ECHOES FROM THE EOCENE: A WHALE BETWEEN WORLDS

Chrysocetus foudasil 

The impressive skull you see here belongs to Chrysocetus foudasil a member of the Basilosauridae, an ancient family of fully aquatic early whales known as archaeocetes. Though it still bore vestigial hind limbs, it no longer depended on land—a critical evolutionary step from its semi-aquatic ancestors such as Ambulocetus and Protocetus.

Basilosaurids like Chrysocetus, Dorudon, and Basilosaurus ruled the seas of the late Eocene, occupying ecological roles much like today’s dolphins and orcas. 

Basilosaurus grew into a serpent-like giant over 15 meters long, while Dorudon was smaller, sleeker, and likely faster. Chrysocetus was somewhere in between—mid-sized, streamlined, and adapted for powerful undulating swimming.

These early whales represent a pivotal stage in cetacean evolution. They bridge the gap between the land-dwelling artiodactyl ancestors (even-toed ungulates like deer and hippos) and the fully marine mysticetes (baleen whales) and odontocetes (toothed whales) that would later diversify in the Oligocene.

Looking at their remains, we are seeing a window into our world when whales were still learning to be whales—a fleeting evolutionary moment preserved in Moroccan stone, where golden bones tell the story of an ocean in transition.

BE STILL MY HEART: ANAHOPLITES PLANUS

There are fossils that whisper and then there are those that positively sing.

This interesting beauty is a splendid specimen of Anahoplites planus (Mantell, 1822), drawn from Albian-aged sediments at Courcelles-sur-Voire in the Aube region of north-central France. 

And sing, it does! There are so many things going on here!

Roughly 105 million years ago, when warm Cretaceous seas spread across much of Europe, this elegant cephalopod cruised ancient waters with all the poise of a creature that knew it wore excellent tailoring.

Anahoplites, first named by Sowerby in 1815, is a delightfully refined genus of hoplitid ammonite. 

Its shell is compressed and neatly streamlined, with flat flanks, a narrow venter — sometimes grooved, sometimes smooth — and graceful, flexuous ribs rising from modest umbilical tubercles before ending in a fringe of fine ventrolateral nodes. In short: less brute force, more couture. 

Its sturdier cousins in the Hoplitinae favour broader whorls and heavier ornament, but Anahoplites has always struck a finer silhouette.

Today, the genus sits comfortably within the subfamily Anahoplitinae, a taxonomic reshuffle that recognises its more delicate build and distinct style. We find these beauties in Middle to Late Albian rocks from England across Europe and eastward toward the Transcaspian reaches near the Caspian Sea — proof that good design travels.

And what a setting this fossil calls home. The Aube department lends its name to the Albian Stage itself, established by d’Orbigny in 1842. 

Here, the stratotype succession includes the Argiles tégulines de Courcelles, some 82 metres of clay-rich deposits, overlain by the Marnes de Brienne, a further 43 metres of marl. Their boundary is marked by a hardened bed, clear in the field to those with sharp eyes and muddy boots.

This particular shell, measuring 113 mm across, did not rest alone on the seafloor. It became a tiny apartment block after death. 

Two forms of bryozoans encrust its surface, joined by an oyster and industrious serpulid worms, all leaving their marks upon those handsome flanks. Even in death, it was prime real estate.

Lovingly prepared using potash by José Juárez Ruiz of Spain, this fossil now offers us not just the form of one ammonite, but a snapshot of an ancient community. 

One shell. Many stories. And my, what a beauty.

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.

BRONZE FROM THE DEVONIAN: PARALEJURUS

This bronzed beauty hails from an early chapter in Earth’s story — a Middle Devonian treasure, Eifelian in age, some 395 million years old. 

Meet Paralejurus rehamnanus (Alberti, 1970), collected from the fossil-rich outcrops near Issoumour, Alnif, in Morocco, where the desert keeps a rather fine archive of ancient seas.

It was the glow of this specimen — that rich, burnished bronze — that first caught the eye of collector and increasingly talented macro photographer, David Appleton. 

At first glance, one might suspect a bit of artistic licence in preparation. That golden sheen seems almost too lovely to be true. But lean in close — as David has — and the story shifts. 

The colour runs through the fossil itself, threading into the surrounding matrix in delicate mineral veins. There are repairs, yes — quite normal for Moroccan trilobites — but the finish here is something rather special. Many specimens from this region carry that classic bronze-on-black palette, but seldom with such confidence.

And what a form it has.

Paralejurus is one of those trilobites that seems to understand aesthetics. Its body is long and gently oval, the exoskeleton arched like a well-made shield. The cephalon — its head — is a smooth, domed half-moon, elegant in its simplicity. Those large compound eyes, capped with crescent-shaped lids, are particularly fetching — you can almost imagine them catching the Devonian light.

