PEREGRINE BEAUTY: SEARCHING THE SKIES

GREECE: FOSSILS OF THE AEGEAN

The islands of the Aegean are peaks of underwater mountains that extend out from the mainland. Crete is the last of this range and boasts a diverse beauty from its high mountains of Psiloritis, Lefka Ori, Dikti, to its ocean caressed pink sand beaches.

Much of the island of Crete is Miocene and filled with fossil mollusks, bivalves, gastropods who lived 5 to 23 million years ago in warm, tropical seas. They are easily collected from their pink limestone matrix and are often eroded out, mixing with their modern relatives. Aside from the marine deposits, the island boasts some of the best vertebrate finds, including the remains of Deinotherium giganteum, a massive 8 million-year-old mammal and primative relative of the elephants roaming the Earth today.

With an enormous large nasal opening at the centre of his skull, presumably to house a rather largish trunk, Deinotherium may be the inspiration behind the myth of the Cyclops, the one-eyed giant from Homer's famous Odyssey.

Aside from the plentiful fossils, the beach is home to sun bathing locals and rare extant marine species. Pinniped seals and Loggerhead sea turtles call this part of the world home. The local fields hold lush, red cretan poppies and the mountains house rare orchids and the last of remaining lynx, Roe deer, Wild goat and brown bear.

BEACHCOMBING VARGAS ISLAND

SLOTHS & BLUE GREEN ALGAE

Ever wonder why the slow moving sloth has a slightly greenish hue? Ever consider the sloth at all? Well, perhaps not. Location, location, location, is the mantra for many of us in our macro world, but it is also true for the small world of algae.

Blue green algae is a term used to describe any of a large, heterogeneous group of prokaryotic, principally photosynthetic organisms.

These little oxygenic (oxygen-producing) fellows appeared about 2,000,000,000 to 3,000,000,000 years ago and are given credit for greatly increasing the oxygen content of the atmosphere, making possible the development of aerobic (oxygen-using) organisms and some very special relationships with some of the slowest moving mammals on the planet, the sloths or Folivora.

The tribes of South America who live close to these insect and leaf-eaters, call these arboreal browsers "Ritto, Rit or Ridette, which roughly translates to variations on sleep, sleepy, munching and filthy. Not all that far off when you consider ths sloth and their lifestyle.

The sloth's body and shaggy coat, or pelage, provides a comfy habitat to two types of wee blue-green algae along with various other invertebrates. The hairs that make up the sloth's coat have grooves that help foster algal growth.

And, while Kermit the Frog says, "it's not easy being green," it couldn't be further from the truth for this slow-moving tree dweller. The blue-green algae gives the sloth a natural greenish camouflage, an arrangement that is certainly win-win.

PEREGRINE: SOAKING UP THE SUNSHINE

CHUCKANUT DRIVE: EOCENE TROPICAL PARADISE

A trip along Chuckanut Drive, in northwestern Washington is a chance to view incredible diversity from sea to sky.

An amazing array of plants and animals call this coastline home. For the fossil enthusiast, it is a chance to slip back in time and have a bird’s eye view of a tropical paradise preserved in the Eocene strata of various fossil sites. Snug up against the Pacific Ocean, this 6000m thick exposure yields a vast number of tropical and flowering plants that you might see in Mexico today.

Easily accessible by car, this rich natural playground makes for an enjoyable daytrip just one hour south of the US Border.

Over vast expanses of time, powerful tectonic forces have massaged the western edge of the continent, smashing together a seemingly endless number of islands to produce what we now know as North America and the Pacific Northwest. Intuition tells us that the earth’s crust is a permanent, fixed outer shell – terra firma.

Aside from the rare event of an earthquake or the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s, our world seems unchanging, the landscape constant. In fact, it has been on the move for billions of years and continues to shift each day. As the earth’s core began cooling, some 4.5 billion years ago, plates, small bits of continental crust, have become larger and smaller as they are swept up in or swept under their neighboring plates. Large chunks of the ocean floor have been uplifted, shifted and now find themselves thousands of miles in the air, part of mountain chains far from the ocean today or carved by glacial ice into valleys and basins.

