FOSSIL FISHAPODS OF CANADA'S FAR NORTH

Qikiqtania wakei, a fishapod & relative to tetrapods

You will likely recall the amazing tetrapodomorpha fossil found on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic in 2004, Tiktaalik roseae. 

These were advanced forms transitional between fish and the early labyrinthodonts playfully referred to as fishapods — half-fish, half-tetrapod in appearance and limb morphology. 

Up to that point, the relationship of limbed vertebrates (tetrapods) to lobe-finned fish (sarcopterygians) was well known, but the origin of significant tetrapod features remained obscure for the lack of fossils that document the sequence of evolutionary changes — until Tiktaalik. 

While Tiktaalik is technically a fish, this fellow is as far from fish-like as you can be and still be a card-carrying member of the group. 

Interestingly, while Neil Shubin and crew were combing the icy tundra for Tiktaalik, another group was trying their luck just a few kilometres away. 

A week before the eureka moment of Tiktaalik's discovery, Tom Stewart and Justin Lemberg unearthed material that we now know to be a relative of Tiktaalik's. 

Meet Qikiqtania wakei, a fishapod and close relative to our dear tetrapods — and cousin to Tiktaalik — who shares features in the flattened triangular skull, shoulders and elbows in the fin. 

Qikiqtania (pronounced kick-kick-TAN-ee-ya)

But, and here’s the amazing part, its upper arm bone (humerus) is specialised for open water swimming, not walking. 

The story gets wilder when we look at Qikiqtania’s position on the evolutionary tree— all the features for this type of swimming are newly evolved, not primitive. 

This means that Qikiqtania secondarily reentered open water habitats from ancestors that had already had some aspect of walking behaviour. 

And, this whole story was playing out 365 million years ago — the transition from water to land was going both ways in the Devonian.

Why is this exciting? You and I descend from those early tetrapods. We share the legacy of their water-to-land transition and the wee bony bits in their wrists and paddles that evolved to become our hands. I know, mindblowing!

Thomas Stewart and Justin Lemberg put in thousands of hours bringing Qikiqtania to life. 

The analysis consisted of a long path of wild events— from a haphazard moment when it was first spotted, a random collection of a block that ended up containing an articulated fin, to a serendipitous discovery three days before Covid lockdowns in March 2020.

Both teams acknowledge the profound debt owed to the individuals, organizations and indigenous communities where they had the privilege to work — Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay— Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, the largest and northernmost territory of Canada. 

Part of that debt is honoured in the name chosen for this new miraculous species. 

Aerial View of Ellesmere Island

The generic name, Qikiqtania (pronounced kick-kick-TAN-ee-ya), is derived from the Inuktitut words Qikiqtaaluk and Qikiqtani which are the traditional place name of the region where the fossil was discovered. 

The specific name, wakei, is in memory of the evolutionary biologist David Wake — colleague, mentor and friend. 

He was a professor of integrative biology and Director and curator of herpetology at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley who passed away in April 2021. 

Wake is known for his work on the biology and evolution of salamanders and vertebrate evolutionary biology. 

If you look at the photo on the left you can imagine visiting these fossil localities in Canada's far north.

Qikiqtania was found on Inuit land and belongs to the community. Thomas Stewart and his colleagues were able to conduct this research because of the generosity and support of individuals in the hamlets of Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, the Iviq Hunters and Trappers of Grise Fiord, and the Department of Heritage and Culture, Nunavut.

To them, on behalf of the larger scientific community — Nakurmiik. Thank you! 

Here is the link to Tom Stewart's article in The Conversation & paper in Nature that dropped yesterday:

1. Stewart, Thomas A.; Lemberg, Justin B.; Daly, Ailis; Daeschler, Edward B.; Shubin, Neil H. (2022-07-20). "A new elpistostegalian from the Late Devonian of the Canadian Arctic". Nature. doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04990-w. ISSN 0028-0836.
2. Stewart, Thomas. "Meet Qikiqtania, a fossil fish with the good sense to stay in the water while others ventured onto land" The Conversation. Retrieved 2022-07-20.