Just behind the glabella, there’s a subtle transition — a quiet little occipital node — before the body gives way to that glowing thorax. 

Ten narrow segments make up this middle section, wrapped around a broad, raised axial lobe, or rhachis, giving the whole creature a pleasing sense of structure and strength.

At the rear, the pygidium is broad and beautifully fused — a smooth, unified shield. Unlike its cousins in the genus Scutellum, whose tail segments are etched with distinct furrows like icing on a well-decorated cake (and yes, that comparison may say more about me than the trilobite), Paralejurus opts for a more seamless design. It’s less pastry, more plate armour — efficient, protective, and rather Roman in its sensibility.

Along the sides, the axial regions rise gently, and from them radiate a series of fine furrows — twelve to fourteen delicate lines that complete the poetry of its form. It is, quite simply, a beautifully built animal.

Members of the genus Paralejurus lived from the Late Silurian into the Middle Devonian, wandering ancient seafloors across what is now Africa and Europe. They grew to about nine centimetres in length, though our bronzed friend here is a more modest 5.3 cm — compact, but no less charming.

Trilobites, of course, are among the earliest animals to sport hard skeletons, and they took full advantage of that evolutionary innovation. 

They flourished, diversified, and ruled the oceans for nearly 300 million years — from the Cambrian explosion through to their final curtain call at the end of the Permian, some 252 million years ago.

Now, all that remains are their mineralized echoes — these exquisite forms in stone — each one a small, perfect window into a vanished world.

And this one? A little bronze jewel from a Devonian sea, captured beautifully through David Appleton’s lens.

WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS?

Sixty-six million years ago, on an otherwise unremarkable day at the close of the Cretaceous, the world changed in an instant.

If you had been standing in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, you would not have had time to wonder. 

A mountain-sized asteroid—roughly 10 to 12 kilometres across—tore through the atmosphere at extraordinary speed, brighter than the Sun and hotter than anything on Earth’s surface. In a heartbeat, it struck with a force equivalent to billions of nuclear bombs.

This was the Chicxulub impact.

The collision blasted a crater over 180 kilometres wide, vaporising rock, igniting forests, and sending a shockwave racing across continents. The sky itself seemed to fall. Molten debris—ejecta—was hurled high into the atmosphere before raining back down across the globe, each fragment glowing with the heat of re-entry. For a brief and terrible moment, much of the planet’s surface may have experienced searing temperatures, as if placed beneath a planetary broiler.

But the true devastation unfolded more slowly.

Fine particles—dust, ash, and sulphate aerosols—were lofted into the upper atmosphere, forming a thick veil that blocked sunlight. Photosynthesis faltered. Plants withered. Food webs, delicately balanced and deeply interconnected, began to collapse. The great non-avian dinosaurs, who had dominated Earth for over 160 million years, found themselves in a world that no longer supported them.

This was not a single bad day. It was the beginning of a prolonged ecological crisis.

We call this mass extinction event the Cretaceous–Paleogene, or K–Pg boundary. It marks the end of the Age of Dinosaurs and the dawn of a new world—one that would eventually be shaped by mammals, birds, and, much later, us.

The evidence for this catastrophic impact is written in stone.

All around the world, from Italy to Alberta, a thin layer of sediment marks this boundary. Within it lies an unusually high concentration of iridium, a rare element on Earth’s crust but common in asteroids. Shocked quartz—minerals fractured under immense pressure—and tiny glass spherules formed from vaporised rock tell the same story: something extraordinary happened here.

For decades, scientists debated alternative explanations. Volcanic activity, particularly the vast eruptions that formed the Deccan Traps in India, certainly played a role in altering the climate. These eruptions released enormous quantities of greenhouse gases and aerosols, stressing ecosystems long before the asteroid arrived.

But the consensus today is clear. The asteroid impact was the decisive blow—the coup de grâce in an already struggling world.

And yet, not everything perished.

Some creatures endured. Small mammals, tucked into burrows. Crocodilians, patient survivors of changing waters. Birds—the living descendants of theropod dinosaurs—weathered the storm and carried their lineage forward into the skies of a quieter, recovering world.

It is a humbling thought.

The forests returned. Life, as it always does, found a way to reassemble itself—different, reshaped, but resilient. The absence of the great dinosaurs opened ecological space, allowing mammals to diversify and, over millions of years, to evolve into forms both strange and familiar.

Including us.

So when we ask, “What killed the dinosaurs?” the answer is both simple and profound. A rock from space changed the course of life on Earth.

If you'd like to listen to stories like this on a podcast or stream them on video (sometimes only audio from my podcast and sometimes with visuals), head on over to www.fossilhuntress.com to link to YouTube or the Fossil Huntress Podcast. 