Two hundred million years ago, Washington was two large islands, bits of continent on the move westward, eventually bumping up against the North American continent and calling it home. Even with their new fixed address, the shifting continues; the more extreme movement has subsided laterally and continues vertically. The upthrusting of plates continues to move our mountain ranges skyward – the path of least resistance. This dynamic movement has created the landscape we see today and helped form the fossil record that tells much of Washington’s relatively recent history – the past 50 million years.

Chuckanut Drive is much younger than other parts of Washington. The fossils found there lived and died some 40-55 million years ago, very close to where they are now, but in a much warmer, swampy setting. The exposures of the Chuckanut Formation were once part of a vast river delta; imagine, if you will, the bayou country of the Lower Mississippi. The siltstones, sandstones, mudstones and conglomerates of the Chuckanut Formation were laid down about 40-54 million years ago during the Eocene epoch, a time of luxuriant plant growth in the subtropical flood plain that covered much of the Pacific Northwest.

This ancient wetland provided ideal conditions to preserve the many trees, shrubs & plants that thrived here. Plants are important in the fossil record because they are more abundant and can give us a lot of information about climate, temperature, the water cycle and humidity of the region. The Chuckanut flora is made up predominantly of plants whose modern relatives live in tropical areas such as Mexico and Central America. If you are interesting in viewing a tropical paradise in your own backyard, look no further than the Chuckanut. Images and tag lines: Glyptostrobus, the Chinese swamp cypress, is perhaps the most common plant found here. Also abundant are fossilized remains of the North American bald cypress, Taxodium; Metasequoia (dawn redwood), Lygodium (climbing fern), large Sabal (palm) and leaves from a variety of broad leaf angiosperm plants such as (witch hazel), Laurus (laurel), Ficus (fig) and Platanus (sycamore), and several other forms.

While less abundant, evidence of the animals that called this ancient swamp home are also found here. Rare bird, reptile, and mammal tracks have been immortalized in the outcrops of the Chuckanut Formation. Tracks of a type of archaic mammal of the Orders Pantodonta or Dinocerata (blunt foot herbivores), footprints from a small shorebird, and tracks from an early equid or webbed bird track give evidence to the vertebrates that inhabited the swamps, lakes and river ways of the Pacific Northwest 50 million years ago.

The movement of these celebrity vertebrates was captured in the soft mud on the banks of a river, one of the only depositional environments favorable for track preservation.

EXQUISITE DETAIL: CRINOIDS

TRIASSIC PAPER CLAMS

Paper clams or "flat clams" were widespread in the Triassic. They often dominate the rocks in which they are found, as in these specimens from Pine Pass near Chetwynd found on a wee pit stop enroute to a paleontological conference near Tumbler Ridge.

Pine Pass is part of the Pardonet Formation. Just a short hike from the road we were able to easily find the abundant outcroppings of the paper clam Moinotis subcircularis, perfectly preserved and cemented in this strata from the Late Triassic.

SAFE HARBOUR: DESOLATION SOUND

DAMSELFLY

ANCIENT SUMERIAN LION

 

POND SCUM OF MY DREAMS

Slimeball…a derogative term to be sure, from the modern usage, but before it was ever dragged down to the world of insults and verbal nastiness we know it for today, the scum of which we speak and the small bacteria that form them were simply the catalysts for the many beautiful colours we see in hot springs. While a whole host of thermophilic (heat-loving) microorganisms are responsible, it is the cyanobacteria, one of the more common fellows from this group, which form most of the scum. Cyanobacteria grow together in huge colonies (bacterial mats) that form the delightfully colourful scums and slimes on the sides of hot springs.

You can tell a fair bit about the water temperature and chemistry by just looking at the colour of the pools… as cyanobacteria, while not considered picky pool dwellers, do prefer one pool to another. A fear of slime actually has a term, blennophobia, a term told to me by a very savvy 12-year old -- child not scotch. The next time you hear someone flinging this insult your way, stop and tell them how attractive scum make this world.

