EPIC FOSSIL HUNTING: TYAUGHTON & CASTLE PEAK

Some places stay with you long after you've left them.

Tyaughton, north of Gold Bridge beneath the rugged skyline of Castle Peak, is one of those places for me. 

It is wild, breathtaking country where glaciers cling to the mountains, marmots whistle from rocky slopes, golden eagles drift effortlessly overhead, and every winding trail feels like it leads into another chapter of Earth's history.

It is also one of British Columbia's most remarkable places to hunt Triassic and Jurassic fossils.

Standing among these peaks, it is almost impossible to picture that some 200 to 220 million years ago this entire landscape lay beneath a warm tropical sea. Instead of alpine meadows and mountain goats, graceful ammonites cruised the water column while crinoids swayed gently on the seafloor. 

Brachiopods, bivalves, gastropods and countless other marine creatures flourished in an ocean that has long since disappeared.

Those ancient seabeds would one day be lifted thousands of metres skyward as the Coast Mountains rose around them, preserving their story within layers of limestone and shale.

Badouxia ammonites

There is nothing quite like splitting open a weathered slab and finding a beautifully preserved ammonite waiting inside. 

One careful tap with the rock hammer and suddenly you are sharing a moment with an animal that last saw daylight before the first dinosaurs truly came into their own. 

Those discoveries never lose their magic.

The nearby Taseko Lakes region has yielded one of the finest collections of Late Hettangian ammonites ever discovered in British Columbia. 

Over many remarkable field seasons, we documented thirty-five ammonite taxa and described three entirely new species, greatly expanding our understanding of Early Jurassic life along the ancient western margin of North America.

That work holds a particularly special place in my heart.

I had the enormous honour of having one of those new species named after me by Dr. Louise Longridge of the University of British Columbia. Fergusonites hendersonae is a beautiful little nektonic carnivorous ammonite that now carries my family name through the scientific literature. It remains one of the greatest honours of my life.

I first met Louise as an undergraduate, and later had the privilege of joining expeditions into the Taseko backcountry alongside wonderful friends from the Vancouver Island Paleontological Society, the Vancouver Paleontological Society, and researchers from UBC. 

We followed in the footsteps of the legendary Dr. Howard Tipper, whose meticulous geological mapping and extraordinary knowledge of Jurassic ammonites transformed our understanding of this part of British Columbia. His maps remain the foundation for much of the work we continue today.

Those expeditions were unforgettable.

Over several field seasons we endured altitude sickness, rain, snow, grizzly bears, and more than a few freezing nights camped beside glaciers. Helicopters spared us days of hiking into some of the most inaccessible fossil localities in the province, where every outcrop held the possibility of something extraordinary. 

Along with the three new ammonite species, we recovered beautifully preserved gastropods, crustaceans, and countless specimens that continue to help us piece together the history of these ancient seas.

What makes these fossils so important is not simply their beauty.

Ammonites evolved rapidly, making them some of our finest index fossils. By comparing species found here with those from Nevada, Alaska, South America, New Zealand, and Europe, we can correlate rock layers across continents and refine the geological timescale for the Early Jurassic. 

These tiny coiled shells have become some of our most powerful tools for understanding how life recovered following the greatest mass extinction our planet has ever known.

Collecting in this country also comes with responsibility. Many of these fossil localities lie within sensitive alpine environments or protected areas where collecting requires permits or is prohibited altogether. We tread lightly, respect the land, follow regulations, and remember that we are visitors in landscapes that have preserved these stories for hundreds of millions of years.

That is perhaps what I love most. You stand surrounded by towering peaks, yet beneath your boots lies the floor of an ancient tropical ocean. The mountains themselves are built from forgotten seas, and every fossil reminds us that Earth is never still. 

Continents wander. Oceans open and close. Mountains rise. Species flourish, disappear, and give way to those yet to come.

VANCOUVER ISLAND'S ICE AGE CAVES: WHERE GIANT GROUND SLOTHS STILL SLEEP

There is a version of Vancouver Island that few ever see.

Not the emerald forests draped in moss, the crashing Pacific surf or the towering Douglas firs reaching skyward, but another world hidden beneath our feet. 

A world of silent limestone chambers where time slows to a crawl and the Ice Age still lingers in the darkness.

Deep within the island's karst cave systems lie the remains of an extraordinary lost ecosystem. 

Long before people paddled these shores, before cedar canoes skimmed the inlets and long before the glaciers finally loosened their grip, these caves became natural vaults, preserving the stories of some of the largest animals ever to call Vancouver Island home.

Among the most remarkable are the giant ground sloths. The thought almost seems impossible. Sloths? On Vancouver Island? Yet it is wonderfully true.

The giant ground sloth Megalonyx jeffersonii, Jefferson's Ground Sloth, wandered British Columbia during the closing chapters of the Pleistocene. 

Unlike the tiny tree sloths that spend their days hanging upside down in the tropical forests of Central and South America, these impressive herbivores stood nearly three metres (10 feet) tall when rearing up on their hind legs. 

Giant Ground Sloth

Built like shaggy tanks, they browsed shrubs and young trees using long, powerful forelimbs tipped with formidable claws that were better suited to pulling branches toward them than defending against predators.

As the last glaciers retreated some 14,000 to 12,000 years ago, Vancouver Island was transforming. 

Vast ice sheets gave way to open parklands, willow thickets and patches of spruce, creating a landscape rich enough to support these gentle giants.

They were not alone.

The caves have yielded an astonishing collection of Ice Age fauna, each discovery adding another piece to the puzzle of a vanished world. 

Ancient bison once grazed these emerging landscapes. Caribou and deer moved across newly exposed valleys. 

Wolves and foxes hunted among the tundra-like plains. Black bears sought shelter in the caves, while the colossal short-faced bear, Arctodus simus, one of North America's largest terrestrial predators, also roamed these lands. 

Arctodus simus, La Brea Tar Pits

There is a wonderful fossil specimen of Arctodus simus on display at the La Brea Tar Pits in California, if you ever have the chance to visit. 

Smaller creatures, from marmots to birds, left their own subtle traces within the cave sediments, creating an extraordinary record of an ecosystem rebuilding itself after the glaciers.

Unlike many fossil localities exposed on cliffs or riverbanks, these treasures survived because they were tucked safely away underground. 

Animals occasionally wandered into cave entrances, became trapped in vertical shafts or sought temporary shelter, their remains gradually buried beneath sediments that remained cool, dry and remarkably undisturbed for thousands of years.

Recovering these fossils has never been the work of a lone adventurer. Their discovery is the story of collaboration. 

Many of Vancouver Island's fossil-bearing caves were first explored by dedicated local cavers and members of the BC Speleological Federation. Crawling through tight passages, descending deep shafts, and carefully mapping these hidden worlds, they occasionally encountered ancient bones resting undisturbed on cave floors. 

Knowing their importance, they did exactly what every responsible caver hopes they would do—they left the remains where they were and contacted researchers, museums and universities so the discoveries could be properly studied.

That decision preserved an irreplaceable scientific record.

My good friend Mike Trask (Oh, how I miss that man!) also contributed greatly to our knowledge of these caves and the wonders held within. 

Port Eliza Cave, Vancouver Island

Over the years, archaeologists Dr. Quentin Mackie and Dr. Duncan McLaren of the University of Victoria have led investigations of several of Vancouver Island's remarkable cave sites, including the famous Port Eliza Cave, located on the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island near the Holberg Quatsino Sound region.

Their research has revealed rich fossil assemblages that help us understand how animals—and eventually people—lived as the Ice Age drew to a close.