FOSSIL HUNTRESS PALEONTOLOGY PODCAST

Step into deep time with The Fossil Huntress Podcast—a journey through the ancient heartbeat of our planet.

Close your eyes and imagine the world as it once was: strange seas teeming with ammonites and trilobites, ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs, fern-filled forests echoing with the footsteps of dinosaurs, and sun-warmed badlands whispering secrets from ages long past.

Together, we’ll explore Earth’s great fossil treasures—places where time slows and stone remembers. From sacred landscapes to world-famous dig sites, each episode unearths the science and stories that connect us to all who have ever lived, swum, or flown across this incredible planet.

This is a podcast about discovery, deep history, and the wonder of life itself. I'll share what you want to bring with you to enjoy your time in the field and adventure stories from my time there. 

From the tiniest single-celled ancestors to the mighty creatures that once ruled the Earth, you’ll hear how fossils tell the tale of change, resilience, and renewal—the discoveries that had me whoop with joy and the crushing defeat of a poorly split piece of shale.

So grab your curiosity, favourite the show, and come fossil-hunting through time with me—one ancient adventure at a time for some family-friendly fun. 

Head on over to the Fossil Huntress Podcast on Spotify, Apple or your favourite streaming service. The latest episode answers the question, "What Killed the Dinosaurs?" Currently streaming in 116 countries. 

CTENOPHORES: COMB JELLIES

Cannibalistic Comb Jellies

This festive lantern looking lovely belongs to a group of invertebrates known as comb jellies.

Comb jellies are named for their unique plates of giant fused cilia, or combs, which run in eight rows up and down the length of their bodies. 

They are armed with sticky cells or colloblasts, that do not sting but display wonderful bioluminescent colouring as they move through the sea.

Ctenophores or comb jellies are one of the phylogenetically most important and controversial metazoan groups. 

Looks can be deceiving. At first glance you might think you are looking at a jellyfish but this is not the case. Surprisingly, they are not jellyfish and are not closely related, though they do share some characteristics with the gelatinous members of the subphylum Medusozoa. 

Comb jellies are not picky eaters. Their tastes range to what is at hand, including cannibalizing other comb jellies. They will feast on their kin along with tasty plankton, zooplankton, crustaceans and wee fish.

Interest in their fossil record has been catalysed by spectacularly preserved soft-bodied specimens from Cambrian Lagerstätten of the 518-million-years-old Chengjiang Biota, the 505-million-years-old Burgess Shale and other Burgess Shale-like deposits. 

We find them in the Late Devonian Escuminac Formation at Miguasha National Park, Quebec, Canada — a UNESCO world heritage site famous for its abundance of well-preserved vertebrate fossils including most major evolutionary groups of Devonian lower vertebrates from jawless fish to stem-tetrapods.

Based on morphological similarities of this Canadian fossil with stem-ctenophore fossils from the Cambrian Lagerstätte of the Chinese locality Chengjiang, they have been assessed for their affinity to stem-group ctenophores (dinomischids, Siphusauctum, scleroctenophorans) and early crown-group ctenophores. Modern ctenophores and many fossil forms lack mineralized hard parts, which renders the rare fossils that have been extracted from several Lagerstätten quite remarkable. 

Like the soft bodies of jellyfish and the polyps of hydrozoans and anthozoans, the probability for such soft bodies (or body regions) to become fossilized is extremely low. In spite of this low preservation potential, remains of stem-ctenophores have become known from several Cambrian and younger conservation deposits, and with even older candidate ctenophores in the Ediacaran. 

While Cambrian Lagerstätten have yielded several genera, ctenophore remains are much rarer in the Devonian; in particular, two studies, describing material from the German Hunsrück Slate. 

Bioluminescent Comb Jellies

This Early Devonian material, however, appears to belong to crown ctenophores morphologically similar to living forms such as Pleurobrachia, unlike the stem Cambrian taxa and the new Devonian stem taxon described here.

The most basal stem ctenophores are the dinomischids: sessile benthic petaloid invertebrates, many of which are equipped with a stalk. This group first was described from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale. Based on the genus Dinomischus, these early stalked forms were commonly called ‘dinomischids’. 

Zhao et al. shared that dinomischids "form a grade in the lower part of the ctenophore stem group” and include taxa such as Xianguangia, Daihua, and Dinomischus that have hexaradiate-based symmetry (e.g., sixfold, 18-fold). 

Some later, skeletonised stem-ctenophores were termed ‘Scleroctenophora’; ‘scleroctenophorans’ have a shorter stalk, lack the ‘petals’ and have no bracts and might be monophyletic. 

