THEROPOD HUNTING

GROUSE GRIND: RITE OF PASSION

Vancouver, Canada's third-largest metropolis, is home to many natural wonders. One of these is the Grouse Grind hiking trail. Here, steps shrouded in mist invite you to test your mettle against one of our hallmark rites of passion.

MISTER FINALLY: PERCHED

Highly adaptable to hot and cold temperatures, Peregrines boast a breeding range that stretches from the icy cold Arctic tundra to the searing Tropics. This fellow, Mister Finally, is lucky to be in the temperate climes near White Rock on the US border.

FALCO LINNAEUS

Reaching speeds of over 320 km/h (200 mph) Peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus), are exquisite birds of prey. They are worthy predators in the air and one of the fastest moving creatures on the planet. I've had the great honor to work with several of these amazing creatures and can personally attest to both their speed and quirky yet charming personalities.

Highly adaptable to hot and cold temperatures, they boast a breeding range that stretches from the icy cold Arctic tundra to the searing Tropics. 

We've had Peregrines on this beautiful big blue planet since the Late Miocene (with closely related Raptors as early as the Eocene). Sadly, the Peregrine Falcon was added to the endangered species list back in the 1970's after their population took a beating from food sources contaminated with pesticides, DDT being the main culprit. With the ban of DDT and active breed and release programs, their numbers have significantly increased. Score one for humans being thoughtful of those we share this planet with.

OF SNOW AND ICE

Twenty thousand years ago, the last Ice Age was at its frozen peak.

While some of our ancestors were making a living in what is now Europe, they were pressed between the permanent ice fields that covered all of Scandinavia and the mountains of the Pyrenees and Alps.

Much of our present-day oceans was locked up in vast ice sheets, lowering the sea level by as much as a hundred metres lower than it is today.

It was a time of scarcity and risk. Cave bears, Ursus spelaeus, at once a food source and skilled predator, enjoyed the same hunting grounds, similar prey and competed for many of the same shelters. Cave hyena, Crocuta spelaea, also looked to these shelters and while smaller, were encountered as packs.

Beyond days filled with an endless search for food, primarily through scavenging off the kills of hyena and others, there was also the no-small-feat of checking well-situated caves for other, rather scary, inhabitants.

Large prey could be taken down by an organized hunt. Wooly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis, and majestic Irish Elk, Megaloceros giganteus, being two of the most prized.

For many, there was a regular cycle of gathering mollusks, seaweed, and birds eggs at the shoreline and picking the fungi and other small offerings from the woodland areas. Once an area had been harvested, the nomadic life continued, with groups moving from camp to camp and participating in organized annual hunts.

Nomadic groups gathered peacefully at places where large herds of bison, reindeer or other hard to hunt beasties were forced into a narrow channel to cross a mountain, river or stream. I'm impressed by this. Both at the organization of such large hunts and by the lack of evidence of warring between nomadic groups when scarcity was the norm.

AMMONITE: FIBONACCI

TUMBLER RIDGE TRACKWAY

ICE AGE PROBOSCIDEANS

This disarticulated fellow is Mammutus primigenius from the Pleistocene of Siberia, Russia. He's now housed in the Museo Nacional De Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, Spain in a display that shows thoughtful comparisons between the proboscideans. They have a wonderful display of mammoth teeth, the diagnostic flat enamel plates and the equally distinct pointy cusped molars of the mastodons.

He was a true elephant, unlike his less robust cousins, the mastodons. Mammoths were bigger (both in girth and height), weighing in at a max of 13 tonnes. They roamed widely in the Pliocene to Holocene, covering much of Africa, Europe, Asia and North America.

We see them first some 150,000 years ago from remains in Russia. They enjoyed a very long lifespan of 60-80 (up to 20 years longer than a mastodon and longer than modern elephants) and quite surprisingly, at least to me, the last mammoth died just 3,700 years ago in the icy frost of a small Alaskan island. 

Not all had the shaggy coat of long hair we picture them with. But all of these behemoth proboscideans boasted long, curved tusks, big ears, short tails and grazed on leaves, shrubs and grasses.

So why the tusks? Likely for displays of strength, protecting their delicate trunks, digging up ground vegetation and in dry riverbeds, digging holes to get at the precious life-giving water. It's a genius design, really. A bit like having a plough on the front of your skull.

WANNERIA DUNNAE

CRETACEOUS SPINE LIZARD

Spinosaurus was a huge carnivorous theropod dinosaur who lived in the swamps of North Africa during the upper Albian to upper Turonian stages of the Cretaceous, some 112 to 93.5 million years ago.

Larger even than some Tyrannosaurus and Giganotosaurus, this fellow weighed up to 21,000 kg and with all that mass was still an accomplished swimmer.

RADIOLARIAN TIMEKEEPERS

Anthocyrtium hispidum Haeckel

Radiolarian microfossils, tiny, siliceous, single-celled organisms, make for excellent timekeepers. Think of them as the world's smallest clocks. These wee fellows have been living in the world’s oceans for over 600 million years.

Radiolarians are unicellulars, wee little things with a diameter of 0.1–0.2 mm.

They produce intricate mineral skeletons, typically with a central capsule dividing the cell into the inner and outer portions of endoplasm and ectoplasm.Their beautifully elaborate mineral skeletons are usually made of silica. We find radiolaria as zooplankton throughout the ocean and their skeletal remains make up a large part of the cover of the ocean floor as siliceous ooze.

Due to their rapid turnover of species, they represent an important diagnostic fossil from the Cambrian onwards. Because they occur in continuous and well-dated sequences of rock, they act like a yardstick, helping geologists accurately date rock from around the globe.

In the Upper Triassic rocks, which predate the Triassic / Jurassic Mass Extinction event by about 10 million years, radiolarians are preserved in hundreds of forms. Just above them, in the early Jurassic rock layers laid down about the time of the great die-offs, only a fraction of the previous number of forms are represented. The more recent Jurassic rock shows a rebound of radiolarian diversity, though of course, in different forms, a diversity which continues to flourish and expand in today’s oceans.

Photo: Anthocyrtium hispidum Haeckel, magnification: 400x, bright field (negative image), stacked image Fundort / Site: Barbados Alter / Age: approx. 32-35 million years (late Eocene - early Oligocene) Präparation / Preparation: Andreas Drews

CRETACEOUS DINOSAUR TRACKWAY

After an exciting hike in the dark through the woods and down a steep incline, we reached the river. 

The tracks in this photo are from a type of armored dinosaur that date from the very end of the Cretaceous, between 68-66 million years ago.

Imagine a meandering armored tank munching on ferns and 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.

Some of the prints contain skin impressions, which is lucky as many of the prints are so shallow that they can only be recognized by the skin impressions.

There are two types of footprints at the Wolverine River Tracksite, the meat-eating theropods (at least four different sizes) and the slow, lumbering plant-eating 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.

SUMAS SLIDE FOSSIL SITE

Heidi Henderson at Sumas Slide Eocene Fossil Site