DARWIN: A TASTE FOR STUDIES

Chelonia. Schildkröten by Ernst Haeckel, 1904

Care for some tarantula with that walrus? No? how about some Woolly mammoth?

While eating study specimens is not de rigueur today, it was once common practice for researchers in the 1700-1880s. 

The English naturalist, Charles Darwin belonged to an elite men's club dedicated to tasting exotic meats. In his first book, Darwin wrote almost three times as much about dishes like armadillo and tortoise urine as he did on the biogeography of his Galapagos finches. 

From his great love of gastronomy, I am surprised any of his tasty specimens made it back from his historic voyage on the HMS Beagle — particularly the turtles.

One of the most famous scientific meals occurred one Saturday evening on the 13th of January, 1951. This was at the 47th Explorers Club Annual Dinner (ECAD) when members purportedly dined on a frozen woolly mammoth. 

Commander Wendell Phillips Dodge was the promotor of the banquet. He sent out press notices proclaiming the event's signature dish would be a selection of prehistoric meat. Whether Dodge did this simply to gain attendees or play a joke remains a mystery. 

The prehistoric meat was supposedly found at Woolly Cove on Akutan in the Aleutians Islands of Alaska, USA, by the eminent polar explorers' Father Bernard Rosecrans Hubbard, American geologist, explorer sometimes called the Glacier Priest, and polar explorer Captain George Francis Kosco of the United States Navy.

Fried Tarantula & Goat Eyeballs

This much-publicized meal captured the public’s imagination and became an enduring legend and source of pride for the Club, popularizing an annual menu of exotics that continues today. The Club is well-known for its notorious hors d’oeuvres like fried tarantulas and goat eyeballs as it is for its veritable whose who of notable members — Teddy Roosevelt, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Roy Chapman Andrews, Thor Heyerdahl, James Cameron.

The Yale Peabody Museum holds a sample of meat preserved from the 1951 meal, interestingly labelled as a South American Giant Ground Sloth, Megatherium, not Mammoth. The specimen of meat from that famous meal was originally designated BRCM 16925 before a transfer in 2001 from the Bruce Museum to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History (New Haven, CT, USA) where it gained the number YPM MAM 14399.

The specimen is now permanently deposited in the Yale Peabody Museum with the designation YPM HERR 19475 and is accessible to outside researchers. The meat was never fixed in formalin and was initially stored in isopropyl alcohol before being transferred to ethanol when it arrived at the Peabody Museum. DNA extraction occurred at Yale University in a clean room with equipment reserved exclusively for aDNA analyses.

In 2016, Jessica Glass and her colleagues sequenced a fragment of the mitochondrial cytochrome-b gene and studied archival material to verify its identity, which if genuine, would extend the range of Megatherium over 600% and alter views on ground sloth evolution. 

Mammoth, Megatherium — Green Sea Turtle

Their results showed that the meat was not Mammoth or Megatherium, but a bit of Green Sea Turtle, Chelonia mydas. So much for elaborate legends. The prehistoric dinner was likely meant as a publicity stunt. 

Glass's study emphasizes the value of museums collecting and curating voucher specimens, particularly those used for evidence of extraordinary claims. Not so long before Glass et al. did their experiment, a friend's mother (and my kayaking partners) served up a venison steak from her freezer to dinner guests in Castlegar that hailed from 1978. Tough? Inedible? I have it on good report that the meat was surprisingly divine.

Reference: Glass, J. R., Davis, M., Walsh, T. J., Sargis, E. J., & Caccone, A. (2016). Was Frozen Mammoth or Giant Ground Sloth Served for Dinner at The Explorers Club?. PloS one, 11(2), e0146825. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146825

Image: Chelonia. Schildkröten by Ernst Haeckel, 1904, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-07619.

Join the Explorer's Club

Fancy yourself an explorer who should join the club? Here is a link to their membership application. The monied days of old are still inherent, but you will be well pleased to learn you can now join for as little as $50 US.