To date, all known dinomischids and scleroctenophorans are Cambrian. Remarkably, analysis of the material described here suggests it is a very late-surviving member of this part of the ctenophore tree, occurring in strata over a hundred million years younger with no intervening known record, thus making it a Lazarus taxon with an extensive ghost lineage. 

Palaeozoic sediments yield a growing number of fossil invertebrates with radial symmetries, some being quite enigmatic with body plans differing radically from those of extant organisms.

The morphological similarities to Cambrian forms and the mix of characters regarding overall shape and symmetries render this discovery important. The aims of this study are to describe the only known specimen of this Devonian ctenophore, discuss its phylogenetic and systematic position, and the impact of fossil data for ctenophore affinities, and assess its palaeoecological role.

SMILODON NORTH OF THE 49TH PARALLEL

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. 

APEX HUNTER OF ITS TIME: ANKYLORHIZA

Back in the 1880s, from fragments of bone weathered by time and tide, a most curious creature emerged into scientific view — an ancient toothed dolphin later named Ankylorhiza tiedemani. 

Its name, drawn from the Greek ankylo — bound or fused — and rhiza — root — hints at one of its more unusual traits: teeth with mostly single, fused roots. 

A formidable grin, and not at all what we might expect from the dolphins we know today.

We often think of dolphins as gentle, clever denizens of the sea. 

But cast your mind back to the Oligocene, and a rather different picture takes shape. Here was a hunter — swift, powerful, and armed with a mouthful of sharp teeth. Ankylorhiza tiedemani stood as the largest member of the Odontoceti — the great lineage of toothed whales that includes dolphins, porpoises, sperm whales, beaked whales, river dolphins, pilot whales, and their kin — all hunters of prey larger than plankton, all bearing teeth instead of baleen.

More clues surfaced in the decades that followed. Fragments in the 1970s and 1990s, and then something far more revealing — a nearly complete skeleton, now resting at the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History. A beautifully preserved skull, ribcage, much of the vertebral column, and even a solitary flipper. 

Rare treasures, these, for creatures of the sea. 

Together, they whisper a clearer story: a 4.8-metre predator, tracing its lineage back some 35–36 million years, diverging from baleen whales yet evolving strikingly similar features through convergence.

This was no languid swimmer. Some 24 million years ago, Ankylorhiza coursed through ancient seas with speed and purpose. 

Its body tells the tale — a narrow tailstock, additional tail vertebrae, and a shortened humerus in its flippers. Like modern dolphins, it likely powered itself with strong, rhythmic thrusts of its flukes, adjusting its course with hydrofoil-like flippers. 

Beneath the skin, robust muscles anchored to a relatively rigid torso — a design honed for movement, for pursuit, for the hunt.

The fossil record, however, does not always give up its secrets easily. Eocene whale skeletons show us the early transition from land to sea — limbs shrinking, bodies streamlining. 

But Oligocene specimens are rare, and with them, much of the story of how whales mastered fluke-powered swimming has remained elusive. 

Did these early dolphins possess the same refinements for speed? For a long time, we could only speculate.

Then came the work of Robert Boessenecker and colleagues. Their study of this remarkable skeleton reveals an animal poised between worlds — its forelimb structure bridging stem cetaceans and modern whales, its spine showing the beginnings of rigidity at the tail while retaining flexibility through the lower back. 

A body in transition, yet already capable.

And what a role it played. Its skull, teeth, vertebrae, and size all point to a macrophagous predator — one that hunted large prey and moved with relative speed. 

In life, Ankylorhiza may well have filled a niche much like that of today’s killer whales — an apex hunter of its time, commanding the ancient seas with quiet authority.

A fossil, yes — but also a story. One of innovation, convergence, and the relentless shaping of life in motion.

HOLLARDOPS: LE MAÎTRE

Hollardops sp. Devonian Trilobite

Hollardops is a genus of trilobite in the order Phacopida that lived during the Eifelian of the Middle Devonian. It was described by Le Maître in 1952 under type species Metacanthina mesocristata. 

The genus underwent reclassification in 1997 and emerged as Hollardops. We find this extinct arthropod in present-day Morocco. They share similarities with Greenops of New York and Canada but are generally larger than most Greenops species.

Hollardops have schizochroal eyes and a glabella that is slightly raised on the surface of the cephalon. Genal spines extend from the cephalon and extend to approximately the 6th thoracic segment.

Hollardops has eleven thoracic segments and also has five pairs of spines extending from the segments of the pygidium. Length ranges from approximately 3 to 9 cm.

Palaeo Coordinates — If you are a keen bean to head out in search of this lovely yourself, head to the Tazoulait Formation at Jbel (Jebel) Oufatène 30.8374368°N 4.9018067°W and Issimour 30.9669834°N 5.0373266°W SE of Alnif, western of Oued Alnif, Ma'ider region, Morocco.

