BUMBLEBEE: HAMDZALAT'SI

This fuzzy yellow and black striped fellow is a bumblebee in the genus Bombus sp., family Apidae. We know him from our gardens where we see them busily lapping up nectar and pollen from flowers with their long hairy tongues.

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, bumblebees are known as ha̱mdzalat̕si — though I wonder if this is actually the word for a honey bee, Apis mellifera, as ha̱mdzat̕si is the word for beehive.

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

Bumblebees habit of rolling around in flowers gives us a sense that these industrious insects are also playful. In First Nation art they provide levity — comic relief along with their cousins the mosquitoes and wasps — as First Nation dancers wear masks made to mimic their round faces, big round eyes and pointy stingers. A bit of artistic license is taken with their forms as each mask may have up to six stingers. The dancers weave amongst the watchful audience and swoop down to playfully give many of the guests a good, albeit gentle, poke. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We see the first bumblebees arise in the fossil record 100 million years ago and diversify alongside the earliest flowering plants. Their evolution is an entangled dance with the pollen and varied array of flowers that colour our world. 

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

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

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

VANCOUVER ISLAND'S FOSSIL TREASURES: TRENT RIVER PALAEONTOLOGY

Dan Bowen, Chair, VIPS, Trent River

The rocks that make up the Trent River on Vancouver Island were laid down south of the equator as small, tropical islands. They rode across the Pacific heading north and slightly east over the past 85 million years to where we find them today.

The Pacific Plate is an oceanic tectonic plate that lies beneath the Pacific Ocean. And it is massive. At 103 million km2 (40 million sq mi), it is the largest tectonic plate and continues to grow fed by volcanic eruptions that piggyback onto its trailing edge.

This relentless expansion pushes the Pacific Plate into the North American Plate. The pressure subducts it beneath our continent where it then melts back into the earth. Plate tectonics are slow but powerful forces. 

The island chains that rode the plates across the Pacific smashed into our coastline and slowly built the province of British Columbia. And because each of those islands had a different origin, they create pockets of interesting and diverse geology.

It is these islands that make up the Insular Belt — a physio-geological region on the northwestern North American coast. It consists of three major island groups — and many smaller islands — that stretches from southern British Columbia up into Alaska and the Yukon. These bits of islands on the move arrived from the Late Cretaceous through the Eocene — and continues to this day.

The rocks that form the Insular Superterrane are allochthonous, meaning they are not related to the rest of the North American continent. The rocks we walk over along the Trent River are distinct from those we find throughout the rest of Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii, the rest of the province of British Columbia and completely foreign to those we find next door in Alberta.

To discover what we do find on the Trent takes only a wee stroll, a bit of digging and time to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. The first geological forays to Vancouver Island were to look for coal deposits, the profitable remains of ancient forests that could be burned to the power industry.

Jim Monger and Charlie Ross of the Geological Survey of Canada both worked to further our knowledge of the complex geology of the Comox Basin. They were at the cutting edge of west coast geology in the 1970s. It was their work that helped tease out how and where the rocks we see along the Trent today were formed and made their way north.

We know from their work that by 85 million years ago, the Insular Superterrane had made its way to what is now British Columbia. 

The lands were forested much as they are now but by extinct genera and families. The fossil remains of trees similar to oak, poplar, maple and ash can be found along the Trent and Vancouver Island. We also see the lovely remains of flowering plants such as Cupanities crenularis, figs and breadfruit.

Heading up the river, you come to a delineation zone that clearly marks the contact between the dark grey marine shales and mudstones of the Haslam Formation where they meet the sandstones of the Comox Formation. Fossilized material is less abundant in the Comox sandstones but still contains some interesting specimens. Here you begin to see fossilized wood and identifiable fossil plant material.

Further upstream, there is a small tributary, Idle Creek, where you can find more of this terrestrial material in the sandy shales. As you walk up, you see identifiable fossil plants beneath your feet and jungle-like, overgrown moss-covered, snarly trees all around you.

Walking west from the Trent River Falls at the bottom, you pass the infamous Ammonite Alley, where you can find Mesopuzosia sp. and Kitchinites sp. of the Upper Cretaceous (Santonian), Haslam Formation. Minding the slippery green algae covering some of the river rocks, you can see the first of the Polytychoceras vancouverense zone.

Continuing west, you reach the first of two fossil turtle sites on the river — amazingly, one terrestrial and one marine. If you continue, you come to the Inland Island Highway.

The Trent River has yielded some very interesting marine specimens, and significant terrestrial finds. We have found a wonderful terrestrial helochelydrid turtle, Naomichelys speciosa, and the caudal vertebrae of a Hadrosauroid dinosaur. Walking down from the Hadrosaur site you come to the site of the fossil ratfish find — one of the ocean's oddest fish.

Ratfish, Hydrolagus Collie, are chimaera found in the north-eastern Pacific Ocean today. The fossil specimen from the Trent would be considered large by modern standards as it is a bruiser in comparison to his modern counterparts. 

This robust fellow had exceptionally large eyes and sex organs that dangled enticingly between them. You mock, but there are many ratfish who would differ. While inherently sexy by ratfish standards, this fellow was not particularly tasty to their ancient marine brethren (or humans today) — so not hugely sought after as a food source or prey.

A little further again from the ratfish site we reach the contact of the two Formations. The rocks here have travelled a long way to their current location. With them, we peel away the layers of the geologic history of both the Comox Valley and the province of British Columbia.

The Trent River is not far from the Puntledge, a river whose banks have also revealed many wonderful fossil specimens. The Puntledge is also the name used by the K'ómoks First Nation to describe themselves. They have lived here since time immemorial. Along with Puntledge, they refer to themselves as Sahtloot, Sasitla and Ieeksun.

References: Note on the occurrence of the marine turtle Desmatochelys (Reptilia: Chelonioidea) from the Upper Cretaceous of Vancouver Island Elizabeth L. Nicholls Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences (1992) 29 (2): 377–380. https://doi.org/10.1139/e92-033; References: Chimaeras - The Neglected Chondrichthyans". Elasmo-research.org. Retrieved 2017-07-01.

Directions: If you're keen to explore the area, park on the side of Highway 19 about three kilometres south of Courtenay and hike up to the Trent River. Begin to look for parking about three kilometres south of the Cumberland Interchange. There is a trail that leads from the highway down beneath the bridge which will bring you to the Trent River's north side.

ETHELDRED BENETT: ENGLISH GEOLOGIST & CITIZEN SCIENTIST

Hoplites (Hoplites) bennettiana (Sowerby, 1826)

A beautiful example of the ammonite, Hoplites (Hoplites) bennettiana (Sowerby, 1826), from Early Albian localities in the Carrière de Courcelles Villemoyenne, Région de Troyes, near Champagne in northeastern France.