Quaternary geologist and geoarchaeologist Dr. Michael C. Wilson has also played a pivotal role in documenting these cave deposits. 

His comprehensive analyses of the faunal remains have helped establish the presence of giant ground sloths, bison, short-faced bears and many other species, painting an increasingly detailed picture of Vancouver Island's ancient ecosystems during a period of profound environmental change.

Together, scientists, archaeologists, geologists and volunteer cavers have opened a remarkable window into British Columbia's deep past. 

Vancouver Island has worn many faces. It has been buried beneath kilometres of ice, transformed into open tundra, crossed by giant sloths, stalked by immense bears and slowly reclaimed by the forests we know today.

A special thank you to Shirley Renaud for rekindling this wonder for all of us with her thoughtful questions around these cave systems and the Ice Age assemblages they hold. 

Image: A skeleton of M. jeffersonii on display in the Orton Geological Museum. This skeleton was mounted in 1896. Photo by Fuzheado. 

Image: Arctodus simus, La Brea Tar Pits. Photo by Jonathan Chen

Port Eliza Cave: North American West Coast interstadial environment and implications for human migrations, ScienceDirect: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379103000921

Late Wisconsinan Port Eliza Cave deposits and their implications for human coastal migration, Vancouver Island, Canada. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Location-of-Port-Eliza-Cave-along-the-hypothesized-coastal-migration-route_fig1_229940158

TENDER GIANTS: MAMENCHISAURUS SINOCANADORUM

For those who know me—and many of you know me rather well—you'll know I carry around a very long bucket list.

Some of it is wonderfully practical. There are places I ache to visit, museums I long to wander, fossils I dream of collecting with muddy boots and sunburned shoulders, and so many of you I'd love to spend a day in the field with, swapping stories while splitting shale or scanning a cliff face for the tiniest hint of ancient life.

Those dreams are mostly a matter of time, opportunity, and perhaps convincing my bank account to cooperate.

But there are other wishes that no amount of planning can ever make possible.

If I could choose one impossible gift, it would be to step back into deep time. Not to change anything. Just to watch.

To stand unnoticed beneath the towering trees of the Jurassic and witness moments forever lost to us. The fierce ones, certainly. The great hunts and desperate escapes. But even more than those, I'd love to see the quiet moments. A parent watching over its young. Animals greeting one another. The ordinary lives hidden between the fossils we find millions of years later.

One of the scenes I return to again and again is this.

The air is warm and heavy with the rich scent of damp earth, resin, and fresh conifer needles. Giant tree ferns crowd the shoreline, while dragonflies the size of small birds skim across still water that mirrors the fading sky. 

Somewhere beyond the trees, insects sing, and the calls of unseen dinosaurs drift through the evening air.

A family of Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum moves silently into the shallows.

The immense adults wade with astonishing grace, each careful step sending gentle ripples across the lake. Between them, two youngsters splash through the water, still awkward in bodies that will one day become truly colossal. 

Their impossibly long necks sway with effortless elegance as they browse from branches leaning over the water's edge, occasionally pausing as if simply enjoying the coolness of the evening. 

There is no urgency. No violence. Only the quiet rhythm of another day drawing to a close in the Jurassic.

Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum lived about 160 million years ago in what is now China and is celebrated for possessing one of the longest necks ever to evolve. At an astonishing 15 metres (50 feet), its neck alone was longer than many entire dinosaurs.

Despite their immense size, these remarkable sauropods were peaceful browsers, sweeping those extraordinary necks through the forest canopy to feed on conifers, cycads, ferns, and other lush Jurassic vegetation. Their anatomy allowed them to forage across a huge area without constantly moving their massive bodies—an elegant solution for an animal that could exceed 25 metres (82 feet) in length.

Whenever I look at these magnificent giants, I'm reminded that not every giant in Earth's history was built for conflict. Some were architects of quiet landscapes, moving through ancient forests with remarkable gentleness. 

They left no roar echoing across the valley, only soft footfalls, the rustle of leaves high in the canopy, and widening circles on the surface of a Jurassic lake as twilight settled over a world we know today only through stone.

BAA-D TO THE BONE: SHEEP IN THE FOSSIL RECORD

The story of sheep begins long before shepherds, wool sweaters, and stone fences. 

It starts in the rugged mountains and open grasslands of Eurasia, where their wild ancestors evolved into some of the most sure-footed herbivores on the planet.

Modern sheep belong to the genus Ovis, part of the Bovidae family—a wonderfully successful group that includes goats, musk oxen, antelope, cattle, bison, and buffalo. 

While the family itself first appears in the fossil record around 18–20 million years ago during the Early Miocene, true sheep arrived considerably later.

The oldest fossils confidently assigned to the genus Ovis are roughly 3 to 4 million years old, dating to the Late Pliocene of Central Asia. 

These early sheep already possessed many of the features we recognize today: sturdy limbs built for climbing steep terrain, high-crowned teeth adapted for grazing abrasive grasses, and, in many species, impressive horns that played an important role in establishing dominance and attracting mates.

Unlike antlers, which are shed each year by deer, sheep horns are permanent structures. They consist of a bony core covered by a keratin sheath that continues to grow throughout life. Fossil skulls preserve the bony core, allowing us to study the size, curvature, and growth patterns of ancient animals in remarkable detail.

One of the best-known fossil sheep is Ovis ammon, the ancestral argali. While living argali still roam the mountains of Central Asia today, fossil representatives reveal a lineage that has endured repeated cycles of glaciation, warming climates, and shifting landscapes throughout the Pleistocene.

During the Ice Age, wild sheep expanded across much of Eurasia and into North America. Their arrival on this continent came by way of Beringia—the broad land bridge that periodically connected Siberia and Alaska when sea levels dropped during glacial periods.

One particularly impressive Ice Age species is Ovis canadensis, the ancestor of today's bighorn sheep. Fossils dating back several hundred thousand years have been recovered from caves, river terraces, and ancient packrat middens throughout western North America. Some populations developed truly spectacular horns, reflecting both healthy nutrition and generations of competition between powerful rams.

Another fascinating relative is Ovis dalli, the ancestor of modern Dall sheep found today in Alaska and northwestern Canada. Fossils show that these hardy mountain specialists persisted through dramatic climatic swings, retreating to suitable alpine habitats as glaciers advanced and expanded again when conditions improved.

We learn an extraordinary amount from fossil sheep. Their teeth record changing diets as grasslands spread across continents. Horns reveal patterns of sexual selection and social behaviour. Limb bones speak of life on precipitous slopes where balance, agility, and endurance meant survival.

Even their dung has stories to tell.

Ancient sheep droppings recovered from caves and rock shelters sometimes preserve pollen, seeds, and plant fragments, offering tiny snapshots of Ice Age vegetation. Together with isotope analysis of fossil bones and teeth, these discoveries help us reconstruct entire ecosystems—revealing not only what sheep were eating, but also the climate, rainfall, and seasonal changes that shaped their world.

Around 10,500 to 11,000 years ago, humans began domesticating wild mouflon (Ovis orientalis) in the Fertile Crescent. This marked one of the great turning points in human history. Sheep became among the earliest domesticated livestock, providing meat, milk, hides, bone, and eventually the wool that transformed clothing, textiles, and trade across civilizations.

Domestic sheep also left a fossil record of sorts. Archaeological sites preserve bones showing changes brought about by selective breeding. Horn size often became reduced, body proportions shifted, and age profiles within herds reveal increasingly sophisticated management by early farming communities.

Today, more than a billion domestic sheep live around the world, descendants of animals that once navigated rugged mountain landscapes long before humans ever imagined weaving wool into cloth.

There is something rather poetic about that continuity.