Image One: An artist’s vision of Qikiqtania enjoying its fully aquatic, free-swimming lifestyle. Alex Boersma, CC BY-ND

Image Two: A new elpistostegalian from the Late Devonian of the Canadian Arctic, T. A. Stewart, J. B. Lemberg, A. Daly, E. B. Daeschler, & N. H. Shubin.

A huge shout out to the deeply awesome Neil Shubin who shared that the paper had been published and offered his insights on what played out behind the scenes!

SPIRALLING BEAUTY: TURRITELLA

Gastropods, or univalves, are the largest and most successful class of molluscs. They started as exclusively marine but have adapted well and now their rank spends more time in freshwater than in salty marine environments.

Many are marine, but two-thirds of all living species live in freshwater or on land. Their entry into the fossil record goes all the way back to the Cambrian.

Slugs and snails, abalones, limpets, cowries, conches, top shells, whelks, and sea slugs are all gastropods. They are the second-largest class of animals with over 60,000–75,000 known living species. The two beauties you see here are Turritella, a genus of medium-sized sea snails with an operculum, marine gastropod mollusks in the family Turritellidae. They hail from the Paris Basin and have tightly coiled shells, whose overall shape is basically that of an elongated cone. The name Turritella comes from the Latin word turritus meaning "turreted" or "towered" and the diminutive suffix -ella.

Many years ago, I had the pleasure of collecting in the Paris Basin with a fellow named Michael. I had stalked the poor man from Sunday market to Sunday market, eventually meeting up with him in the town of Gordes. He graciously shared his knowledge of the local fossil localities from the hills south of Calais to Poitiers and from Caen to the Rhine Valley, east of Saarbrücken. I deeply regret losing my notebook from that trip but cherish the fossils and memories.

The Paris Basin has many fine specimens of gastropods. These molluscs were originally sea-floor predators, though they have evolved to live happily in many other habitats. Many lines living today evolved in the Mesozoic. The first gastropods were exclusively marine and appeared in the Upper Cambrian (Chippewaella, Strepsodiscus). By the Ordovician, gastropods were a varied group present in a variety of aquatic habitats. Commonly, fossil gastropods from the rocks of the early Palaeozoic era are too poorly preserved for accurate identification. Still, the Silurian genus Poleumita contains fifteen identified species.

Most of the gastropods of the Palaeozoic belong to primitive groups, a few of which still survive today. By the Carboniferous, many of the shapes we see in living gastropods can be matched in the fossil record, but despite these similarities in appearance the majority of these older forms are not directly related to living forms. It was during the Mesozoic era that the ancestors of many of the living gastropods evolved.

In rocks of the Mesozoic era, gastropods are more common as fossils and their shells often very well preserved. While not all gastropods have shells, the ones that do fossilize more easily and consequently, we know a lot more about them. We find them in fossil beds from both freshwater and marine environments, in ancient building materials and as modern guests of our gardens.

JUVENILE HAMITES SUBROTUNDUS

A tremendously delicate juvenile Hamites subrotundus (J. Sowerby 1814) from Upper Albian outcrops in Mallorca, the largest of the three Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean at more than 3,600 square kilometers. 

Mallorca has been home to various inhabitants for thousands of years. Sitting some 200 kilometers off Spain’s southeastern, it is a idyllic setting for exploring the rich human and geologic history of this part of the world.

The island is made up of dolomite and limestone from a huge expanse of time, the Mesozoic and Cenozoic—170 million to 10 million years ago— and bookended by two parallel mountain chains top and bottom on its southern and northern coasts. 

As you walk the mountain passes northwest to northeast, you stroll across Miocene deposits 20 million to 13 million years ago that speak of the time in our Earth's recent past when part of the African continent collided with Europe. 

It is famous for its limestone mountains and Roman and Moorish remains. As you can see here, it is also home to some rather nice fossils including this specimen of Hamites subrotundus.