CRETACEOUS PREDATORS: KOURISODON PUNTLEDGENSIS

Kourisodon puntledgensis

You would be a brave soul to be swimming in the warm, shallow seas of the Late Cretaceous—and braver still to linger near the surface. 

These waters belonged to the mosasaurs—sleek, powerful marine reptiles that ruled the global oceans with quiet authority. 

Since their first discovery in 1766, their bones have surfaced from nearly every corner of the world—New Zealand to Antarctica, Africa to Europe, the Americas to Japan—whispers of a dynasty that once circled the globe.

And yet, some of their most intriguing stories are written close to home.

Along the banks of the Puntledge River on Vancouver Island, a remarkable assemblage has come to light. Here, tucked into ancient marine sediments, we find the remains of both elasmosaurids and mosasaurs—echoes of a coastal ecosystem long vanished beneath forest and freshwater flow. 

As Dan Bowen of the Vancouver Island Paleontological Society notes, this stretch of river has yielded not one, but multiple marine reptiles from a time when this land lay beneath a teeming inland sea.

The first mosasaur material recovered here—around ten vertebrae belonging to Platecarpus—was discovered by Tim O’Bear and carefully excavated by a dedicated team led by Dr. Rolf Ludvigsen. Later prepared by Bowen and Joe Morin, these bones offer a tantalising glimpse of fast-moving predators that once patrolled these waters.

But it is a second discovery that truly sharpens the tale.

Kourisodon photo by Roland Tanglao

In 1993, upstream from the elasmosaur site, Joe Zembiliwich uncovered something altogether special on a field excursion led by the legendary Mike Trask. 

What emerged was Kourisodon puntledgensis—a name drawn from the Greek kourís and odon, meaning “razor tooth,” and an apt one at that.

Small by mosasaur standards—roughly 3.75 to 4.5 metres in length—Kourisodon was nonetheless a nimble and capable predator. 

First described within the “Leiodontini” and now placed among the clidastines, it hunted with precision in Pacific waters rich with life. Alongside it swam long-necked elasmosaurids, turtles, and other mosasaurs, though notably absent were the polycotylids so common elsewhere.

What makes this animal especially intriguing is its story of place—and of connection.

The type specimen of Kourisodon puntledgensis comes from a single locality within the Santonian-aged Pender Formation along the Puntledge River—the very place that lends the species its name. And yet, across the vast Pacific, its relatives appear again in the Upper Cretaceous rocks of Japan’s Izumi Group. 

There, fragmentary remains—including those of juveniles—hint at at least one additional, as-yet-unnamed species, distinguished by features such as longer maxillary teeth (Tanimoto, 2005; Caldwell & Konishi, 2007).

We see a similar trans-Pacific kinship echoed in the ammonites of these regions—shared lineages linking distant shores. But curiously, this connection does not extend inland. The marine reptiles of the Western Interior Seaway tell a different story entirely.

This is provinciality in action—ancient ecosystems shaped by geography, currents, and isolation. As detailed by Nicholls and Meckert (2002), the Pacific faunas of British Columbia evolved along their own path, distinct from their contemporaries to the east.

Today, a full-scale replica of Kourisodon puntledgensis—a sleek, 12-foot echo of those razor-toothed hunters—resides at the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre in Morden, Manitoba. A long way from the Puntledge, perhaps, but still tethered to that riverbank story.

And the Puntledge continues to give.

It is also the home of a newly described elasmosaur—Traskasaura—named in honour of Mike, Pat, and Heather Trask. Discovered in 1988 and formally described in 2025, it adds yet another layer to this rich and ever-unfolding story of Vancouver Island’s ancient seas.

Stand along the Puntledge now, with the river slipping quietly past your boots, and you can almost feel it—the weight of deep time, the flicker of ancient oceans, the swift shadow of something moving just beneath the surface.

And, if you’ve spent enough time in the field, you’ll feel something else too.

The memory of those who walked these shores with you—who swung their last hammer, shared their last laugh, and left their stories folded gently into the stones we still turn over today.

References

Nicholls, E. L. and Meckert, D. (2002). Marine reptiles from the Nanaimo Group (Upper Cretaceous) of Vancouver Island. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 39(11):1591–1603.

Tanimoto, M. (2005). Mosasaur remains from the Upper Cretaceous Izumi Group of Southwest Japan. Netherlands Journal of Geosciences 84(3):373–378.

Caldwell, M., & Konishi, T. (2007). Taxonomic re-assignment of the first-known mosasaur specimen from Japan, and a discussion of circum-Pacific mosasaur paleobiogeography. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 27(2):517–520.

CBC News (2018). “Ferocious” new mosasaur skeleton coming to Morden.

