Friday 3 February 2017
Thursday 2 February 2017
IN SEARCH OF TRIASSIC BEASTIES
Well, if finds like Shonisaurus sikanniensis are any indication, my guess would be northern British Columbia.
After almost no large finds over the past hundred years, they have revealed the largest marine reptile on record, along with countless terrestrial finds that make that area one of the richest searching grounds on the globe.
There are Triassic marine outcrops in northern British Columbia that extend from Wapiti Lake to the Yukon border. Without the fossil finds, this area is just pure, raw Canadian gold in terms of scenery and environmental importance. Well worth exploring for its sheer beauty.
With the paleontological possibilities, it's the stuff of dreams. The big reveal may be new species of dinosaurs, large marine reptiles and greater insight into their behaviour and interactions deep in the Triassic.
I'm excited for the future of paleontology in the region as more of these fruitful outcrops are discovered, collected and studied.
Wednesday 1 February 2017
Thursday 26 January 2017
MIDDLE TRIASSIC-ANISIAN AMMONOID
EOCENE LOVE BUG
This is a Fossil Love Bug, one of the most satisfying fossils to collect in the Eocene deposits of Princeton, British Columbia.
Love Bugs or March Flies are hardy, medium-sized flies in the Order Diptera, with a body length ranging from 4.0 to 10.0 mm. The body is black, brown, or rusty, and thickset, with thick legs. The antennae are moniliform. The front tibiae bear large strong spurs or a circlet of spines. The tarsi are five-segmented and bear tarsal claws, pulvilli, and a well-developed empodium.
As it is with many species, these guys included, the teens of this species are troublesome but the adults turn out alright. As larvae, Bibionidae are pests of agricultural crops, devouring all those tasty young seedlings you've just planted.
Then, as they mature their tastes turn to the nectar of flowers from fruit trees and la voila, they become your best friends again. With their physical and behavioral transformation complete, Bibionidae become a welcome garden visitor, pulling their weight in the ecosystems they live in by being important pollinators.
Monday 16 January 2017
AMMONITE CRUSHED BY PREDATOR
One of the natural predators to ammonites were the marine reptiles, particularly mosasaurs and elasmosaurs.
Mosasaurs, while robust predators, lived nearer to the ocean surface, preying on fish, turtles, birds, and sadly for this fellow, ammonites.
Ammonites were also prey to the elasmosaurs, a genus of plesiosaur that lived in the Late Cretaceous. With their long necks, the could move unseen in the depths then chomp down with their cage-like teeth to munch on fish and those unfortunate enough to be the tasty bounty of ancient times.
Sunday 15 January 2017
Saturday 14 January 2017
Thursday 12 January 2017
Tuesday 10 January 2017
FLORISSANTIA SP. (STERCULIACEAE)
Florissantia, an extinct genus in the Cocoa Tree Family |
This specimen is from the Allenby Formation, which is predominately fine-grained shales and mudrocks. Florissantia are quite commonly found here alongside other plant remains and rarer, insect and fish fossils.
Monday 9 January 2017
Friday 6 January 2017
SHELTER POINT, VANCOUVER ISLAND
At the northern end of Shelter Bay, turn east onto Heard Road, which ends at a public access to Shelter Point. A low tide is necessary in order to collect from these shales. I also recommend rubber boots and eye protection. This is a good family trip.
The fossils, mainly the crab, Longusorbis and the straight ammonite Baculites, occur only in the gritty concretions that weather out of the shale. Aside from the fossils, check out the local tidepools and larger sea life in the area. Seals and playful otters can be seen basking on the beaches.
CRETACEOUS STEW: INOCERAMUS CLAMS
Visit his collection at the Qualicum Museum on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It is well worth the trip!
Thursday 5 January 2017
Wednesday 4 January 2017
THEROPOD TRACK, TUMBLER RIDGE
Rich McCrea, Dinosaur Track Specialist & Heidi Henderson |
Here you can see a theropod footprint found by Heidi Henderson, then Chair of the Vancouver Paleontological Society.
Rich McCrae, resident paleontologist and researcher at the site has published many first dinosaur finds from British Columbia. The specimen was donated to the Tumbler Ridge Paleontological Society.