From windswept Pliocene ridges to Ice Age cliffs, from Neolithic villages to modern farms, sheep have quietly accompanied the changing face of our planet. Their fossils tell us stories of climate, migration, adaptation, and survival over millions of years.

And yes... every one of those magnificent spiral horns began with an ancestor who simply kept putting one hoof in front of the other. Sometimes, steady really does win the evolutionary race.

CANADA'S FIRST SMILODON

This fierce predator with the luxurious coat is Smilodon fatalis — a compact but robust killer that weighed in around 160 to 280 kg and was 1.5 - 2.2 metres long.

Smilodon is a genus of the extinct machairodont subfamily of the felids. It is one of the most famous prehistoric mammals and the best known saber-toothed cat. Although commonly known as the saber-toothed tiger, it was not closely related to the tiger or other modern cats.

Up until a few years ago, all the great fossil specimens of this apex predator were found south of us in the United States. That was until some interesting bones from Medicine Hat, Alberta got a second look.

A few years ago, a fossil specimen caught the eye of researcher Ashley Reynolds as she was rummaging through the collections at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. 

Back in the 1960s,  University of Toronto palaeontologist C.S. Churcher and his team had collected and donated more than 1,200 specimens from their many field seasons scouring the bluffs of the South Saskatchewan River near Medicine Hat, Alberta.

Churcher is a delightful storyteller and a palaeontologist with a keen eye. I had the very great pleasure of listening to many of his talks out at the University of British Columbia and a few Vancouver Paleontological Society meetings in the mid-2000s. 

"Rufus" was a thoroughly charming storyteller and shared many of his adventures from the field. 

He moved out to the West Coast for his retirement, first to Gabriola Island then to Victoria, but his keen love of the science kept him giving talks to enthralled listeners keen to hear about his survey of the Dakhleh Oasis in the Western Desert of Egypt, geomorphology, stratigraphy, recent biology, Pleistocene and Holocene lithic cultures, insights learned from Neolithic Islamic pottery to Roman settlements.

The specimens he had collected had been roughly sorted but never examined in detail. Reynolds, who was researching the growth patterns and life histories of extinct cats saw a familiar-looking bone from an ancient cat's right front paw. That tiny paw bone had reached through time and was positively identified as Canada's first Smilodon.

These Apex Predators used their exceptionally long upper canine teeth to hunt large mammals. 

Isotopes preserved in the bones of S. fatalis in the La Brea Tar Pits in California tell us that they liked to dine on bison (Bison antiquus) and camels (Camelops) along with deer and tapirs. Smilodon is thought to have killed its prey by holding it still with its forelimbs and biting it. And that was quite the bite!

Their razor-sharp incisors were arranged in an arch. Once they bit down, the teeth would hold their prey still and stabilize it while the canine bite was delivered — and what a bite that was. They could open their mouths a full 120 degrees.

Smilodon died out at the same time that most North and South American megafauna disappeared, about 10,000 years ago. Its reliance on large animals has been proposed as the cause of its extinction, along with climate change and competition with other species. 

THE CURIOUS TALE OF THE FOSSIL RHINO

The Miocene pillow basalts from the Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area of central Washington hold an unlikely fossil. 

What looks to be a rather unremarkable ballooning at the top of a cave is actually the mould of a small rhinoceros, preserved by sheer chance as its bloated carcass sunk to the bottom of a shallow lake just prior to a volcanic explosion.

We have known about this gem for a long while now. The fossil was discovered by hikers back in 1935 and later cast by the University of California palaeontologists in 1948. 

The Dirty Thirties & The Great Depression

These were the Dirty Thirties and those living in Washington state were experiencing the Great Depression along with the rest of the country and the world. Franklin D. Roosevelt was President of the United States, navigating the States away from laissez-faire economics. 

Charmingly, Roosevelt would have his good name honoured by this same park in April of 1946, a few years before researchers at Berkeley would rekindle interest in the site.

Both hiking and fossil collecting was a fine answer to these hard economic times and came with all the delights of discovery with no cost for natural entertainment. And so it was that two fossil enthusiast couples were out looking for petrified wood just south of Dry Falls on Blue Lake in Washington State. 

While searching the pillow basalt, the Frieles and Peabodys came across a large hole high up in a cave that had the distinctive shape of an upside-down rhinoceros.

This fossil is interesting in all sorts of ways. First, we so rarely see fossils in igneous rocks. As you might suspect, both magma and lava are very hot. Magma, or molten rock, glows a bright red/orange as it simmers at a toasty 700 °C to 1300 °C (or 1300 °F to 2400 °F) beneath the Earth's surface.

A Rhinoceros Frozen in Lava

During the late Miocene and early Pliocene, repeated basaltic lava floods engulfed about 63,000 square miles of the Pacific Northwest over a period of ten to fifteen million years. After these repeated bathings the residual lava accumulated to more than 6,000 feet.

As magma pushes up to the surface becoming lava, it cools to a nice deep black. In the case of our rhino friend, this is how this unlikely fellow became a fossil. Instead of vaporizing his remains, the lava cooled relatively quickly preserving his outline as a trace fossil and remarkably, a few of his teeth, jaw and bones. The lava was eventually buried then waters from the Spokane Floods eroded enough of the overburden to reveal the remains once more.

Diceratherium tridactylum (Marsh, 1875)

Diceratherium (Marsh, 1875) is known from over a hundred paleontological occurrences from eighty-seven collections.

While there are likely many more, we have found fossil remains of Diceratherium, an extinct genus of rhinoceros, in the Miocene of Canada in Saskatchewan, China, France, Portugal, Switzerland, and multiple sites in the United States.

He has also been found in the Oligocene of Canada in Saskatchewan, and twenty-five localities in the United States — in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington and Wyoming.  

Diceratherium was a scansorial insectivore with two horns and a fair bit of girth. He was a chunky fellow, weighing in at about one tonne (or 2,200 lbs). That is about the size of a baby Humpback Whale or a walrus.

Back in the Day: Washington State 15 Million-Years Ago

He roamed a much cooler Washington state some 15 million years ago. Ice dams blocked large waterways in the northern half of the state, creating reservoirs. Floodwaters scoured the eastern side of the state, leaving scablands we still see today. In what would become Idaho, volcanic eruptions pushed through the Snake River, the lava cooling instantly as it burst to the surface in a cloud of steam. 

By then, the Cascades had arrived and we had yet to see the volcanic eruptions that would entomb whole forests up near Vantage in the Takama Canyon of Washington state. 

Know Before You Go

You are welcome to go see his final resting site beside the lake but it is difficult to reach and comes with its own risks. Head to the north end of Blue Lake in Washington. Take a boat and search for openings in the cliff face. You will know you are in the right place if you see a white "R" a couple hundred feet up inside the cliff. Inside the cave, look for a cache left by those who've explored here before you. Once you find the cache, look straight up. That hole above you is the outline of the rhino.

If you don't relish the thought of basalt caving, you can visit a cast of the rhino at the Burke Museum in Seattle, Washington. They have a great museum and are pretty sporting as they have built the cast sturdy enough for folk to climb inside. 

The Burke Museum 

The Burke Museum recently underwent a rather massive facelift and has re-opened its doors to the public. You can now explore their collections in the New Burke, a 113,000 sq. ft. building at 4300 15th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98105, United States. Or visit them virtually, at https://www.burkemuseum.org/

Photo: Robert Bruce Horsfall - https://archive.org/details/ahistorylandmam00scotgoog, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12805514

Reference: Prothero, Donald R. (2005). The Evolution of North American Rhinoceroses. Cambridge University Press. p. 228. ISBN 9780521832403.