CJOB (2018). “Ferocious, razor-like teeth”: new mosasaur comes to Morden's fossil centre.

Winnipeg News (2018). Morden museum's collection of mosasaur skeletons grows with new addition.

Image Two: By Roland Tanglao from Vancouver, Canada - Dinos at Courtenay Museum -20090628-7Uploaded by FunkMonk, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10364342

SAKARA MADAGASGAR: OXFORDIAN OUTCROPS

Lobolytoceras costellatum

This big beastie is a superb specimen of the ammonite Lobolytoceras costellatum showing the intricate fractal pattern of its septa. 

This lovely measures to a whopping 230 mm and hails from Oxfordian outcrops near Sakara, Madagascar. Lovingly prepped by the supremely talented José Juárez Ruiz.

Ammonites were predatory, squidlike 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. Ammonites did the equivalent, catching prey in their tentacles. They 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) then they are to shelled nautiloids such as the living Nautilus species.

Lobolytoceras costellatum

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.

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.

BARNACLES: CUVIER TO DARWIN

Barnacles All Closed Up

One of the most interesting and enigmatic little critters we find at the seashore are barnacles. 

They cling to rocks at the waters' edge, closed to our curiosity, their domed mounds like little closed beaks shut to the water and the world.

They choose their permanent homes as larvae, sticking to hard substrates that will become their permanent homes for the rest of their lives. 

It has taken us a long time to find how they actually stick or what kind of "glue" they were using.

A clever fellow from Duke University's Marine Laboratory in Durhan, North Carolina finally cracked that puzzle. 

Instead of chopping up barnacles to see what makes them stick, he observed and collected the oozing glue from some Amphibalanus amphitrite as they secreted it.

Remarkably, the barnacle glue sticks to rocks in a similar way to how red cells bind together. Red blood cells bind and clot with a little help from some enzymes. These work to create long protein fibres that first blind, clot then form a scab. The mechanism barnacles use, right down to the enzyme, is very similar. That's especially interesting as about a billion years separate our evolutionary path from theirs.

So, with the help of their clever enzymes, they can affix to most anything – ship hulls, rocks, and even the skin of whales. If you find them in tidepools, you begin to see their true nature as they open up, their delicate feathery finger-like projections flowing back and forth in the surf.

Barnacle Cirri Seeking Tasty Plankton

Those wee feather-like bits you see are called cirri. Eight pairs of these thoracic limbs help barnacles to filter tasty bits of plankton from the surrounding water into their mouths.

Barnacles are cirripedes, a kind of crustacean that is covered with hard plates of calcium carbonate. Named for their cirri, they live stuck to hard surfaces in and around our world's oceans. While they do not look like crustaceans, they are definitely part of this taxonomic grouping that includes crab, lobster, crayfish, prawn, krill, and woodlice.

BARNACLES IN KWAK'WALA

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, barnacles are known as k̕wit̕a̱'a and broken barnacle shells are known as t̕sut̕su'ma.

BARNACLES IN THE FOSSIL RECORD

They have an old history. Their ancestors can be traced back to animals such as Priscansermarinus that lived during the Middle Cambrian – some 510 to 500 million years ago. 

I found my first barnacle fossil at a fossil site called Muir Creek on the south end of Vancouver Island. The fossil exposures at Muir are Oligocene, 20-25 million years old. This is about the time that barnacles can be found more readily as skeletal remains.

One of the reasons for the limited number of barnacle remains in the fossil record is their preferred habitat – high energy, shallow ocean environments. These tend to see a lot of tidal action that leads to erosion and barnacles being broken apart, slowly eroded down to bits too small to recognize for what they are.

One of the fossil remains we do find are not the barnacles themselves, but trace fossils of acrothoracican barnacle borings from Rogerella. These are commonly found in the fossil record beginning in the Devonian right up to today. Rogerella is a small pouch-shaped boring (a type of trace fossil) with a slit-like aperture currently produced by acrothoracican barnacles. 

These crustaceans extrude their legs upwards through the opening for filter-feeding (Seilacher, 1969; Lambers and Boekschoten, 1986). They are known in the fossil record as borings in carbonate substrates (shells and hardgrounds) from the Devonian to the Recent (Taylor and Wilson, 2003).

Barnacle Ancestry Goes Back to the Middle Cambrian

FROM MOLLUSCA TO ARTICULATA

Barnacles were originally classified by Linnaeus and Cuvier as Mollusca, but in 1830 John Vaughan Thompson published observations showing the metamorphosis of the nauplius and cypris larvae into adult barnacles. 

He noted how these larvae were similar to those of crustaceans.

In 1834 Hermann Burmeister published further information, reinterpreting these findings. The effect was to move barnacles from the phylum of Mollusca to Articulata, showing naturalists that detailed study was needed to reevaluate their taxonomy.