The species name is a homage to Etheldred Benett, an early English geologist often credited with being the first female geologist — a fossil collector par excellence.

She was also credited with being a man  —  the Natural History Society of Moscow awarding her membership as Master Etheldredus Benett in 1836. 

The confusion over her name (it did sound masculine) came again with the bestowing of a Doctorate of Civil Law from Tsar Nicholas I.

The Tsar had read Sowerby's Mineral Conchology, a major fossil reference work that contained the second-highest number of contributed fossils of the day, many of them with the best preservation seen at that time. Forty-one of those specimens were credited to Benett. Between her name and this wonderous contribution to a growing science, the Russian Tsar awarded the Doctorate to what he believed was a young male scientist on the rise. 

He believed in education, founding Kyiv University in 1834, just not for women. He was an autocratic military man frozen in time — the thought that this work could have been done by a female unthinkable. Doubly charming is that the honour from the University of St Petersburg was granted at a time when women were not allowed to attend St. Pete's or any higher institutions. That privilege arrived in 1878, twenty years after Nicholas I's death.

Benett took these honours (and social blunders) with grace. She devoted her life to collecting and studying fossils from the southwest of England, amassing an impressive personal collection she openly shared with geologist friends, colleagues and visitors to her home. Her speciality was fossils from the Middle Cretaceous, Upper Greensand in the Vale of Wardour — a valley in the county of Wiltshire near the River Nadder.

Etheldred was a local Wiltshire girl. Born Etheldred Benett on 22 July 1775 at Pyt House, Tisbury, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of the local squire Thomas Benett. Etheldred's interest was cultivated by the botanist Aylmer Bourke Lambert (1761-1842), a founding member of the Linnean Society. Benett's brother had married Lucy Lambert, Aylmer's half-sister. Aylmer was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Society of the Arts. He was also an avid fossil collector and member of the Geological Society of London. The two met and got on famously.

Aylmer kindled an interest in natural history in both of Benett's daughters. Etheldred had a great fondness for geology, stratigraphy and all things paleo, whilst her sister concentrated on botany. Etheldred had a distinct advantage over her near contemporary, the working-class Mary Anning (1799-1847), in that Benett was a woman of independent wealth who never married — and didn't need to — who could pursue the acquisition and study of fossils for her own interest.

While Anning was the marine reptile darling of the age, she was also greatly hindered by her finances. "She sells, seashells by the seashore..." while chanted in a playful spirit today, was not meant kindly at the time. Aylmer's encouragement emboldened Etheldred to go into the field to collect for herself — and collect she did. Profusely.

Benett’s contribution to the early history of Wiltshire geology is significant. She corresponded extensively with the coterie of gentlemen scientists of the day —  Gideon Mantell, William Buckland, James Sowerby, George Bellas Greenough and, Samuel Woodward. She also consorted with the lay folk and had an ongoing correspondence with William Smith, whose stratigraphy work had made a favourable impression on her brother-in-law, Aylmer.

Her collections and collaboration with geologists of the day were instrumental in helping to form the field of geology as a science. One colleague and friend, Gideon Mantell, British physician, geologist and palaeontologist, who discovered four of the five genera of dinosaurs and Iguanadon, was so inspired by Benett's work he named this Cretaceous ammonite after her — Hoplites bennettiana.

Benett's fossil assemblage was a valuable resource for her contemporaries and remains so today. It contains thousands of Jurassic and Cretaceous fossil specimens from the Wiltshire area and the Dorset Coast, including a myriad of first recorded finds. The scientific name of every taxon is usually based on one particular specimen, or in some cases multiple specimens. Many of the specimens she collected serve as the Type Specimen for new species.

Fossil Sponge, Polypothecia quadriloba, Warminster, Wiltshire

Her particular interest was the collection and study of fossil sponges. Alcyonia caught her eye early on. 

She collected and recorded her findings with the hope that one of her colleagues might share her enthusiasm and publish her work as a contribution to their own.

Alas, no one took up the helm — those interested were busy with other pursuits (or passed away) and others were less than enthusiastic or never seemed to get around to it.

To ensure the knowledge was shared in a timely fashion, she finally wrote them up and published them herself. You can read her findings in her publication, ‘A Catalogue of Organic Remains of the County of Wiltshire’ (1831), where she shares observations on the fossil sponge specimens and other invert goodies from the outcrops west of town.

She shared her ideas freely and donated many specimens to local museums. It was through her exchange of observations, new ideas and open sharing of fossils with Gideon Mantell and others that a clearer understanding of the Lower Cretaceous sedimentary rocks of Southern England was gained.

In many ways, Mantell was drawn to Benett as his ideas went against the majority opinion. At a time when marine reptiles were dominating scientific discoveries and discussions, he pushed the view that dinosaurs were terrestrial, not amphibious, and sometimes bipedal. Mantell's life's work established the now-familiar idea that the Age of Reptiles preceded the Age of Mammals. Mantell kept a journal from 1819-1852, that remained unpublished until 1940 when E. Cecil Curwen published an abridged version. (Oxford University Press 1940). John A. Cooper, Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove, published the work in its entirety in 2010.

I was elated to get a copy, both to untangle the history of the time and to better learn about the relationship between Mantell and Benett. So much of our geologic past has been revealed since Mantell's first entry two hundred years ago. The first encounter we share with the two of them is a short note from March 8, 1819. "This morning I received a letter from Miss Bennett of Norton House near Warminster Wilts, informing me of her having sent a packet of fossils for me, to the Waggon Office..." The diary records his life, but also the social interactions of the day and the small connected community of the scientific social elite. It is a delight!

Though a woman in a newly evolving field, her work, dedication and ideas were recognized and appreciated by her colleagues. Gideon Mantell described her as, "a lady of great talent and indefatigable research," whilst the Sowerbys noted her, "labours in the pursuit of geological information have been as useful as they have been incessant."

Benett produced the first measured sections of the Upper Chicksgrove quarry near Tisbury in 1819, published and shared with local colleagues as, "the measure of different beds of stone in Chicksgrove Quarry in the Parish of Tisbury.” The stratigraphic section was later published by naturalist James Sowerby without her knowledge. Her research contradicted many of Sowerby’s conclusions.

She wrote and privately published a monograph in 1831, containing many of her drawings and sketches of molluscs and sponges. Her work included sketches of fossil Alcyonia (1816) from the Green Sand Formation at Warminster Common and the immediate vicinity of Warminster in Wiltshire.