Reference: O. C. Marsh. 1875. Notice of new Tertiary mammals, IV. American Journal of Science 9(51):239-250

Lincoln, Roosevelt and Recovery from The Great Depression

Rural Tennessee has electricity for the same reason Southeast Alaska has totem parks. In order to help the nation recover from The Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, created a number of federal agencies to put people to work. From 1938-1942 more than 200 Tlingit and Haida men carved totem poles and cleared land for the Civilian Conservation Corps in an effort to create “totem parks” the federal government hoped would draw travelers to Alaska.

This odd intersection of federal relief, Alaska Native art and marketing is the subject of Emily L. Moore’s book “Proud Raven, Panting Wolf: Carving Alaska’s New Deal Totem Parks.”

This effort to bring poles out of abandoned villages includes the Lincoln Pole being moved to Saxman Totem Park by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), who established the Saxman Totem Park in 1938.  

The top carving on the Lincoln Pole bears a great likeness of Abraham Lincoln. According to the teachings of many Tlingit elders, this carving was meant to represent the first white man seen in Tlingit territory in the 18th century.  

A century later, in the 1880s, one of my ancestors from the Gaanax.ádi Raven clan of the Tongass Tlingit commissioned the pole to commemorate our ancestor's pride to have seen this first white man—which has become a Gaanax.ádi crest—using a photograph of Abraham Lincoln as the model. 

It is important not only for these various readings of the crests but also because it claims Gaanax.ádi clan territory before the first Europeans and budding Americans came to these shores—territory that Tlingit carvers who were re-carving the pole in the 1940s were trying to assert to the U.S. government as sovereign land.

Interestingly, another pole in that same park is the Dogfish Pole, carved for Chief Ebbits Andáa, Teikweidi, Valley House. The Chief Ebbits Memorial Pole—the Dogfish Kootéeyaa Pole—was raised in 1892 in Old Tongass Village in honour of a great man, Head Chief of the Tongass and my ancestor. It was then moved, re-carved and re-painted at Saxman Totem Park in 1938 as part of Roosevelt's program—and it due to be re-carved again this year. 

It tells the story of his life and the curious way he became Ebbits as he was born Neokoots. He met and traded with some early American fur traders. One of those traders was a Mister Ebbits. The two became friends and sealed that friendship with the exchanging of names.  

If you would like to read more about that pole and others, I recommend, The Wolf and the Raven, by anthropologist Viola Garfield and architect Linn Forrest (my talented cousin), published in 1961 and still in print as I ordered a copy for a friend just this year.

ARMOUR, ESTUARIES AND ATTITUDE: MEET BOTHRIOLEPSIS, DEVONIAN BOTTOM-DWELLER EXTRAORDINAIRE

This handsome armoured fellow is Bothriolepis canadensis—one of the greats of the Late Devonian seas, here in replica form but no less marvellous for it. 

He hails from the Frasnian-aged Escuminac Formation at Parc national de Miguasha, tucked along the shores of Baie des Chaleurs in Québec—a place where deep time feels almost within reach.

Bothriolepis was a placoderm, one of the earliest groups of jawed vertebrates, clad head to tail in bony armour like a medieval knight who took a wrong turn into a river delta some 380 million years ago. 

Its boxy head shield and jointed, limb-like pectoral fins hint at a life spent nosing along the bottom—likely sifting through sediment for organic morsels, a sort of Devonian vacuum cleaner with attitude.

And what a world it lived in.

The Miguasha biota is one of Canada’s most celebrated fossil Lagerstätten—and rightly so. For over 170 years, this site has yielded an extraordinary snapshot of life near the close of the “Age of Fishes.” 

More than 18,000 specimens have been collected here, representing at least 20 species of early vertebrates—everything from jawless anaspids to lobe-finned fishes that would one day give rise to tetrapods (yes, that includes us).

By Hectonichus - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

You’ll also find early ray-finned fishes, spiny acanthodians, and other placoderms sharing the waters, alongside a supporting cast of invertebrates and the first tentative steps of life onto land—plants, scorpions, and millipedes creeping along the margins of this ancient ecosystem.

For years, scientists pictured Miguasha as a quiet freshwater lake.

But the rocks had more to say. 

A growing body of sedimentological and geochemical evidence now points to a brackish estuarine setting—where rivers met the sea in a dynamic, shifting environment rich in nutrients and, apparently, excellent at preserving the dead.

And preserve them it did.

Many of the fossils here are found fully articulated—bones still in life position, as though the animal simply paused mid-swim and slipped gently into the sediment. 

Some even retain traces of soft tissues, which is about as close as we get to time travel in palaeontology. Even more remarkable, we have identified larval and juvenile stages for the majority of species, giving us rare insight into growth and development in these early vertebrates.

Multiple layers within the Escuminac Formation are now recognized as both Konservat-Lagerstätten—sites of exceptional preservation—and Konzentrat-Lagerstätten, where fossils occur in abundance. In other words, it’s a double jackpot.

This particular replica was picked up at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle de Miguasha and now lives in the collection of the wonderfully well-travelled John Fam—proof that sometimes the best souvenirs are 380 million years in the making.

If you ever find yourself in Québec with a bit of time and a love of fossils, Miguasha is well worth the pilgrimage. Few places on Earth offer such a vivid window into the early story of vertebrate life—where armoured fishes ruled, and the blueprint for our own bodies was just beginning to take shape.

The lead photo you see here is from the deeply awesome John Fam, Chair now of both the Vancouver Paleontological Society and the British Columbia Paleontological Alliance.

STUPENDEMYS GEOGRAPHICUS: TITAN OF THE ANCIENT AMAZON

Freshwater turtles come in all shapes and sizes, but few inspire quite as much awe as Stupendemys geographicus — an aptly named giant whose very existence seems borrowed from myth. 

This now-extinct lovely inhabited the waterways of northern South America during the Miocene and grew to truly staggering proportions. 

Its shell stretched nearly three metres in length — up to 9.5 feet — making it roughly one hundred times larger than some of its closest living relatives.

To put that into perspective, Stupendemys dwarfed modern South American river turtles such as the Giant South American River Turtle (Podocnemis expansa), the Yellow-Spotted Amazon River Turtle (Podocnemis unifilis), and the Amazon River Turtle (Peltocephalus dumerilianus). 

It was even larger than the mighty leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea), the largest marine turtle alive today. And while the famous Late Cretaceous sea turtle Archelon reached impressive lengths of around 4.5 metres (15 feet), Stupendemys remains among the largest turtles ever to have paddled through ancient waters.

South America, as any Fossil Huntress worth her muddy boots will tell you, is a treasure chest of extraordinary fossil life. Through deep time, the continent hosted giant rodents, an astonishing variety of crocodylians, and waterways ruled by creatures that seem almost impossible by today's standards. 

Yet for decades, Stupendemys geographicus remained frustratingly elusive. 

Most fossil discoveries consisted of scattered shell fragments and isolated bones — tantalising clues, but never enough to reveal the full story.

Rodolfo Sánchez with Stupendemys geographicus

Then came a breakthrough.

In 1994, several new shells and the first lower jaws of Stupendemys were uncovered in the fossil-rich Urumaco region near Falcón State, Venezuela. 

The area had already earned a reputation among palaeontologists as a remarkable source of exquisitely preserved fossils. 

Researchers from Harvard University had first discovered Stupendemys remains there in the 1970s, but in the decades that followed, complete carapaces remained frustratingly rare.

That scarcity only heightened the excitement for Edwin Cadena, a palaeontologist at Universidad del Rosario in Colombia, along with colleagues from the University of Zurich and institutions across Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. They suspected that more complete specimens were waiting patiently beneath the desert sediments.