While H. subrotundus is generally a Middle Albian species, this specimen was found in the lower part of Upper Albian in the Cristatum zone by José Juárez Ruiz. José had to piece this lovely together from seven fragments. His labour of love was worth the effort. The final piece is sheer perfection and a beautiful specimen approximately 2.5 cm long.

Mallorca and the other Balearic Islands are geologically an extension of the Baetic Cordillera mountain chain of western Andalusia that extends to Murcia and Valencia. 

They are made up of sediments deposited in the Tethys Sea during the Mesozoic.

Exploring the islands, you can collect from deposits from the Triassic, Cretaceous, Jurassic, and Neogene periods. 

The limestone outcrops contain lovely examples of foraminifers—mainly the species Globigerina.

We also see lovely examples of Hamites (Hamites) subrotundus in the Euhoplites loricatus zone; Euhoplites meandrinus subzone from the Middle Albian (Lower Gault) of Folkestone, Kent, UK. 

Photo, preparation and in the collection of the deeply awesome José Juárez Ruiz. Wright C. W. 1996. Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology (Part L Mollusca 4 Revised) Volume 4: Cretaceous Ammonoidea

BLADDER-BEARERS: HOODED SEALS

If you frequent the eastern coast of North America north of Maine to the western tip of Europe, along the coast of Norway near Svalbard you may have glimpsed one of their chubby, dark silver-grey and white residents. 

Hooded seals, Cystophora cristata, are large phocid seals in the family Phocidae, who live in some of the chilliest places on Earth, from 47° to 80° N in latitude. 

These skilled divers are mainly concentrated around Bear Island, Norway, Iceland, and northeast Greenland. 

In rare cases, we find them in the icy waters in Siberia. They usually dive depths of 600 m (1,968 ft) in search of fishy treats but can go as deep as 1000 m (3,280 ft) when needed. That is deep into the cold, dark depths of our oceans. Sunlight entering the sea may travel as deep as 1,000 m (3,280 ft) under the right conditions, but there is rarely any significant light beyond 200 meters (656 ft). This is the dark zone and the place we find our bioluminescent friends. 

Hooded seals have a sparse fossil record. One of the first fossils found was a Pliocene specimen from Anvers, Belgium discovered in 1876. In 1983 a paper was published claiming there were some fossils found in North America thought to be from Cystophora cristata. Of the three accounts, the most creditable discovery was from a sewer excavation in Maine, the northeasternmost U.S. state, known for its rocky coastline, maritime history and nature areas like the granite and spruce islands of Acadia National Park. A scapula and humeri were found among other bones and thought to date to the post-Pleistocene. 

Of two other accounts, one was later reassigned to another species and the other left unsolved. (Folkow, et al., 2008; Kovacs and Lavigne, 1986; Ray, 1983)

The seals are typically silver-grey or white in colour, with black spots that vary in size covering most of the body. 

Hooded seal pups are known as, Blue-backs as their coats are blue-grey on the back with whitish bellies, though this coat is shed after 14 months of age when the pups moult.

FIRST NATION, INUIT, METIS, MI'KMAQ L'NU

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, seal are known as migwat — and fur seals are known as x̱a'wa.

Hooded seals live primarily on drifting pack ice and in deep water in the Arctic Ocean and North Atlantic. Although some drift away to warmer regions during the year their best survival rate is in colder climates. They can be found on four distinct areas with pack ice: near Jan Mayen Island, northeast of Iceland; off Labrador and northeastern Newfoundland; the Gulf of St. Lawrence; and the Davis Strait, off midwestern Greenland. 

The province of Newfoundland and Labrador is home to the Inuit, the Innu, the Mi'kmaq L'nu and the Southern Inuit of NunatuKavut, formerly the Labrador Inuit-Metis. The Hooded Seals that visit their traditional territory were a welcome source of food and clothing. In Mi'kmaw, the language spoken in Mi'kma'ki, the territory of the Mi'kmaq L'nu, the word for seal is waspu.

HOODED SEAL HABITAT

Males are localized around areas of complex seabeds, such as Baffin Bay, Davis Strait, and the Flemish Cap. Females concentrate their habitat efforts primarily on shelf areas, such as the Labrador Shelf. 