Echinoids and Bivalves. Collection of Etheldred Benett (1775-1845)

The Society holds two copies, one was given to George Bellas Greenough, and another copy was given to her friend Gideon Mantell. This work established her as a true, pioneering biostratigrapher following but not always agreeing with the work of William Smith.

If you'd like to read a lovely tale on William's work, check out the Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester. It narrates the intellectual context of the time, the development of Smith's ideas and how they contributed to the theory of evolution and more generally to a dawning realization of the true age of the earth.

The book describes the social, economic or industrial context for Smith's insights and work, such as the importance of coal mining and the transport of coal by means of canals, both of which were a stimulus to the study of geology and the means whereby Smith supported his research. Benett debated many of the ideas Smith put forward. She was luckier than Smith financially, coming from a wealthy family, a financial perk that allowed her the freedom to add fossils to her curiosity cabinet at will.

Most of her impressive collection was assumed lost in the early 20th century. It was later found and purchased by an American, Thomas Bellerby Wilson, who donated it to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Small parts of it made their way into British museums, including the Leeds City Museum, London, Bristol and the University of St. Petersburg. These collections contain many of the Type specimens and some of the very first fossils found — some with the soft tissues preserved. When Benett died in 1845, it was Mantell who penned her obituary for the London Geological Journal.

In 1989, almost a hundred and fifty years after her death, a review of her collection had Arthur Bogen and Hugh Torrens remark that her work has significantly impacted our modern understanding of Porifera, Coelenterata, Echinodermata, and the molluscan classes, Cephalopoda, Gastropoda, and Bivalvia. A worthy legacy, indeed.

Her renown lives on through her collections, her collaborations and through the beautiful 110 million-year-old ammonite you see here, Hoplites bennettiana. The lovely example you see here is in the collection of the deeply awesome Christophe Marot.

Spamer, Earle E.; Bogan, Arthur E.; Torrens, Hugh S. (1989). "Recovery of the Etheldred Benett Collection of fossils mostly from Jurassic-Cretaceous strata of Wiltshire, England, analysis of the taxonomic nomenclature of Benett (1831), and notes and figures of type specimens contained in the collection". Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. 141. pp. 115–180. JSTOR 4064955.

Torrens, H. S.; Benamy, Elana; Daeschler, E.; Spamer, E.; Bogan, A. (2000). "Etheldred Benett of Wiltshire, England, the First Lady Geologist: Her Fossil Collection in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and the Rediscovery of "Lost" Specimens of Jurassic Trigoniidae (Mollusca: Bivalvia) with Their Soft Anatomy Preserved.". Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. 150. pp. 59–123. JSTOR 4064955.

Photo credit: Fossils from Wiltshire.  In the foreground are three examples of the echinoid, Cidaris crenularis, from Calne, a town in Wiltshire, southwestern England, with bivalves behind. Caroline Lam, Archivist at the Geological Society, London, UK. http://britgeodata.blogspot.com/2016/03/etheldred-benett-first-female-geologist_30.html

Photo credit: Fossil sponges Polypothecia quadriloba, from Warminster, Wiltshire. The genus labels are Benett’s, as is the handwriting indicating the species. The small number, 20812, is the Society’s original accession label from which we can tell that the specimen was received in April 1824. The tablet onto which the fossils were glued is from the Society’s old Museum.

VISITING FERNIE'S GIANT AMMONITE

Titanites occidentalis, Fernie Ammonite

The Fernie ammonite, Titanites occidentalis, from outcrops on Coal Mountain near Fernie, British Columbia, Canada. 

This beauty is the remains of a carnivorous cephalopod within the family Dorsoplanitidae that lived and died in a shallow sea some 150 million years ago.

If you would like to get off the beaten track and hike up to see this ancient beauty, you will want to head to the town of Fernie in British Columbia close to the Alberta border. 

This is the traditional territory of the the Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi ‘it First Nation who have lived here since time immemorial. There was some active logging along the hillside in 2021, so if you are looking at older directions on how to get to the site be mindful that many of the trailheads have been altered and a fair bit of bushwhacking will be necessary to get to the fossil site proper. That being said, the loggers from CanWel may have clear-cut large sections of the hillside but they did give the ammonite a wide berth and have left it intact.

Wildsight, a non-profit environmental group out of the Kimberly Cranbrook area has been trying to gain grant funding to open up the site as an educational hike with educational signage for folks visiting the Fernie area. It is likely the province of British Columbia would top up those funds if they are able to place the ammonite under the Heritage Conservation Act. CanWel would remain the owners of the land but the province could assume the liability for those visiting this iconic piece of British Columbia's palaeontological history. 

Driving to the trail base is along an easy access road just east of town along Fernie Coal Road. There are some nice exposures of Cretaceous plant material on the north side (left-hand side) of the road as you head from Fernie towards Coal Creek. I recently drove up to Fernie to look at Cretaceous plant material and locate the access point to the now infamous Late Jurassic (Tithonian) Titanites (S.S. Buckman, 1921) site. While the drive out of town is on an easy, well-maintained road, the slog up to the ammonite site is often a wet, steep push.

Fernie, British Columbia, Canada

The first Titanites occidentalis was about one-third the size and was incorrectly identified as Lytoceras, a fast-moving nektonic carnivore. The specimen you see here is significantly larger at 1.4 metres (about four and a half feet) and rare in North America. 

Titanites occidentalis, the Western Giant, is the second known specimen of this extinct fossil species. 

The first was discovered in 1947 in nearby Coal Creek by a British Columbia Geophysical Society mapping team. When they first discovered this marine fossil high up on the hillside, they could not believe their eyes — both because it is clearly marine at the top of a mountain and the sheer size of this ancient beauty.

In the summer of 1947, a field crew was mapping coal outcrops for the BC Geological Survey east of Fernie. One of the students reported finding “a fossil truck tire.” Fair enough. The similarity of size and optics are pretty close to your average Goodridge. 

A few years later, GSC Paleontologist Hans Frebold described and named the fossil Titanites occidentalis after the large Jurassic ammonites from Dorset, England. The name comes from Greek mythology. Tithonus, as you may recall, was the Prince of Troy. He fell in love with Eos, the Greek Goddess of the Dawn. Eos begged Zeus to make her mortal lover immortal. Zeus granted her wish but did not grant Tithonus eternal youth. He did indeed live forever — ageing hideously. Ah, Zeus, you old trickster. It is a clever play on time placement. Dawn is the beginning of the day and the Tithonian being the latest age of the Late Jurassic. Clever Hans!