Urumaco is a palaeontologist's dream. Unlike forested localities where vegetation obscures exposures and seasonal rains wash fossils away, this arid landscape leaves ancient bones and shells weathering gently into view beneath endless blue skies. Here, persistence is often rewarded.

Rewarded they were.

Rodolfo Sánchez with Stupendemys geographicus

Among the spectacular discoveries were enormous carapaces, including those of males bearing extraordinary horn-like projections on the front edges of their shells. 

One striking image shows Venezuelan palaeontologist Rodolfo Sánchez standing beside a male Stupendemys shell from eight-million-year-old deposits in Venezuela. 

The comparison is enough to stop even seasoned fossil enthusiasts in their tracks. This was not merely a large turtle. This was a freshwater leviathan.

The team combined these Venezuelan specimens with fossils recovered from Colombia's La Tatacoa Desert. 

Together, they offered a far more complete understanding of the anatomy, lifestyle, and evolutionary relationships of these gigantic turtles. Cadena and colleagues published their findings in Science Advances in February 2020.

Their research described the largest turtle carapace ever recovered and supported the idea that all of these giant specimens belonged to a single widespread species: Stupendemys geographicus. 

During the middle to late Miocene, this enormous turtle inhabited the Pebas and Acre systems — vast wetland networks that once spread across what is now northern South America in a pan-Amazonian landscape.

And what a creature it was.

Some males sported two impressive, lance-like horns projecting from the shell, giving them the appearance of armoured river tanks with attitude. The researchers proposed that these horns represent evidence of sexual dimorphism, with males possessing the elaborate adornments while females remained hornless. Similar differences between males and females occur in many living animals, although few can claim to involve built-in jousting equipment.

Based on a shell length of approximately 2.4 metres, the team estimated body masses exceeding a metric tonne. Even among giant fossil turtles, Stupendemys stood apart.

Life in the Miocene waterways was not without its hazards. Bite marks and puncture wounds preserved on fossil shells tell a dramatic tale of conflict between these enormous turtles and equally formidable predators. 

These bad boys didn't have it easy. Sharing these rivers were gigantic caimans — powerful alligatorid crocodilians reaching lengths of more than nine metres (30 feet). To such predators, even a turtle the size of a compact car might have looked appetizing. 

Yet the scars etched into the shells of Stupendemys suggest that these encounters often ended with the turtle surviving and walking or limping away. Without the healed bite marks, my money would have been firmly on the caimans. 

The emerging picture here is one of resilience and grandeur: a single giant turtle species ranging across the northern Neotropics, exhibiting remarkable sexual dimorphism and thriving within some of the richest freshwater ecosystems the world has ever known.

Image Two: Venezuelan Palaeontologist Rodolfo Sánchez and a male carapace of Stupendemys geographicus, from Venezuela, found in 8 million years old deposits. Photo credit: Jorge Carrillo

Image Three: Venezuelan Palaeontologist Rodolfo Sánchez and a male carapace of Stupendemys geographicus, from Venezuela, found in 8 million years old deposits. Photo credit: Edwin Cadena

Reference: E-A. Cadena, T. M. Scheyer, J. D. Carrillo-Briceño, R. Sánchez, O. A Aguilera-Socorro, A. Vanegas, M. Pardo, D. M. Hansen, M. R. Sánchez-Villagra. The anatomy, paleobiology and evolutionary relationships of the largest side-necked extinct turtle. Science Advances. 12 February 2020. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aay4593

FOSSIL BEES AND FIRST NATION HISTORY

Welcome to the world of bees. This fuzzy yellow and black striped fellow is a bumblebee in the genus Bombus sp., family Apidae. 

We know him from our gardens where we see them busily lapping up nectar and pollen from flowers with their long hairy tongues.

My Norwegian cousins on my mother's side call them humle. Norway is a wonderful place to be something wild as the wild places have not been disturbed by our hands. 

Head out for a walk in the wild flowers and the sounds you will hear are the wind and the bees en masse amongst the flowers.   

There are an impressive thirty-five species of bumblebee species that call Norway hjem (home), and one, Bombus consobrinus, boasts the longest tongue that they use to feast solely on Monkshood, genus Aconitum, you may know by the name Wolf's-bane.

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, and my family on my father's side in the Pacific Northwest, bumblebees are known as ha̱mdzalat̕si — though I wonder if this is actually the word for a honey bee, Apis mellifera, as ha̱mdzat̕si is the word for a beehive.

I have a special fondness for all bees and look for them both in the garden and in First Nation art.

Bumblebees' habit of rolling around in flowers gives us a sense that these industrious insects are also playful. In First Nation art they provide levity — comic relief along with their cousins the mosquitoes and wasps — as First Nation dancers wear masks made to mimic their round faces, big round eyes and pointy stingers. 

A bit of artistic license is taken with their forms as each mask may have up to six stingers. The dancers weave amongst the watchful audience and swoop down to playfully give many of the guests a good, albeit gentle, poke. 

Honey bees actually do a little dance when they get back to the nest with news of an exciting new place to forage — truly they do. Bumblebees do not do a wee bee dance when they come home pleased with themselves from a successful foraging mission, but they do rush around excitedly, running to and fro to share their excitement. They are social learners, so this behaviour can signal those heading out to join them as they return to the perfect patch of wildflowers. 

Bumblebees are quite passive and usually sting in defense of their nest or if they feel threatened. Female bumblebees can sting several times and live on afterwards — unlike honeybees who hold back on their single sting as its barbs hook in once used and their exit shears it off, marking their demise.

They are important buzz pollinators both for our food crops and our wildflowers. Their wings beat at 130 times or more per second, literally shaking the pollen off the flowers with their vibration. 

And they truly are busy bees, spending their days fully focused on their work. Bumblebees collect and carry pollen and nectar back to the nest which may be as much as 25% to 75% of their body weight. 

And they are courteous — as they harvest each flower, they mark them with a particular scent to help others in their group know that the nectar is gone. 

The food they bring back to the nest is eaten to keep the hive healthy but is not used to make honey as each new season's queen bees hibernate over the winter and emerge reinvigorated to seek a new hive each Spring. She will choose a new site, primarily underground depending on the bumblebee species, and then set to work building wax cells for each of her fertilized eggs. 

Bumblebees are quite hardy. The plentiful hairs on their bodies are coated in oils that provide them with natural waterproofing. They can also generate more heat than their smaller, slender honey bee cousins, so they remain productive workers in cooler weather.    

We see the first bumblebees arise in the fossil record 100 million years ago and diversify alongside the earliest flowering plants. 

Their evolution is an entangled dance with the pollen and varied array of flowers that colour our world. 

We have found many wonderful examples within the fossil record, including a rather famous Eocene fossil bee found by a dear friend and naturalist who has left this Earth, Rene Savenye.

His namesake, H. Savenyei, is a lovely fossil halictine bee from Early Eocene deposits near Quilchena, British Columbia — and the first bee body-fossil known from the Okanagan Highlands — and indeed from Canada. 

It is a fitting homage, as bees symbolize honesty, playfulness and willingness to serve the community in our local First Nation lore and around the world — something Rene did his whole life.

FEED ME, SEYMOURIA: PERMIAN SHENANIGANS

Seymouria baylorensis

Feed me, Seymouria!" No, not the man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors — though life in the Early Permian had its fair share of drama. 

Meet Seymouria baylorensis, an evolutionary troublemaker that spent decades confusing us by looking suspiciously reptilian while secretly being an amphibian.

Named for Seymour, Texas, where its fossils were first discovered in the famous Permian red beds of Baylor County, Seymouria baylorensis lived roughly 280 million years ago. 

