background shared here. If you'd like to learn more about the Yorkshire area or donate to a very worthy charity, follow their link below.

Reference: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/yorkshire-coast/features/how-alum-shaped-the-yorkshire-coast