HIKING TO THE FERNIE AMMONITE

From the town of Fernie, British Columbia, head east along Coal Creek Road towards Coal Creek. The site is 3.81 km from the base of Coal Creek Road to the trailhead as the crow flies. I have mapped it here for you in yellow and added the wee purple GPS marker for the ammonite site proper. There is a nice, dark grey to black roadcut exposure of Cretaceous plants on the north side of the dirt road that is your cue to pull over and park.  

You access what is left of the trailhead on the south side of the road. You will need to cross the creek to begin your ascent. There is no easy way across the creek and you'll want to tackle this one with a friend when the water level is low. 

The beginning of the trail is not clear but a bit of searching will reveal the trailhead with its telltale signs of previous hikers. This is a moderate 6.3-kilometre hike up & back bushwhacking through scrub and fallen trees. Heading up, you will make about a 246-metre elevation gain. You will likely not have a cellular signal up here but if you download the Google Map to your mobile, you will have GPS to guide you. The area has been recently logged so much of the original trail has been destroyed. There may now be easier vehicle access up the logging roads but I have not driven them since the logging and new road construction.

If you are coming in from out of town, the closest airport is Cranbrook. Then it is about an hour and change to Fernie and another 15-minutes or so to park near the site.

You will want to leave your hammers with your vehicle (no need to carry the weight and this lovely should never be struck with anything more than a raindrop) as this site is best enjoyed with a camera. 

This is a site you will want to wear hiking boots to access. Know that these will get wet as you cross the creek. 

If you would like to see the ammonite but are not keen on the hike, a cast has been made by fossil preparator Rod Bartlett is on display at the Courtenay Museum in Courtenay, Vancouver Island, Canada. 

Respect for the Land / Leave No Trace

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. 

Fernie Ammonite Palaeo Coordinates: 49°29'04"N 115°00'49"W

THERIZINOSAURUS: CRETACEOUS SCYTHE LIZARD

The Scythe Lizard Therizinosaurus

The slow-moving but massive fellow you see here is Therizinosaurus. He belonged to a genus of sizable therizinosaurid that lived during the Late Cretaceous, 70 million years ago. 

These big beasties reached up to 10 metres in length and likely weighed over 3,000 kg. They lumbered along with their unusually long arms pulling down and munching on vegetation in what is now the Nemegt Formation in the Nemegt Valley of Asia. 

While there are several species of Therizinosauridae, including several from North America, the massive Asian therizinosaurids are known from a single type species Therizinosaurus cheloniformis or scythe lizard found in the Gobi Desert.

In 1918, a very fortuitous Palaeontological Field Expedition to the Mongolian Gobi Desert by the USSR Academy of Sciences found the remains of a giant, turtle-like reptile near the remains of a large carnivorous dinosaur. 

Later, In 1948, another expedition was launched to retrace the work of the USSR expedition. More of the fossil bones were collected and together with those originally collected in 1918, were written up as the type specimen of Therizinosaurus described by Soviet palaeontologist Evgeny Aleksandrovich Maleev in 1954.  You may recall that Maleeve was the fellow who described the ankylosaur Talarurus and the theropod Tarbosaurus.

The genus is best known for its gigantic manual unguals or claw bones, from which it gets its name. 

Therizinosaurus was a colossal therizinosaur that could grow up to 9–10 m (30–33 ft) long and weigh possibly over 3 t (3,000 kg). Like other therizinosaurs, it would have been a slow-moving, long-necked high browser equipped with a rhamphotheca (horny beak) and a wide torso for food processing. 

The forelimbs were particularly robust and had three fingers that bore unguals which, unlike other relatives, were very stiffened, elongated, and only had significant curvatures at the tips.

Therizinosaurus had the longest known manual unguals of any land animal, reaching above 50 cm (500 mm) in length. Its hindlimbs ended in four functionally weight-bearing toes differing from other theropod groups in which the first toe was reduced to a dewclaw and also resembling the unrelated sauropodomorphs.

It was one of the last and the largest representative of its unique group, the Therizinosauria (formerly known as Segnosauria; the segnosaurs). During and after its original description in 1954, Therizinosaurus had rather complex relationships due to the lack of complete specimens and relatives at the time. 

Maleev thought the remains of Therizinosaurus to belong to a large turtle-like reptile, and also named a separate family for the genus: Therizinosauridae. Later on, with the discovery of more complete relatives, Therizinosaurus and kin were thought to represent some kind of Late Cretaceous sauropodomorphs or transitional ornithischians, even though at some point it was suggested that it may have been a theropod. 

After years of taxonomic debate, nevertheless, they are now placed in one of the major dinosaur clades, Theropoda, specifically as maniraptorans. Therizinosaurus is widely recovered within Therizinosauridae by most analyses and with more recent specimens found in Utah and New Mexico.

The unusual arms and body anatomy (extrapolated after relatives) of Therizinosaurus have been cited as an example of convergent evolution with chalicotheriines and other primarily herbivorous mammals, suggesting similar feeding habits. 

Their elongated hand claws were more useful when pulling vegetation within reach rather than being used for active attack or defence because of their fragility, however, they may have had some role for intimidation. Its arms also were particularly resistant to stress, which suggests a robust use of these limbs. Therizinosaurus was a very tall animal, likely having reduced competition over the foliage in its habitat and outmatching predators like Tarbosaurus.

EAGER FORMATION: TUZOIA

This specimen of the arthropod Tuzoia sp. is from the Lower Cambrian Eager Formation of British Columbia. 

Tuzoia is an extinct genus of large bivalved arthropod known from Early to Middle Cambrian marine environments in what is now the Burgess Shale, Emu Bay Shale, Kaili, the Rockslide Formation, the Spence Shale, Wheeler Formation, and Marjum Formation, and the Kinzers Formation. 

As you can see here, they are also found in the Lower Cambrian Eager Formation near Cranbrook British Columbia. 

This particular specimen is from the Rifle Range outcrop near Cranbrook where you can also find numerous fragments and complete specimens of the olenellid trilobites Ollenellus sp. and the larger, more robust Wanneria dunnae, along with Mesonacis eagerensis (Best, 1952).

The site outcrops at a few locations as you head east out of Cranbrook towards Fort Steele. The first trilobites were discovered with the building of the Kootenay Highway connecting Cranbrook to Fort Steele and beyond. Several other localities, including the outcrops at the Silhouette Rife Range — which is literally on a Rifle Range where folks go to shoot at things — is a shade older than the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale but the fauna here is much less varied. 