Monday 2 January 2017
ANKYLOSAUR TRACKWAY
Imagine a meandering armored tank munching on ferns, shrubs and other low-growing vegetation.
This is a photograph of an ankylosaur trackway filled with water and lit by lamplight along Wolverine River, a research site of Lisa Buckley, one of two magnificent paleontologists working in the area.
There are three types of footprints at the Wolverine River Tracksite - theropods (at least four different sizes) sauropods and ankylosaurs. Filling the prints with water and using light in a clever way was a genius idea for viewing tracks that are all but invisible in bright sunlight by day.
Sunday 1 January 2017
Saturday 31 December 2016
JOHN DAY FOSSIL BEDS
Oreodont skull, John Day Fossil Beds |
The fossiliferous strata that have yielded beautifully preserved specimens of many of the animals we see domesticated today. Dogs, cats, swine and horses are common. Oreodonts, camels, rhinoceros and rodents have also been found in this ancient deciduous forested area.
Here my talented young paleontologist cousin Spencer is holding a well preserved Oreodont skull.Many sites in Oregon yield beautifully preserved fossil shells laid down over 60 million years. The asteroid that hit the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous caused a seafloor rift that split ancient Oregon. The massive hole left behind as the coastal lands slid northward filled in with sediment, refilling the basin.
These marine sediments were uplifted around the time of the birth of Oregon's Coastal Range. Easily collected and identified, as they look very similar to their modern cousins, you can dig for marine fossils all along Oregon's beachfront.
Friday 30 December 2016
MOSQUE-CATHEDRAL, CORDOBA, SPAIN
This sharing arrangement lasted until 784, when the Christian half was purchased by the Emir 'Abd al-Rahman I, who then demolished the original structure to build the grand mosque of Córdoba on its ground.
Córdoba returned to Christian rule in 1236 during the Reconquista, and the building was converted to a Roman Catholic church, culminating in the inclusion of a Renaissance cathedral nave in the 16th century. If you are visiting Andalusia, it is well worth a day trip. Bring your camera and comfortable shoes.
Thursday 29 December 2016
KOTSUIS AND HOHHUG: KWAKWAKWA'WAKA OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
Kotsuis and Hohhug, Nakoaktok |
Curtis photographed the Kwakwaka'waka ceremonial dress and masks on the west coast of British Columbia.
The Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw (or Kwakiutl) are a collective of First Nation groups of the Pacific Northwest Coast. We view them as one people, and they are bound by language, but each had their own Chiefs, beliefs and ancestors. Collectively they cover the territory of British Columbia on northern Vancouver Island, some of the islands around Johnstone Strait and Queen Charlotte Strait and the adjoining mainland.
United by the common language of Kwak'wala, the broad group can be divided into 13 nations, each with its own clan structure and distinct histories. According to Kwakwaka'wakw folklore their ancestors or ‘na’mima, came to a given spot — by way of land, sea, or underground — in the form of ancestral animals that upon arrival shed their animal appearance and became human.
The first documented contact with Westerners was in 1792 during the expedition led by English officer Captain George Vancouver, and was soon followed by colonies of Europeans settling on Canada's West Coast.
As was often the way, with settlers came disease and the Kwakwaka’wakw population dropped by up to 75% between 1830 and 1880. Their distinctive ideas about wealth — that status came not from how much you owned but how much you were able to give away — came to the particular attention of the US anthropologist Franz Boas, who wrote extensively on their elaborate gift-giving ceremonies known as the potlach.
The ceremonial practice was also a particular target of Christian missionaries who saw it as a major obstacle to their "civilizing" mission, and the Canadian government banned the practice in 1885 —although the act was soon amended, proving impossible to enforce.
This photograph of the ceremonial dress and masks of the Kwakwaka'wakw was the creation of American photographer and ethnologist Edward Curtis (1868–1952), famous for his work with First Nations and Native American people.
Part of a project funded by banking magnate J.P. Morgan, these photographs are from the collection held at the Library of Congress and contain many images not published in Curtis' enormous twenty-volume The North American Indian. In 2015, Taschen produced their epic 768-page The North American Indian: The Complete Portfolios, which gathers Curtis’ entire American Indian portfolio into one publication.