At that time, North America sat much closer to the equator, and the landscape was a seasonally dry floodplain threaded with rivers and ponds. Dragonflies zipped through the warm air, sail-backed predators such as Dimetrodon prowled the landscape, and amphibians of every shape and size made the most of a world still finding its footing after life first ventured onto land.

At around 60 centimetres (two feet) in length, Seymouria was no giant, but it had presence. With sturdy limbs, a robust body, and well-developed vertebrae, it looked every bit like an early reptile striding confidently across the Permian countryside. For years, scientists classified it as exactly that — one of the first true reptiles.

Plot twist: it wasn't.

The answer came, as it so often does in paleontology, from the youngsters. Juvenile Seymouria fossils revealed evidence of aquatic beginnings, including features associated with external gills. While the adults may have spent much of their lives exploring the drier side of the floodplain, their early life stages still depended on water.

Seymouria baylorensis

Rather than being an early reptile, Seymouria turned out to be a close amphibian relative experimenting with a more terrestrial lifestyle. It was an evolutionary in-betweener — an amphibian dressed in reptilian clothing, testing out what life away from the pond might have to offer.

I have a soft spot for these wonderfully awkward creatures. We often imagine evolution as a neat procession: one group gives rise to another in a tidy, orderly fashion. The fossil record cheerfully disagrees. It is filled with experiments, side branches, doors that lead off to nowhere and organisms trying on new adaptations like last season's fashions.

Seymouria was one of those experiments.

Nature is less interested in our categories than we are. Evolution tinkers. It improvises. It throws ideas at the wall and occasionally comes up with something extraordinary.

So, should some little darling ask whether Seymouria was an amphibian or a reptile, you can smile knowingly and say, "Well, that's where things get interesting." 

Because 280 million years ago, on the sun-baked floodplains of what is now Texas, Seymouria baylorensis was busy blurring the lines.

And let's be honest, any fossil that gives people an excuse to mentally picture a two-foot-long Permian amphibian belting show tunes while trundling across a Texas floodplain is a win in my books. 

Evolution isn't always neat and tidy. Sometimes it's just 280 million years of Permian shenanigans.

SPISULA FOSSIL CLAMS FROM HAIDA GWAII

Some lovely Spisula praecursor (Dall) fossil clams from the Skonun Formation of Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, captured from the Miocene when this coastline looked very different from today. 

These fossil bivalves belong to the surf clam lineage, a group well adapted to shallow, energetic marine environments with shifting sands and strong wave action. 

Their robust, equivalve shells and streamlined form speak to a life spent burrowed just beneath the sediment surface, filtering seawater for food while riding out constant motion above.

The Skonun Formation preserves a rich snapshot of nearshore marine life along the northeastern Pacific margin during the Miocene, roughly 23 to 5 million years ago. 

At that time, Haida Gwaii lay along an active tectonic edge, with sediments accumulating in coastal and shelf settings influenced by currents, storms, and abundant nutrient flow. 

Fossils such as Spisula praecursor help us reconstruct these dynamic environments, offering clues about water depth, substrate type, and even paleoclimate.

These particular specimens came from a single block only accessible on a falling tide. Timing, as ever, was everything—and the tide had other ideas. 

The excavation involved equal parts determination and seawater, leaving both collector and fossils thoroughly soaked. Still, there is something fitting about getting wet while freeing marine clams from their ancient shoreline, a small reminder that fieldwork often mirrors the environments we are trying to understand.

ANCIENT ELEGANCE: UINTACRINUS OF KANSAS

There is a particular kind of quiet magic in the world, the sort that sends a small shiver of awe through you when all the elements of deep time align. 

Every so often, nature grants us a perfect moment: minerals seep gently into ancient flesh, sediments cradle a creature’s delicate form, and the slow choreography of preservation captures a life in astonishing detail. 

For me, nothing embodies that magic quite like crinoids. These elegant echinoderms—equal parts flower and animal—feel like whispers from an ancient sea, caught forever in stone.

The specimen before us is no exception. If you lean in close and let your eyes wander across its intricate geometry, you will find yourself face to face with a stunning representative of Uintacrinus socialis. 

This Upper Cretaceous beauty, hailing from the Santonian roughly 85 million years ago, was first named nearly a century and a half ago by O.C. Marsh in honour of the Uinta Mountains of Utah. 

This specimen hail from the soft chalky layers of the Smoky Hills Niobrara Formation in central Kansas—a region that once lay beneath the warm, shallow waters of the Western Interior Seaway. Here, entire colonies of Uintacrinus drifted like living chandeliers, their feathery arms extended into the sun-dappled currents.

Crinoids are the quiet dancers of the animal kingdom. Although they appear plant-like—an underwater blossom swaying gracefully in the tide—they are very much animals, part of the illustrious echinoderm clan that includes sea stars, brittle stars, and urchins. 

Imagine a lily turned sentient: a cup-shaped central body holding a mouth on its upper surface, surrounded by delicate, branching arms that sweep food particles from the water. 

And, in true echinoderm fashion, add an anus inconveniently positioned right beside the mouth. Evolution, it seems, has a sense of humour.

The anchored species, traditionally called sea lilies, rise from the seafloor on slender stalks composed of stacked calcite rings—columnals—that resemble beads fallen from some ancient necklace. In shallower waters, the stalks can be short and sturdy, but in deeper seas they may stretch a metre or more, holding the crinoid aloft like the mast of a living ship, swaying gently with each passing current.

Yet most crinoids in today’s oceans are not anchored at all. The feather stars, or comatulids, break free from their juvenile stalks and spend their adulthood drifting, crawling, or even swimming with slow, balletic strokes of their arms. 

They cling to rocks and coral with tiny curved structures called cirri—delicate as eyelashes yet strong enough to grip firmly in swirling water. These cirri also allowed many fossil crinoids to hold fast to the Cretaceous seafloor, weathering tides and storms in the vast expanse of the Western Interior Seaway.

Like all echinoderms, crinoids exhibit pentaradial symmetry: a five-fold architecture expressed in their plates, arms, and feeding grooves. The aboral, or underside, of the calyx is encased in a mosaic of calcium carbonate plates that form their internal skeleton—robust enough to fossilize beautifully. 

The top surface, the oral area, is mostly soft tissue in life, opening into five deep ambulacral grooves where tube feet once reached outward like tiny graceful fingers. Between these lie the interambulacral zones, together forming the elegant star-like pattern that both living and fossil crinoids display.

Their fossil record is ancient and abundant. Crinoids first appear in the Ordovician over 450 million years ago—unless one counts Echmatocrinus, that strange and controversial form from the Burgess Shale whose affinities still spark debate among paleontologists. 

Through the Paleozoic, crinoids flourished in such numbers that their disarticulated columnals often blanket limestone beds. In some places, these columnals form the very fabric of the rock itself, creating entire cliffs built from the remnants of ancient underwater meadows. To run your fingers along such a rock is to touch a community that lived hundreds of millions of years before humans ever drew breath.

And yet, crinoids endure. They survive today in tropical reefs, deep ocean slopes, and soft-bottomed basins, their lineage stretching unbroken from those early Paleozoic seas to the modern oceans. 

Some cling to the seafloor in twilight depths; others drift like feathered ghosts, arms unfurling in silent, rhythmic pulses. 

When a fossil like Uintacrinus socialis emerges from the chalk of Kansas or the limestone of Utah, we are granted a rare window into that vanished age. 

And for those of us who spend our days searching riverbeds, quarries, and sea cliffs for such wonders, as I am sure you do, it is for the thrill of having a satisfying split and letting the past shine through.

That, to me, is pure magic.