The site has been known and collected since the 1920s. Back in the day, fossil collecting was a family affair with folks heading out in their lightly coloured finery to picnic and surface collect the eroding exposures. Cranbrook local, Clement Hungerford Pollen was an engineer and avocational palaeontologist. He promoted collecting the exposures of the Eager Formation around 1921. As a pedigreed Englishman of considerable means, he had invested in the Kootenay Central Railway, revitalizing the town by opening up railway access within the region.

BARNACLES: K'WIT'A' A

One of the most interesting and enigmatic little critters we find at the seashore are barnacles. They cling to rocks deep in the sea and 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.

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.

One of my earliest memories is of playing with them in the tidepools on the north end of Vancouver Island. It was here that I learned their many names. In the Kwak'wala language of the Kwakiutl First Nations of the Pacific Northwest, the word for barnacles is k̕wit̕a̱'a — and if it is a very small barnacle it is called t̕sot̕soma — and the Kwak'wala word for glue is ḵ̕wa̱dayu.

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

LOWER CAMBRIAN EAGER FORMATION

This specimen of a mature olenellid trilobite, Wanneria dunnae, is from the Lower Cambrian Eager Formation of British Columbia. 

He is from the Rifle Range outcrop near Cranbrook where you can find numerous fragments and complete specimens of the olenellid trilobites Ollenellus sp. and the larger, more robust Wanneria sp. you see here. 

The site outcrops at a few locations as you head east out of Cranbrook towards Fort Steele. 

The first trilobites were discovered with the building of the Kootenay Highway connecting Cranbrook to Fort Steele and beyond. Several other localities, including the outcrops at the Silhouette Rife Range — which is literally on a Rifle Range where folks go to shoot at things — is a shade older than the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale but the fauna here is much less varied. 

The site has been known and collected since the 1920s. Back in the day, fossil collecting was a family affair with folks heading out in their lightly coloured finery to picnic and surface collect the eroding exposures. Cranbrook local, Clement Hungerford Pollen was an engineer and avocational palaeontologist. 

He promoted collecting the exposures of the Eager Formation around 1921. As a pedigreed Englishman of considerable means, he had invested in the Kootenay Central Railway, revitalizing the town by opening up railway access within the region.

Olenellus ricei, Eager Formation

Olenellus is an extinct genus of redlichiid trilobites, with species of average size (about 5 centimetres or 2.0 inches long). He lived during the Botomian and Toyonian stages, Olenellus-zone, 522 to 510 million years ago, in what is currently North America, part of the paleocontinent Laurentia.

These extinct arthropods are common in Early Cambrian rocks — 542 million to 521 million years old — and thus a useful guide fossil for the Early Cambrian. 

Olenellus had a well-developed semi-circular head, large and crescentic eyes, and a poorly developed, small tail. Telltale features are his fifteen body segments with the third being much longer than the others. The fellow you see had a bit of his tail crushed as he turned to stone.

Trilobites were amongst the earliest fossils with hard skeletons. While they are extinct today, they were the dominant life form at the beginning of the Cambrian and it is what we find as the primary fossil fauna in the Eager Formation. The Eager Formation has produced many beautifully preserved Wanneria, abundant Olellenus and a handful of rare and treasured Tuzoia. The shale matrix lends itself to amazing preservation. The specimens of Wanneria from here are large. Some are up to thirteen centimetres long and ten centimetres wide. You find a mixture of complete specimens and head impressions from years of perfectly preserved moults.

PLUCKED FROM THE SEA: FOSSIL SEA URCHIN

This beautiful creamy sea biscuit is an echinoid nestled in a clay matrix. Echinoids are classified by the symmetry of the test, the number and arrangement of plate rows making up the test, and the number and arrangement of respiratory pore rows called petals.

Echinoids are divided into two subgroups: regular echinoids, with nearly perfect pentameral (five-part) symmetry; and irregular echinoids with altered symmetry.

The oldest echinoids belong to an extinct regular taxon called the Echinocystitoidea. 

They first appeared in the fossil record in the Late Ordovician. Cidaroids or pencil urchins appear in the Mississippian in the  Carboniferous and were the only echinoids to survive the mass extinction at the Permo-Triassic boundary. 

Echinoids did not become particularly diverse until well after the Permo-Triassic mass extinction. True sea urchins first appear in the Late Triassic, cassiduloids in the Jurassic, and spatangoids or heart urchins in the Cretaceous. Sand dollars, a common and diverse group today, do not make an appearance in the fossil record until the Paleocene.

In echinoids, the skeleton is almost always made up of tightly interlocking plates that form a rigid structure or test — in contrast with the more flexible skeletal arrangements of starfish, brittle stars, and sea cucumbers. Test shapes range from nearly globular, as in some sea urchins, to highly flattened, as in sand dollars. 

Living echinoids are covered with spines, which are movable and anchored in sockets in the test. These spines may be long and prominent, as in typical sea urchins and most have lovely raised patterns on their surface. 

In sand dollars and heart urchins, however, the spines are very short and form an almost felt-like covering. The mouth of most echinoids is provided with five hard teeth arranged in a circle, forming an apparatus known as Aristotle’s lantern.

This wee urchin was photographed near Rosh Hanikrah, Israel on the Lebanese border.

AMMONITE TRACE FOSSIL

This is a particularly fetching trace fossil of an ammonite in a septarian nodule.

Trace fossils or ichnofossils are burrows, footprints, tracks or even faeces left behind by plants and animals that lived long ago. 

Animals may have scurried across a muddy exposure or sea bottom, perhaps eaten a tasty meal then pooped it out — leaving behind clues to how they lived, what they ate and what the environment was like at the time. 

These are wonderfully informative clues to our ancient world.

NIOBE SCHMIDTI OF NORWAY

Niobe schmidti (Balashova, 1976)

This gorgeous trilobite is an exceptionally well-preserved Niobe schmidti (Balashova, 1976) from middle Ordovician limestone deposits of the Huk Formation, Lysaker member near Oslo, Norway. 

The limestones of the Huk Formation have an extreme geological history and fossils from this formation are usually very difficult to prepare. 

The beige/grey limestones are often heavily cemented to the shelly material, which can be quite fragile.

The rich chocolate coloured specimen you see here was no exception. It presented many challenges in its 26 hours of preparation but each of these was overcome by the patience and skill of Paul Freitag Wolvers at Freitag Fossils. 

I have added a link below with a series of photos so you can walk through the preparation process step by step with Paul. If you have a special specimen you would like prepped, I highly recommend you contact him. His work is outstanding.

Superb prep of this Niobe schmidti (Balashova, 1976)

The shell was partly hollow, very fragile and stuck firmly to the matrix. The positive was assembled from two pieces and much of the shell of the left half of the trilobite had to be transferred over from the negative — no small feat. 