Library of Congress Collection: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?st=grid&co=ecur
Wednesday 28 December 2016
SEAGULLS: T'SIK'WI
A gull cries in protest at not getting his share of a meal |
Tuesday 27 December 2016
HUMMINGBIRD: K'WA'AK'WAMT'A
In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, hummingbirds are known as k̕wa̱'ak̕wa̱mt̕a.
Monday 26 December 2016
Thursday 22 December 2016
AMMONITE TIME KEEPERS
Argonauticeras besairei, 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 am sure you know. But the Ammonites were skilled and successful hunters. They caught their prey while swimming and floating in the water column.
Within their shells, they had a number of chambers, called septa, filled with gas or fluid that were interconnected by a wee air tube. By pushing air in or out, they were able to control their buoyancy in the water column.
They lived in the last chamber of their shells, continuously building new shell material as they grew. As each new chamber was added, the squid-like body of the ammonite would move down to occupy the final outside chamber.
They were a group of extinct marine mollusc animals in the subclass Ammonoidea of the class Cephalopoda.These molluscs, commonly referred to as ammonites, are more closely related to living coleoids — octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish) than they are to shelled nautiloids such as the living Nautilus species.
The Ammonoidea can be divided into six orders:
- Agoniatitida, Lower Devonian - Middle Devonian
- Clymeniida, Upper Devonian
- Goniatitida, Middle Devonian - Upper Permian
- Prolecanitida, Upper Devonian - Upper Triassic
- Ceratitida, Upper Permian - Upper Triassic
- Ammonitida, Lower Jurassic - Upper Cretaceous
Ammonites have intricate and complex patterns on their shells called sutures. The suture patterns differ across species and tell us what time period the ammonite is from. If they are geometric with numerous undivided lobes and saddles and eight lobes around the conch, we refer to their pattern as goniatitic, a characteristic of Paleozoic ammonites.
If they are ceratitic with lobes that have subdivided tips; giving them a saw-toothed appearance and rounded undivided saddles, they are likely Triassic. For some lovely Triassic ammonites, take a look at the specimens that come out of Hallstatt, Austria and from the outcrops in the Humboldt Mountains of Nevada.
Hoplites bennettiana (Sowby, 1826) Christophe Marot |
One of my favourite Cretaceous ammonites is the ammonite, Hoplites bennettiana (Sowby, 1826). This beauty is from Albian deposits near Carrière de Courcelles, Villemoyenne, near la région de Troyes (Aube) Champagne in northeastern France.
At the time that this fellow was swimming in our oceans, ankylosaurs were strolling about Mongolia and stomping through the foliage in Utah, Kansas and Texas. Bony fish were swimming over what would become the strata making up Canada, the Czech Republic and Australia. Cartilaginous fish were prowling the western interior seaway of North America and a strange extinct herbivorous mammal, Eobaatar, was snuffling through Mongolia, Spain and England.
In some classifications, these are left as suborders, included in only three orders: Goniatitida, Ceratitida, and Ammonitida. Once you get to know them, ammonites in their various shapes and suturing patterns make it much easier to date an ammonite and the rock formation where it is found.
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 of rock to match up to specific geologic time periods, rather like the way we use tree rings to date trees. A handy way to compare fossils and date strata across the globe.
References: Inoue, S., Kondo, S. Suture pattern formation in ammonites and the unknown rear mantle structure. Sci Rep 6, 33689 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep33689
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33689?fbclid=IwAR1BhBrDqhv8LDjqF60EXdfLR7wPE4zDivwGORTUEgCd2GghD5W7KOfg6Co#citeas
Photos: Argonauticeras besairei from the awesome José Juárez Ruiz.
Photo: Hoplites bennettiana from near Troyes, France. Collection de Christophe Marot
Wednesday 21 December 2016
Tuesday 20 December 2016
DRAGONFLIES: ODONATA
Time has turned the tables. Small lizards and birds who today choose dragonflies as a tasty snack used to be their preferred prey.