Charles Darwin took up this challenge in 1846 and developed his initial interest in a major study published as a series of monographs in 1851 and 1854. 

Darwin undertook this study, at the suggestion of his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker, to thoroughly understand at least one species before making the generalizations needed for his theory of evolution by natural selection.

BARNACLES IN A NUT SHELL

Barnacles are suspension feeders, sweeping small food into their mouth with their curved 'feet'. They are cemented to rock (usually), and covered with hard calcareous plates, which they shut firmly when the tide goes out. 

Barnacles reproduce sexually and produce little nauplius larvae that disperse in the plankton. Eventually, the larvae change into cypris form and attach on other hard surfaces to form new barnacles.

CERVUS CANADENSIS: MAGNIFICENT ELK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once here, elk flourished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CAMBRIAN CROWN: THE SPINED ELEGANCE OF ORGMASPIS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SQUAKING BY THE SEA: SEAGULLS: T'SIK'WI

A gull cries in protest at not getting his share of a meal

Many of us have the good fortune to live near the sea. It is one of the places I seek out to reset my energy and soak up the atmosphere.

I love the feeling of the wind on my face as I take my best-loved path down towards the water —the sand and shells under my feet.

In those moments, the foreshore is alive with the harsh, laughing cries of seagulls, their calls slicing through the steady hush of the tide. 

Wings flash white in the sunlight as they wheel and dive, squabbling over scraps, webbed feet slapping wet sand with a slap-slap before they lift again. The air is thick with the briny tang of seaweed and salt, mingled with the faint sourness of rotting kelp and shells cracked open by the tide. 

Each wave leaves behind a shining film on the rocks, and the gulls pick and probe at it with sharp yellow beaks, clattering and clucking in between their shrieks. The smell of the ocean mixes with the dry, feathery musk of the birds themselves, grounding the scene in a rhythm as ancient as the sea. This is the domain of the seagulls who call these shores home. 

Gulls, or colloquially seagulls, are seabirds of the family Laridae in the suborder Lari. The Laridae are known from not-yet-published fossil evidence from the Early Oligocene — 30–33 million years ago. 

Three gull-like species were described by Alphonse Milne-Edwards from the early Miocene of Saint-Gérand-le-Puy, France. 

Another fossil gull from the Middle to Late Miocene of Cherry County, Nebraska, USA, has been placed in the prehistoric genus Gaviota. 

These fossil gulls, along with undescribed Early Oligocene fossils are all tentatively assigned to the modern genus Larus. Among those of them that have been confirmed as gulls, Milne-Edwards' "Larus" elegans and "L." totanoides from the Late Oligocene/Early Miocene of southeast France have since been separated in Laricola.

Gulls are most closely related to the terns in the family Sternidae and only distantly related to auks, skimmers and distantly to waders. 

A historical name for gulls is mews, which is cognate with the German möwe, Danish måge, Swedish mås, Dutch meeuw, Norwegian måke/måse and French mouette. We still see mews blended into the lexicon of some regional dialects.

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, gulls are known as t̕sik̕wi. Most folk refer to gulls from any number of species as seagulls. This name is a local custom and does not exist in the scientific literature for their official naming. Even so, it is highly probable that it was the name you learned for them growing up.

If you have been to a coastal area nearly everywhere on the planet, you have likely encountered gulls. They are the elegantly plumed but rather noisy bunch on any beach. You will recognize them both by their size and colouring. 

Gulls are typically medium to large birds, usually grey or white, often with black markings on the head or wings. 

They typically have harsh shrill cries and long, yellow, curved bills. Their webbed feet are perfect for navigating the uneven landscape of the foreshore when they take most of their meals. 

Most gulls are ground-nesting carnivores that take live food or scavenge opportunistically, particularly the Larus species. 

Food often includes crab, clams (which they pick up, fly high and drop to crack open), fish and small birds. Gulls have unhinging jaws which allow them to consume large prey which they do with gusto. 

Their preference is to generally live along the bountiful coastal regions where they can find food with relative ease. Some prefer to live more inland and all rarely venture far out to sea, except for the kittiwakes. 

The larger species take up to four years to attain full adult plumage, but two years is typical for small gulls. Large white-headed gulls are typically long-lived birds, with a maximum age of 49 years recorded for the herring gull.

Gulls nest in large, densely packed, noisy colonies. They lay two or three speckled eggs in nests composed of vegetation. The young are precocial, born with dark mottled down and mobile upon hatching. Gulls are resourceful, inquisitive, and intelligent, the larger species in particular, demonstrating complex methods of communication and a highly developed social structure. Many gull colonies display mobbing behaviour, attacking and harassing predators and other intruders. 