Despite these challenges, the final result is superb. This Niobe schmidti is a museum-quality specimen with exquisite preservation. You can clearly see the lovely terrace lines, pores and eye lenses are excellent to study.  

This specimen hails from the middle Ordovician. The Ordovician lasted almost 45 million years, beginning 488.3 million years ago and ending 443.7 million years ago. 

It was the time in our Earth's history when the area north of the tropics was almost entirely underwater and most of the world's land was collected into the southern supercontinent of Gondwana. Throughout the Ordovician, Gondwana slowly shifted towards the South Pole and much of it remained submerged under an ancient ocean.

Niobe schmidti (Balashova, 1976)

At the time that this fellow was making a living in our ancient seas, he would have been joined by a diverse community of marine invertebrates —graptolites, fellow trilobites, brachiopods and the early vertebrate conodonts. 

These marine communities were joined by red and green algae, primitive fish, cephalopods, corals, crinoids, and gastropods. 

We also find stunning tetrahedral spores similar to those of primitive land plants which tell us who was living on the land at the time.

One of the first specimens of this lovely species I had the pleasure to see was from the Voybokalo Quarry near St. Petersburg in Russia. These outcrops are part of the Kunda Horizon, Lower Ordovician, Asaphus expansus zone and run roughly 468 million years old. 

From the Lower to Middle Ordovician, the Earth was enjoying a mild, humid climate — the weather was warm and the atmosphere contained a significant amount of moisture. 

Once Gondwana finally settled on the South Pole during the Upper Ordovician, massive glaciers formed. These drained the shallow seas and ocean levels dropped. By the end of the Ordovician, 60% of all marine invertebrates and 25% of all life on Earth disappeared as part of the Ordovician mass extinction event. We enjoy many of those species now only as fossils and if we are lucky, preserved in remarkable detail.

Photos & collection: Mark Wolvers. Preparation: Paul Freitag, Freitag Fossils. Specimen: 5.5 cm (2.16 inches). You can see some amazing photos of the transformation of this trilobite throughout Paul's preparation process here: https://freitag-fossils.com/en/niobe-schmidti/

If you click on any of the images, you can see them enlarged to take in all the wonderful detail. 

Reference: UCMP Berkeley / https://ucmp.berkeley.edu

TRENT RIVER FOSSIL TURTLE

The Trent River near Courtenay, British Columbia is a hotbed of 85-million-year-old fossil fauna immortalized in stone. 

The bedrock of the Trent River has yielded both marine and terrestrial fossils. 

While you might just gloss over that tidbit of information with a casual nod, consider how unlikely this particular fossil site is. We find fossils of species that lived on the land just metres from those who lived in our ancient oceans — remarkable!

We have found a nearly complete terrestrial helochelydrid turtle, the bones of a juvenile elasmosaur marine reptile and the caudal vertebrae of a Hadrosauroid dinosaur who munched on plants, all within spitting distance of one another.

If you stroll along the Trent solo or as part of a guided tour through the Courtenay Museum, you can walk right up to the Hadrosaur site. It was here many years ago that Mike Trask (whose name may ring a bell as he found the first elasmosaur on the Puntledge River) found bones from a duck-bill dinosaur. Now in Alberta, the province just east of British Columbia, there are areas where if you throw a rock, you'll hit a duck-bill bone, but in British Columbia, they were unheard of. This was not just the first duck-billed dinosaur, it was also the first dinosaur found on Vancouver Island — ever.   

Let's park that little bit of goodness for now and hold your awe and applause for the bounty of the Trent and walk just a wee bit down from the hadrosaur site where you come to the greyish bedrock that looks so plain it seems hardly worth noting, but it was once the resting place of a fossil ratfish, one of the ocean's oddest fish.  

If you head a wee bit upriver, you come to the delineation zone marking the contact between the dark grey marine shales and mudstones of the Haslam Formation where they meet the sandstones of the Comox Formation. 

Fossilized material in the Comox sandstones is less abundant but still well worth a look. If you look closely you begin to see fossilized wood and identifiable fossil plant material. So, hadrosaur, terrestrial, ratfish, marine, then terrestrial plant material. This river just keeps on giving.

Further upstream, there is a small tributary, Idle Creek, where you can find more of this terrestrial material in the sandy shales. A little further up the river, you see more identifiable fossil plants beneath your feet and jungle-like, overgrown snarly trees all around you.

Mesopuzosia sp.; Collection of Rick Ross

If you started your journey at the Trent River Falls and walked west, you pass the infamous Ammonite Alley, where you can find Mesopuzosia sp. and Kitchinites sp. of the Upper Cretaceous (Santonian), Haslam Formation. 

I have included one of the yummy, chocolate coloured Mesopuzosia sp. ammonite found, prepped and photographed by the deeply awesome Rick Ross of the Vancouver Island Palaeontological Society for you to enjoy. 

You are now in the Polytychoceras vancouverense zone. Continuing west, we reach the first of two fossil turtle sites on the river — one terrestrial and one marine. I thought I would share a bit about the terrestrial turtle found here as it is one of my favourite discoveries — after the excitement of the elasmosaur excavated last summer.   

Helochelydrids are a group of poorly known turtles from Late Jurassic to Late Cretaceous deposits in North America and Europe. It is the only known North American member of Helochelydridae.

Naomichelys is known from numerous specimens throughout western North America, most notably the holotype partial shell from the Early Cretaceous Cloverly Formation of Montana and a complete skeleton from the Antlers Formation of Texas. The Cloverly Formation includes a number of vertebrate fossils including a diverse assemblage of dinosaur fossils. the site was designated as a National Natural Landmark by the National Park Service in 1973.

Naomichelys is a member of the family Helochelydridae. We find their fossilized remains in Late Jurassic to Late Cretaceous deposits in North America and Europe. Within North America, only the species Naomichelys speciosa is known from relatively complete material which makes comparisons between specimens from other localities challenging. The delightful Phil Currie along with co-authors Matthew J. Vavrek, Derek W. Larson, Donald B. Brinkman and Courtenay's own Joe Morin described the new species of Helochelydrid terrestrial turtle and put the Trent River near Courtenay, British Columbia on the palaeontological map once again.

The new genus and species of helochelydrid turtle were based on the relatively complete shell from the bedrock of the Trent. This area is a section of the marine Haslam Formation (Santonian) of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.

The new species is characterized by several distinctive shell features, notably a forward curving process on the anterior portion of the hyoplastra, strongly distinguishing it from N. speciosa. 