Link: https://www.explorers.org/wp-content/uploads/Membership-Application_2021-11-19.pdf

REFUGE COVE: HEART OF DESOLATION

Those who make regular treks to Desolation Sound on British Columbia's west coast know the wee gem of Refuge Cove. Friendly faces, fresh seafood and hot showers bring folk back year upon year. Only a few hardy families call Refuge home year-round. The rest of the inhabitants are sun soaked sailors and power boaters stopping in to top up supplies or rest soundly in their well-sheltered bay on their Desolation travels.

DINOSAUR TRACKWAY: TUMBLER RIDGE

WOLVERINE RIVER FOSSIL SITE

BREAKING THROUGH THE MIST

MORNING COFFEE & SAIL COVERS: BOWEN ISLAND

BEACHCOMBING PARADISE: FOSSILS OF SOOKE

Sunshine, salt air, the bark of seals and... fossils await for those lucky enough to beach comb the fossiliferous shores near the fishing community of Sooke on Vancouver Islands' southwestern edge.

Sooke was originally inhabited by the T'sou-ke, a group related to the Salishan First Nations, who found the mild climate and sea access ideal. A fossil field trip brought me there last summer to explore the tidepools and well preserved marine fossils near the seaside exposures at Muir Creek.

Along the beachfront, you can find blocks of late Oligocene, 20-25 million year old, sandstone full of small gastropods, bivalves and barnacle bits of the Sooke Formation. By the late Oligocene ocean temperatures had cooled to near modern levels and the taxa preserved as fossils bear a strong resemblance to those found living beneath the Strait of Juan de Fuca today.

Mammal material, echinoids, coral, chitin and limpets are also found here but are rare. The largely intertidal assemblage of fossil species, many of which will look familiar as you've seen their modern relatives, tell us that the formation was layed down near shore.

The thickly strewn layers you'll see as big fossiliferous blocks and the lines of fossils you'll notice in the nearby cliffs suggest that they may have been deposited along a strand line. What you're sure to notice is the great ocean view and how easy it is to find something spectacular.

Whether you make a day of it or just a twenty minute luxurious beach stroll, your pockets will be filled with a healthy serving of ancient clam stew!

HALE CREEK: HARRISON FOSSIL SITE

PERFECT MISTY MORNING

DINOSAUR HUNTERS: TUMBLER RIDGE

HAIDA GWAII: RING OF FIRE

Located as they are in Canada’s most active earthquake zone, the islands of Haida Gwaii have had their share of shake-ups and scourings. Many of the Islands’ hillsides are scarred by slides and these geologic tales have made their way into the stories of the Haida First Nations who call these islands home. 

But the rock beneath speaks of an even more violent past. Very few people know that the rock here holds the key to a catastrophic event from eons ago. 

We’ve heard tales and seen images of the cataclysmic damage caused by meteriorites smashing into the Earth’s surface. Until recently, it was a meteorite impact that was blamed for the worldwide Triassic/Jurassic Mass Extinction. This wholesale dying out of species occurred some 200 million years ago. 

New evidence challenges the meteorite theory. Experts now believe that tectonic forces may have caused hundreds of volcanoes around the world to erupt simultaneously. The subsequent showers of volcanic ash would have altered the composition of the atmosphere dramatically and plunged the world into near total darkness for years until it settled from the sky. 

The picture painted of the sun flickering fitfully through inky clouds, paling against the torrents of glowing lava, while everywhere life is smothered, poisoned, or starved, rivals the most apocalyptic imaginings of Hollywood or religion. We know from worldwide evidence that the extinction was dramatic and affected upwards of 70% of the world’s biota. Perhaps counterintuitively, for one might think of water as a refuge from fire, smoke, and lava, it was marine lifeforms that suffered the most. 

This is particularly well documented in the rocks at Kennecott Point and Kunga Island. Radiolarian microfossils, tiny, siliceous, single-celled microrganisms, tell the tale. In the Upper Triassic rocks, which predate the extinction 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.

AMMONITE IN CONCRETION

PEREGRINE CALM

VINS, HUILE D'OLIVE ET TRUFFLES

FOSSIL PLANT SITE: SLIDE MOUNTAIN

HMS ORIOLE: GANGES HARBOUR

MAGNOLIA HOMAGE TO EASTER