Certain species have exhibited tool-use behaviour, such as the herring gull, using pieces of bread as bait with which to catch goldfish. Many species of gulls have learned to coexist successfully with humans and have thrived in human habitats. 

Others rely on kleptoparasitism to get their food. Gulls have been observed preying on live whales, landing on the whale as it surfaces to peck out pieces of flesh. They are keen, clever and always hungry. Near where I live along the west coast, I hear their calls and they always bring a smile to my day.

ANCIENT AMBUSH KILLER: MACHAIRODUS

Saber-Toothed Cat, Machairodus aphanistus

The skull before you lies cradled in a glass case at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, Spain.

This museum—one of my most cherished anywhere in the world—houses extraordinary treasures in the heart of a city I adore.

Even at a distance, the skull seems almost unreal, its sweeping lines and lethal symmetry more like an artifact of myth than a product of natural selection.

The upper canines of Machairodus aphanistus sweep downward in a deadly curve, their bases thick and reinforced, their blades tapering into elegant, murderous crescents. 

Grooves along their sides lighten the teeth without robbing them of strength, an evolutionary compromise that allowed this ancient predator to deliver precise, slicing blows. The zygomatic arches flare outward with commanding confidence, a testament to the enormous jaw muscles that once powered the bite. Even the wide nasal opening hints at a creature ruled by scent, finely attuned to the faintest whispers of prey on a warm Miocene wind.

This skull—stripped of flesh, muscle, and fur—remains a vivid record of a predator that walked the Earth between nine and five million years ago, long before the saber-toothed icons of the Americas made their mark. 

Machairodus aphanistus lived in the shifting landscapes of the Late Miocene, a time when Europe and western Asia were giving way to broader grasslands and open woodlands. Forest canopies receded. Herds grew larger and faster. Predators had to adapt or perish, and Machairodus responded with a design both beautiful and deadly.

Unlike its more famous descendant, Smilodon, with its compact body and powerful forelimbs, Machairodus moved with the grace of a panther. It was long-limbed and athletic, relying on bursts of speed and stealth to launch an ambush. But its skull tells a more nuanced story—one of tension between speed and specialization. The tall sagittal crest reveals a powerhouse of jaw muscles anchoring deep into the bone. 

The forward-facing orbits provide the stereoscopic vision needed to track prey with extraordinary accuracy. The sheer length of the canines required a jaw capable of opening nearly ninety degrees, a gape far wider than that of any modern cat, allowing those great blades to descend unobstructed into vulnerable regions like the throat.

You will be relieved to hear that our ancestors did not hunt and were not hunted by this impressive predator. Machairodus aphanistus went extinct in the Late Miocene, roughly 5–9 million years ago.

The earliest members of the human lineage (Homo) did not appear until about 2.8 million years ago, in the early Pleistocene. Even our more ancient relatives—Australopithecines—don’t show up until 4–4.5 million years ago.

So there is a gap of millions of years between the disappearance of Machairodus and the emergence of anything that could be considered human or human-adjacent. For that, I think we can all breath a collective sigh.

Still, others were alive on the plains that were their hunting grounds. Both hunters and prey.

In the warm, open savannas of the Miocene, the world of Machairodus was alive with competition. Packs of early hyenas honed their bone-crushing skills. Bear-dogs patrolled the river valleys. Other machairodonts—kin, rivals, or both—shared the same hunting grounds. 

The herbivores were just as diverse: early horses galloped across the plains in tight herds, while rhinocerotids, camelids, and horned antelope moved in cautious groups, ever aware of shadows that shifted in the tall grass. To survive in this dynamic ecosystem, Machairodus embraced an ambush strategy refined over countless generations. It would stalk silently, using shrubs, boulders, or dim forest edges for cover. 

When the distance closed, it lunged with explosive force, using its muscular forelimbs to pin or destabilize its prey before delivering a swift, slicing bite to the neck. Death came quickly—less by crushing force and more by catastrophic blood loss.

There is a sense, looking at its skull that you are seeing an evolutionary idea mid-transformation.

Machairodus aphanistus stands at a pivotal moment in the story of the saber-toothed cats. Its body remained agile and panther-like, but its cranial features were edging ever closer to the extreme adaptations that would define later giants like Homotherium and Smilodon. It represents a crucial chapter in which nature was experimenting, refining, and pushing the boundaries of what a predator could become.

The skull contains all of this history within its bone: the open grasslands, the pounding hooves of prey, the quiet tension of ambush, and the relentless arms race that shaped predator and prey alike. 

In its silence, it speaks. It tells of a world both familiar and wild, a world where the line between beauty and brutality was sharpened to a sabre’s edge.

A MASSIVE AMMONITE THE SIZE OF A CAR: THE FERNIE AMMONITE

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.