The shell is relatively small — and much smaller than one might expect — but does appear to be from a fully grown individual and not a juvenile, suggesting that the species was generally much smaller than other known helochelydrids.

Previously most records of helochelydrids in North America had been assigned to N. speciosa, regardless of actual diagnosable characters. 

The presence of an additional species of helochelydrid from North America tells us that a greater diversity of the taxon was present than was previously recognized. While the interspecific relationships of helochelydrids remain difficult to fully assess, due to the lack of well-preserved specimens, this new species provides additional geographic and phylogenetic data that aids our understanding of this enigmatic group.

As the rock of the Trent River slowly erodes away, it will be interesting to see what it reveals next. We have now found both marine and terrestrial reptiles along with plants, ammonites and other fossil goodies. Tis a story — and river — to keep an eye on!

What to Know Before You Go — Trent River Walk

The full Trent River Walk is 14.8 kilometres of moderate hiking on a well-maintained trail. You may choose to enjoy the wide, flat beginning section of the loop and leave off the narrower sections of the trail where you need to navigate roots and rock. Dogs on leash are welcome. 

You can do this as a family year-round. The trail provides access to the many collecting areas of the river. Be mindful of slippery rocks and keep your eyes peeled for fossils. To enter the trail and find parking, set 375 Hatton Road, Courtenay, British Columbia, into your GPS. Enjoy!   

FOSSIL SALMON OF SKOKOMISH

This toothy specimen is an Oncorhynchus nerka, a Pleistocene Sockeye Salmon from outcrops along the South Fork Skokomish River, Olympic Peninsula, Washington State, USA.

The area is home to the Skokomish — one of nine tribes of the Twana, Coast Salish First Nations in the northern-mid Puget Sound area of western Washington state in the United States. 

Each of the Tribal Nations are known by their locations — Dabop, Quilcene or salt-water people, Dosewallips, Duckabush, Hoodsport, Skokomish or Skoko'bsh, Vance Creek, Tahuya, and Duhlelap or Tule'lalap. The name Skokomish means river people or people of the river in the language of the Twana, sqʷuqʷóbəš or sqWuqWu'b3sH.

Closer to my home farther north in the Pacific Northwest on northern Vancouver Island are the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala. Here, sockeye salmon are known as ma̱łik. You would likely recognize these fossils' modern counterparts from their distinctive red bodies and greenish heads. 

Their descendants had been absent from the Skokomish River for more than a decade up to 2014 when construction to augment the negative impact of the Cushman Reservoir was undertaken to restore their natural habitat.

The fossil specimens include individuals with enlarged breeding teeth and worn caudal fins. It is likely that these salmon acted very similar to their modern counterparts with males partaking in competitive and sneaky tactics to gain access to the sexiest (large and red) females who were ready to mate. These ancient salmon had migrated, dug their nests, spawned and defended their eggs prior to their death. For now, we're referring to the species found here as Oncorhynchus nerka, as they have many of the characteristics of sockeye salmon, but also several minor traits of the Pink Salmon, Oncorhynchus gorbuscha.

I had expected to learn that the locality contained a single or just a few partial specimens, but the fossils beds are abundant with large, 45–70 cm, four-year-old adult salmon concentrated in a beautiful sequence of death assemblages.

Oncorhynchus nerka, Pleistocene Sockeye Salmon

Gerald Smith, a retired University of Michigan professor was shown the specimens and recognized them as Pleistocene, a time when the northern part of North America was undergoing a series of glacial advances and retreats that carved their distinctive signature into the Pacific Northwest.

It looks as though this population diverged from the original species about one million years ago, possibly when the salmon were deposited at the head of a proglacial lake impounded by the Salmon Springs advancement of a great glacier known as the Puget lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet. 

Around 17,000 years ago, this 3,000 foot-thick hunk of glacial ice had made its way down from Canada, sculpting a path south and pushing its way between the Cascade and Olympic Mountains. The ice touched down as far south as Olympia, stilled for a few hundred years, then began to melt.

After the ice began melting and retreating north, the landscape slowly changed —  both the land and sea levels rising — and great freshwater lakes forming in the lowlands filled with glacial waters from the melting ice. The sea levels rose quite considerably, about one and a half centimetres per year between 18,000 and 13,000 years ago. The isostatic rebound (rising) of the land rose even higher with an elevation gain of about ten centimetres per year from 16,000 to 12,500 years ago.

Around 14,900 years ago, sea levels had risen to a point where the salty waters of Puget Sound began to slowly fill the lowlands. Both the land and sea continued to rise and by 5,000 years ago, the sea level was about just over 3 meters lower than it is today. The years following were an interesting time in the geologic history of the Pacific Northwest. The geology of the South Fork Skokomish River continued to shift, undergoing a complicated series of glacial damming and river diversions after these salmon remains were deposited.

Today, we find their remains near the head of a former glacial lake at an elevation of 115 metres on land owned by the Green Diamond Company. The first fossil specimens were found back in 2001 by locals fishing for trout along the South Fork Skokomish River.

Upon seeing the fossil specimens, Smith teamed up with David Montgomery of the University of Washington, Seattle, along with N. Phil Peterson and Bruce Crowley, a Late Oligocene Mysticete specialist from the Burke Museum, to complete fieldwork and author a paper.

The fossil specimen you see here is housed in the Burke Museum collection. They opened the doors to their new building and exhibitions in the Fall of 2019. These photos are by the deeply awesome John Fam from a trip to see the newly opened exhibits this year. If you fancy a visit to the Burke Museum, check out their website here: https://www.burkemuseum.org/.

David B. Williams did up a nice piece on historylink.org on the Salmon of the Puget lowland. You can find his work here: https://www.historylink.org/File/20263

If you'd like to read more of the papers on the topic, check out:

• Smith, G., Montgomery, D., Peterson, N., and Crowley, B. (2007). Spawning sockeye salmon fossils in Pleistocene lake beds of Skokomish Valley, Washington. Quaternary Research, 68(2), 227-238. doi:10.1016/j.yqres.2007.03.007.
• Easterbrook, D.J., Briggs, N.D., Westgate, J.A., and Gorton, M.P. (1981). Age of the Salmon Springs Glaciation in Washington. Geology 9, 87–93.
• Hikita, T. (1962). Ecological and morphological studies of the genus Oncorhynchus (Salmonidae) with particular consideration on phylogeny. Scientific Reports of the Hokkaido Salmon Hatchery 17, 1–97.