FERNIE, BRITISH COLUMBIA: FOSSIL AMMONITE AS LARGE AS A SMART CAR

Titanites occidentalis, Fernie Ammonite

The Fernie ammonite—long known as Titanites occidentalis—has officially been given a new name: Corbinites occidentalis, a fresh genus erected after a meticulous re-evaluation of this Western Giant’s anatomy and lineage. 

What hasn’t changed is its breathtaking presence high on Coal Mountain near Fernie, British Columbia, where this colossal cephalopod has rested for roughly 150 million years.

This extraordinary fossil belongs to the family Lithacoceratinae within the ataxioceratid ammonites. 

Once thought to be a close cousin of the great Titanites of Dorset, new material—including two additional large specimens discovered at nearby mine sites—reveals ribbing patterns and growth-stage features that simply didn’t match Titanites. 

With these multiple overlapping growth stages finally available, paleontologists had the missing pieces needed to correct its identity.

So, Titanites occidentalis no more—meet Corbinites occidentalis, a giant ammonite likely endemic to the relatively isolated early Alberta foreland basin of the Late Jurassic.

Fernie, British Columbia, Canada

The Fernie ammonite is a carnivorous cephalopod from the latest Jurassic (Tithonian). 

The spectacular individual on Coal Mountain measures 1.4 metres across—about the size of a small car tire and absolutely staggering when you first see it hugged by the mountainside.

The first specimen, discovered in 1947 by a British Columbia Geophysical Society mapping team at Coal Creek, was initially mistaken for a “fossil truck tire.” 

Fair enough—if a truck tire had been forged in the Jurassic and left on a mountaintop. It was later described by GSC paleontologist Hans Frebold, who gave it the name Titanites occidentalis, inspired by the giant ammonites of Dorset. 

For decades, that name stuck, even though paleontologists suspected the attribution was shaky due to poor preservation of the holotype’s inner whorls.

Recent discoveries of two additional specimens at Teck Resources’ Coal Mountain Mine finally provided the evidence needed for reassessment. 

With intact inner whorls and beautifully preserved ribbing—including hallmark variocostate and ataxioceratoid ornamentation—researchers Terence P. Poulton and colleagues demonstrated that the Canadian ammonite does not belong in Titanites. 

Their work (Volumina Jurassica, 2023) established Corbinites as a brand-new genus, with C. occidentalis as its type and only known species.

These specimens—one exceeding a metre, another about 64 cm—confirm a resident ammonite population within this basin. And as of now, these giants are unique to Western Canada.

A Journey Up Coal Mountain

If you’re keen to meet Corbinites occidentalis in the wild, you’ll want to head to Fernie, in southeastern British Columbia, close to the Alberta border. 

As your feet move up the hillside, you can imagine this land 10,000 years ago, rising above great glaciers. Where footfalls trace the steps of those that came before you. This land has been home to the Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi ‘it First Nation and Ktunaxa or Kukin ʔamakis First Nations whose oral history have them living here since time immemorial. Like them, take only what you need and no more than the land offers — packing out anything that you packed in. 

Active logging in the area since 2021 means that older directions are now unreliable—trailheads have shifted, and a fair bit of bushwhacking is the price of admission. Though clear-cutting reshaped the slope, loggers at CanWel showed admirable restraint: they worked around the fossil, leaving it untouched.

The non-profit Wildsight has been championing efforts to protect the ammonite, hoping to establish an educational trail with provincial support and possible inclusion under the Heritage Conservation Act—where the fossil’s stewardship could be formally recognised.

HIKING TO THE FERNIE AMMONITE (IMPORTANT UPDATE: TRAIL CLOSED)

From the town of Fernie, British Columbia, you would traditionally head east along Coal Creek Road toward Coal Creek, with the ammonite site sitting 3.81 km from the road’s base as the crow flies. 

The classic approach begins at a roadside exposure of dark grey to black Cretaceous plant fossils, followed by a creek crossing and a steep, bushwhacking ascent.

However — and this is critical — the trail is currently closed.

The entire access route runs straight through an area of active logging, and conditions on the slope are extremely dangerous. Between heavy equipment, unstable cutblocks, and altered drainages, this is not a safe place for hikers right now.

Conservation groups, including Wildsight, continue working toward restoring safe public access and formalising the site under the Heritage Conservation Act. 

Their long-term goal is to reopen the trail as a designated educational hike with proper signage, but at present, the route should not be attempted. 

Once logging operations move out of the area and safety assessments are done, the possibility of reopening may return.

For now, the safest—and strongly recommended—way to view this iconic fossil is via the excellent cast on display at the Courtenay & District Museum on Vancouver Island, or at the Visitor Information Centre in Sparwood.

Photo credit: Vince Mo Media. Vince is an awesome photographer and drone operator based in Fernie, BC. Check out his work (and hire him!) by visiting his website at vmmedia.ca.

NA GEH! OODLES OF FOSSILS IN VIENNA

There are museums that politely suggest you admire science from a respectful distance… and then there are places like Vienna’s Naturhistorisches Museum, which wraps you in dark polished wood, marble staircases, glass cabinets and enough deep-time wonder to make you forget what century you’re in.

When I work in Eastern Europe, I route through Vienna just to visit this lovely place.

The Natural History Museum in Vienna opened its doors in 1889, originally built to house the extraordinary collections of the Habsburg dynasty. 

Those collections were built over centuries by emperors, archdukes, scholars and enthusiastic royal collectors who apparently looked at the world and collectively decided, “Yes, we shall keep all the shiny things.” 

Their vast holdings included rare gemstones, exotic animal specimens, fossils, minerals, scientific instruments, archaeological treasures and meteorites gathered from across Europe and far beyond. 

Expeditions, trade networks and scientific exchanges fed the ever-growing imperial cabinets of curiosity. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the Habsburgs were assembling one of the most significant natural history collections in the world — equal parts science, prestige and unapologetic treasure hoarding. 

Thankfully for the rest of us curious raccoons disguised as adults, those treasures eventually became one of the world’s great natural history museums — a sprawling celebration of fossils, meteorites, minerals, evolution and the glorious weirdness of our planet.

And ohhh, the atmosphere.

Some museums feel sleek and modern, all chrome and touchscreens. Vienna feels like stepping into the study of a Victorian natural philosopher who perhaps owned twelve magnifying glasses and definitely had strong opinions about trilobites. 

The galleries glow warmly beneath ornate ceilings, the old wood display cases creak with history, and every cabinet seems to hold another marvel waiting quietly behind glass. It smells faintly of polished timber, old books and discovery.

You wander from hall to hall half expecting Charles Darwin to appear around a corner muttering, “Na geh!” because someone has mislabeled a brachiopod.

The fossil galleries are particularly lovely — packed with ancient beasts, delicate shells, Ice Age mammals and creatures that once swam through vanished seas long before the Alps rose skyward. 

There are towering dinosaur skeletons, marine reptiles, fossil fishes and beautifully preserved ammonites curled like ancient cosmic cinnamon buns. It is the sort of museum where you start by casually admiring one fossil and forty-five minutes later find yourself emotionally attached to a prehistoric sea urchin.

“Schau ma mal,” you tell yourself. Just a quick peek at one cabinet.

Three hours later you are still there squinting lovingly at Devonian fish while whispering “Oida…” under your breath and wishing you hadn't worn new shoes. 

And then there are the meteorites.

Vienna houses the largest meteorite display collection in the world, which is frankly a wildly unfair flex. Cabinet after cabinet gleams with stones that fell from space — fragments of asteroids older than Earth itself. Tiny iron worlds. Chondrites filled with the building blocks of planets. Visitors quietly shuffle about trying to process the fact that they are standing inches away from objects that travelled millions of kilometres through the cold dark vacuum before crash-landing on our little blue world.