Sunday 18 December 2016
LOWER CRETACEOUS ACANTHOHOPLITES
Geologically, the Caucasus Mountains belong to a system that extends from southeastern Europe into Asia and is considered a border between them. The Greater Caucasus Mountains are mainly composed of Cretaceous and Jurassic rocks with the Paleozoic and Precambrian rocks in the higher regions.
Some volcanic formations are found throughout the range. On the other hand, the Lesser Caucasus Mountains are formed predominantly of the Paleogene rocks with a much smaller portion of the Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks.
The evolution of the Caucasus began from the Late Triassic to the Late Jurassic during the Cimmerian orogeny at the active margin of the Tethys Ocean while the uplift of the Greater Caucasus is dated to the Miocene during the Alpine orogeny.
The Caucasus Mountains formed largely as the result of a tectonic plate collision between the Arabian plate moving northwards with respect to the Eurasian plate. As the Tethys Sea was closed and the Arabian Plate collided with the Iranian Plate and was pushed against it and with the clockwise movement of the Eurasian Plate towards the Iranian Plate and their final collision, the Iranian Plate was pressed against the Eurasian Plate.
As this happened, the entire rocks that had been deposited in this basin from the Jurassic to the Miocene were folded to form the Greater Caucasus Mountains. This collision also caused the uplift and the Cenozoic volcanic activity in the Lesser Caucasus Mountains.
The preservation of this Russian specimen is outstanding. Acanthohoplites bigoureti are also found in Madagascar, Mozambique, in the Rhone-Alps of France and the Western High Atlas Mountains and near Marrakech in Morocco. This specimen measures 55mm and is in the collection of the deeply awesome Emil Black.
Thursday 15 December 2016
Tuesday 13 December 2016
HALL OF GIANTS NEW MEXICO
Sunday 11 December 2016
Saturday 10 December 2016
Friday 9 December 2016
CARNOTAURUS SASTREI
This fellow (or at least his skull) is on display at the Natural History Museum in Madrid, Spain. For now, he is the only known genus of this species of bipedal predator.
The skull is quite unusual. Initially, it has a very marine reptile feel (but make no mistake this guy is clearly a terrestrial theropod). Once you look closer you see his bull-like horns (from whence he gets his name) that imply battle between rivals for the best meal, sexual partner and to be the one who leads the herd.
I'll be interested to see his cousins once more specimens of the genus are unearthed.
Thursday 8 December 2016
Wednesday 7 December 2016
OLD HABITS IN CORDOBA SPAIN
Nuns stepping out from the palace, Cordoba, Spain |
Tuesday 6 December 2016
Saturday 3 December 2016
SHARKS: ELASMOBRANCH FISH
Modern sharks are classified within the clade Selachimorpha and are the sister group to the rays.
While we often fear them — yes, they can eat you — they should fear us as we dine on them with shocking regularity. In lieu of Shark Fin Soup, a better choice would be investing money and time into their conservation.
Thursday 1 December 2016
Sunday 27 November 2016
40 DEGREES OF LATITUDE: THE ROCKIES
But the niggling thought is still there. Is there one a single element I could name that epitomizes this vast, diverse landscape? Sea to Sky, lakes to mountains, I've kayaked, hiked, sailed and lovingly explored a great deal of it. Through 40 degrees of latitude, from Yukon to Mexico, the Rocky Mountains are North America's geographic backbone.
This is the Great Continental Divide, where the interminable flatness of the interior collides with the Western Cordillera, a major mountain system of the world. From the highest ridges of the Rockies, the rivers flow to opposite corners of the land, north to the Beaufort Sea, south to the Gulf of Mexico, east to Hudson Bay and west to the Pacific.
Friday 25 November 2016
KWAS'KWAS: OUR BEAUTIFUL BLUE JAYS
Tuesday 15 November 2016
Monday 14 November 2016
AMMONITES OF THE ARNIOCERAS BEDS
Several ammonites species can be found here including Arnioceras semicostatum & Arnioceras miserable. The two gastropods you see in the central block have yet to be identified to species. Here's hoping a nice grad student takes an interest. The rare but lovely gastros from this area would make an excellent thesis. Perhaps comparing their distribution to their counterparts in Europe.