If you fancy a read of Crowley's work on Late Oligocene Mysticete from Washington State, you can check out:  Crowley, B., & Barnes, L. (1996). A New Late Oligocene Mysticete from Washington State. The Paleontological Society Special Publications, 8, 90-90. doi:10.1017/S2475262200000927

CRINOIDS — UNDERWATER FLOWERS OR LIVING ANIMALS?

Agaricocrinus splendens

This lovely is Agaricocrinus splendens, an aptly named and wonderfully preserved fossil crinoid. 

Crinoids are one of my favourite echinoderms. It is magical when all the elements come together to preserve a particularly lovely specimen in such glorious detail. 

Crinoids are unusually beautiful and graceful members of the phylum Echinodermata. They resemble an underwater flower swaying in an ocean current. 

But make no mistake they are marine animals. Picture a flower with a mouth on the top surface that is surrounded by feeding arms. Awkwardly, add an anus right beside that mouth. 

Crinoids with root-like anchors are called sea lilies. They have graceful stalks that grip the ocean floor. Those in deeper water have longish stalks up to 3.3 ft or a meter in length. Then there are other varieties that are free-swimming with only vestigial stalks. They make up the majority of this group and are commonly known as feather stars or comatulids. 

Unlike the sea lilies, the feather stars can move about on tiny hook-like structures called cirri. It is these same cirri that allow crinoids to latch to surfaces on the seafloor. Like other echinoderms, crinoids have pentaradial symmetry. The aboral surface of the body is studded with plates of calcium carbonate, forming an endoskeleton similar to that in starfish and sea urchins.

These make the calyx somewhat cup-shaped, and there are few, if any, ossicles in the oral (upper) surface, an area we call the tegmen. It is divided into five ambulacral areas, including a deep groove from which the tube feet project, and five interambulacral areas between them. 

Crinoids are alive and well today. They are also some of the oldest fossils on the planet. We have lovely fossil specimens dating back to the Ordovician — if one ignores the enigmatic Echmatocrinus of the Burgess Shale. And they can be quite plentiful. Crinoid fossils, and in particular disarticulated crinoid columnals, can be so abundant that they at times serve as the primary supporting clasts in sedimentary rocks.

WOMEN IN GEOSCIENCES: CLEMENTINE HELM BEYRICH

Clementine Helm Beyrich (1825–1896), The Unusual Case Of A Woman Popularizer Of The Geosciences During The Nineteenth Century In Central Europe

Clementine Helm Beyrich (9 October 1825, Delitzsch – 26 November 1896, Berlin) was a widely read author of books for children and young adults who published her works during the period of the German Empire.[1][2]

Clementine Helm was born near Leipzig, as the daughter of the merchant Karl Helm (1785 - 1839) and his wife Henriette (née Schmidt 1794 - 1831). Since both of her parents died during her childhood, two of her maternal uncles successively took care of her. 

After having spent a few years at Merseburg, with the paedagogue Christian Weiss, Clementine Helm moved to Berlin, where she lived with the family of the brother of her former guardian, Christian Samuel Weiss, who was a well-known professor of Mineralogy.

Clementine moved to Berlin to obtain a teaching diploma at the "Königliche Luisenstiftung", a private school offering higher education to girls (see also: Höhere Mädchenschule). Afterwards, she taught at a school for girls for several years. In 1848 she married Heinrich Ernst Beyrich, at the time a student of her uncle's who later became a renowned geologist and palaeontologist, as well as a professor at Berlin University. 

The couple had no children of their own, but adopted Clementine's nieces, Anna (1846 –1906) and Elly (1848–1917), after the death of her sister Wilhelmine Louise in 1851. Letters and diaries confirm that the two girls inspired her foster mother as a writer. In 1896, Clementine Helm died at the age of 71, only one month after her husband had passed away.

Besides scientists, associated with Ernst Beyrich, the families' circle of friends also included a number of novelists like Theodor Fontane and Otto Roquette, as well as the art historian Friedrich Eggers, who knew each other from the Rütli (literary group).

Clementine Helm started her career as an author with the publication of songs for children in 1861. She was the author of more than 40 books, many of which were printed in several editions. Besides books she also published many short stories as well as fairy-tales and was the publisher of various anthologies. In 1895, just a year before her death, she started publishing the annual „Junge Mädchen. Ein Almanach“ together with Frida Schanz who continued publishing it until 1904.

Translations of her works are available in English, French, Dutch and various Scandinavian languages. Her most successful book „Backfischchens Leiden und Freuden“, is an example of the German genre Backfischroman, published in 1863.

Clementine's Legacy

Clementine Helm frequently made use of autobiographical episodes in her writing. Besides that her influence as a teacher was also present. Since she had obtained the highest form of education open to girls in the time of the German Empireone of her aims was to pass some of her knowledge on to her readers. As she was interested in science and biology - and had obviously read the works of Charles Darwin - she specifically made a point to mention his work On the Origin of Species in her novel Dornröschen und Schneewittchen. At the time favourable mention of Darwin's thoughts on evolution were very unusual content for a girls’ novel. Besides the reference to Darwin, the fact that religious topics were largely avoided, indicate that Helm was not particularly pious. On the whole Helm's books were ahead of their time by offering protagonists who were not just well-educated but often interested in natural sciences.

During the nineteenth century the role of women was very much restricted. In the geosciences, women were not able to study and thus even less able to publish. Here the work of one female writer is presented who, due to her upbringing in an intellectual family with close connections to the most celebrated scientists in Prussia/Germany, such as Alexander von Humboldt, the mineralogist Christian Samuel Weiss, Ernst Haeckel and many others, was aware of scientific progress and the discussions of the times. 

Based on her unusual education by teachers and scientists and her intellectual abilities, and knowledge acquired through marriage to a well-established geoscientist, she wrote popular juvenile literature that included geological and palaeontological content. This scientific content was typically woven into fairy tales or novels for adolescent girls and served as a way to spread geoscientific knowledge to a large audience.

Mohr, Barbara A.R. "CLEMENTINE HELM BEYRICH (1825-1896), THE UNUSUAL CASE OF A WOMAN POPULARIZER OF THE GEOSCIENCES DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN CENTRAL EUROPE." Earth Sciences History, vol. 40, no. 1, Jan. 2021, pp. 84+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A662784433/AONE?u=anon~b9d8b4b9&sid=googleScholar&xid=1b244e18. Accessed 13 Nov. 2021.


Publisher URL: https://meridian.allenpress.com/esh/article/40/1/84/464291/CLEMENTINE-HELM-BEYRICH-1825-1896-THE-UNUSUAL-CASE

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17704/1944-6187-40.1.84

CANADA'S FIRST SABRE-TOOTHED CAT: SMILODON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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