Austrian grandmothers somewhere nearby are probably saying, “Heast, des is jo uralt,” and honestly, they are not wrong.

Beyond the fossils and meteorites, the museum sprawls into galleries devoted to minerals and gemstones, anthropology, human evolution, Ice Age life, prehistory and the natural sciences. Statues and allegorical figures throughout the museum celebrate scientific discovery itself — a reminder that this grand building was created during a time when humanity was enthusiastically cataloguing the world and trying desperately to understand its place within it.

What I adore most about the Naturhistorisches Museum is that it still feels wonderfully human. You can breath in the history, the lived in, built out over time of the place. 

It has not polished away its age or character. The old cabinets remain. The labels feel delightfully scholarly. The architecture insists you slow down and look carefully. It reminds you that science is not only data and specimens — it is curiosity, wonder and generations of people trying to piece together the story of life on Earth.

Also, somewhere between the ammonites and the Ice Age mammals, there is a very real chance you will become emotionally overwhelmed and need a coffee and a sachertorte immediately. 

This is Vienna. It is practically the law.

If you find yourself in Vienna, give yourself several hours here — preferably with comfortable shoes and absolutely no rigid schedule. Drift through the galleries. Open every mental drawer of curiosity you possess. Admire the gemstones. Stare at meteorites. Fall in love with an ammonite. Get delightfully lost among the wooden cases and ancient bones. 

This is a museum built by many hands with care and loads of love! As the Austrians say: “Passt scho.” Everything is exactly as it should be.

Natural History Museum, Burgring 7, 1010 Vienna, Austria

Photo Credit: Nowaczyk #2685053829

SKATE SKIING THROUGH THE MISSISSIPPIAN

Trilobite and Sea Scorpion Fossil Trackways

This curious wee slab is absolutely alive with movement from the Mississippian seas, laid down some 359.2 to 318.1 million years ago when strange arthropods were bustling about the seafloor like tiny armoured Roombas on a mission. 

What makes this block especially tasty to the fossil-loving eye is that it preserves both a lovely Cruziana trilobite trackway alongside what may be a eurypterid — a sea scorpion — or horseshoe crab trackway, all dancing together across the same bit of ancient seabed. 

It is a proper prehistoric traffic jam.

Now, when we say Cruziana, we are not talking about the trilobite itself, but the style of the trace fossil — the shape and pattern left behind by the critter as it shuffled, ploughed, scraped or scooted along the sediment. 

In this case, we see elongate, bilaterally symmetrical furrows preserved along the bedding plane with repeated oblique striations running at jaunty little angles. 

I always picture some tiny Paleozoic artist armed with a wee putty knife making rhythmic cuts through wet clay. Alternatively, imagine an overly enthusiastic trilobite showing off its Olympic-level skate skiing skills across the seabed. 

Sadly, no medals were awarded in the Carboniferous. While Cruziana traces are most commonly linked to trilobites, other arthropods could make similar marks, so there is still a little mystery woven into the mud.

Trilobite and Sea Scorpion Fossil Trackways

The study of trace fossils is called ichnology — from the Greek ichnos, meaning “track” or “footprint” — and it is one of the best ways we have of decoding the behaviour of ancient life long after the critters themselves have vanished.

Trace fossils are marvellous things because they preserve behaviour rather than bodies. 

These are the footprints, furrows, resting spots and feeding trails of ancient marine life — little snapshots of daily business on the ocean floor hundreds of millions of years ago. 

They tell us who was bustling about, how they moved, where they paused, and sometimes even what mood they might have been in. 

Alright, perhaps not mood exactly, but definitely purpose. 

Every groove and scratch here records a living creature interacting with its world in real time, long before dinosaurs, birds or mammals ever appeared on the scene.

This busy little block — measuring 4 1/2" x 3 1/2" x 1 1/4" — comes from the Tar Springs Formation of Perry County, Indiana, USA, and resides in the collections of the deeply awesome David Appleton.

The Tar Springs Formation stretches across parts of southern Indiana and is known both from surface outcrops and subsurface deposits extending from central Martin County southwestward toward the Ohio River. 

In Indiana, the formation is primarily shale, though scattered limestone beds and chunky local sandstone lenses also appear, including the handsome Tick Ridge Sandstone Member described by Gray in 1986. Thickness varies considerably, from about 70 feet (21 m) to more than 150 feet (46 m) in places like central Posey County and southwestern Gibson County. 

Where the formation thickens, sandstone tends to dominate, hinting at shifting ancient shorelines, changing currents and the restless pulse of long-vanished Carboniferous seas.

MOONFISH & LIMESTONE DREAMS: A MENID FROM MONTE BOLCA

This glorious discoidal darling is Mene rhombea, an extinct moonfish from the legendary Monte Bolca deposits of northeastern Italy. 

She lived during the Mid-Eocene, roughly 45–50 million years ago, at a time when the world was warmer, crocodiles lounged much farther north, and lush tropical seas covered parts of Europe. 

The specimen in the photograph lives today in the paleontology collection of the Senckenberg Nature Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany — and honestly, it looks like it could flick its tail and swim straight off the slab.

And what a slab it is.

The limestone matrix from Monte Bolca is world-famous for preserving fish with extraordinary fidelity. Bones, fin rays, eye sockets, delicate spines — all frozen in exquisite detail like nature’s own lithographic masterpiece. 

You can see the elegant curve of the spinal column, the sharply compressed body, and those wonderfully dramatic pelvic fins trailing beneath like ribbons on a ballroom gown. If fish held fashion week during the Eocene, Mene rhombea would have strutted the runway in Milan and stolen everyone’s espresso.

Modern moonfish — relatives within the family Menidae — still swim in tropical Indo-Pacific waters today, though they are nowhere near as flamboyant as some of their fossil cousins. 

The living species, Mene maculata, has the same deep, compressed body shape that lets it pivot and glide through reefs with remarkable agility. Their fossil kin tell us this lineage has been around for quite some time.

The family Menidae first appears in the fossil record during the Paleocene and flourished through the Eocene. Their fossils are known from Europe, Asia, and parts of North America, but nowhere are they more spectacularly preserved than at Monte Bolca. 

This locality is one of the great Lagerstätten of the world — a fossil site with exceptional preservation — preserving a tropical marine ecosystem shortly after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.

Monte Bolca itself is something of a celebrity in palaeontology circles. For over four centuries, collectors and scientists have marvelled at its fossil fishes. The deposits formed in quiet lagoonal waters associated with ancient coral reefs. 

Fine carbonate mud settled gently to the seafloor, rapidly burying organisms in low-oxygen conditions that discouraged scavengers and decay. The result? Fossils so detailed you half expect them to blink.

Mene rhombea is instantly recognizable by its highly compressed, almost circular body shape and broad triangular tail. That shape was no accident. Like many reef-associated fishes, this body plan allowed quick manoeuvring through tight underwater spaces — handy when weaving through coral heads while trying not to become lunch for some enthusiastic Eocene predator with teeth the size of butter knives.

What I love most about these fossils is how modern they feel.

We often imagine prehistoric life as strange, lumbering, and alien, but many Eocene fishes would look perfectly at home in today’s tropical seas. 

Standing before this fossil in Frankfurt, you are peering into an ocean only slightly different from our own — one filled with reef fish, rays, crustaceans, sharks, and the bustling energy of marine ecosystems recovering and diversifying after the great extinction at the end of the Cretaceous.

And here she remains.

Forty-five million years later, pressed delicately into limestone, elegant,  dramatic, still the prettiest fish in the room