Females reach the age of sexual maturity between two and nine years old and it is estimated that most females give birth to their first young at around five years of age. Males reach sexual maturity a little later around four to six years old but often do not mate until much later. Females give birth to one young at a time through March and April. The gestation period is 240 to 250 days. 

Blue-back, Hooded Seal Pup

During this time the fetus, unlike those of other seals, sheds its lanugo — a covering of fine soft hair that is replaced by thicker pelage — in the uterus. 

These young are precocious and at birth are able to move about and swim with ease. They are independent and left to fend for themselves immediately after they have been weaned.

Hooded seals are known to be a highly migratory species that often wander long distances, as far west as Alaska and as far south as the Canary Islands and Guadeloupe. 

Prior to the mid-1990s, hooded seal sightings in Maine and the east Atlantic were rare but began increasing in the mid-1990s. From January 1997 to December 1999, a total of 84 recorded sightings of hooded seals occurred in the Gulf of Maine, one in France and one in Portugal. 

From 1996 to 2006, five strandings and sightings were noted near the Spanish coasts in the Mediterranean Sea. There is no scientific explanation for the increase in sightings and range of the hooded seal.

Cystophora means "bladder-bearer" in Greek and pays homage to this species' inflatable bladder septum on the heads of adult males. The bladder hangs between the eyes and down over the upper lip in a deflated state. 

The hooded seal can inflate a large balloon-like sac from one of its nostrils. This is done by shutting one nostril valve and inflating a membrane, which then protrudes from the other nostril. 

I was thinking of Hooded seals when contemplating the nasal bladders of Prosaurolophus maximum, large-headed duckbill dinosaurs, or hadrosaurid, in the ornithischian family Hadrosauridae. Perhaps both species used these bladders in a similar manner — to warn predators and attract mates.

Hooded seals are known for their uniquely elastic nasal cavity located at the top of their head, also known as the hood. Only males possess this display-worthy nasal sac, which they begin to develop around the age of four. The hood begins to inflate as the seal makes its initial breath prior to going underwater. It then begins to repetitively deflate and inflate as the seal is swimming. 

The purpose of this is acoustic signaling. It occurs when the seal feels threatened and attempt to ward off hostile species when competing for resources such as food and shelter. It also serves to communicate their health and superior status to both other males and females they are attempting to attract. 

In sexually mature males, a pinkish balloon-like nasal membrane comes out of the left nostril to further aid it in attracting a mate. This membrane, when shaken, is able to produce various sounds and calls depending on whether the seal is underwater or on land. Most of these acoustic signals are used in an acoustic situation (about 79%), while about 12% of the signals are used for sexual purposes.

References: Ray, C. 1983. Hooded Seal, Cystophora cristata: Supposed Fossil Records in North America. American Society of Mammalogists, Vol. 64 No. 3: 509-512; Cystophora cristata, Hooded Seal", 2007; "Seal Conservation Society", 2001; Kovacs and Lavigne, 1986.

Mi'kmaq Online Dictionary: https://www.mikmaqonline.org/servlet/dictionaryFrameSet.html?method=showCategory&arg0=animal

QUENSTEDTOCERAS WITH PATHOLOGY

What you are seeing here is a protuberance extruding from the venter of Quenstedtoceras cf. leachi (Sowerby). It is a pathology in the shell from hosting immature bivalves that shared the seas with these Middle Jurassic, Upper Callovian, Lamberti zone fauna from the Volga River basin. The collecting site is the now inactive Dubki commercial clay quarry and brickyard near Saratov, Russia. 

The site has produced thousands of ammonite specimens. A good 1,100 of those ended up at the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, South Dakota. 

Roughly 1,000 of those are Quenstedtoceras (Lamberticeras) lamberti and the other 100 are a mix of other species found in the same zone. These included Eboraciceras, Peltoceras, Kosmoceras, Grossouvria, Proriceras, Cadoceras and Rursiceras. 

What is especially interesting is the volume of specimens — 167 Quenstedtoceras (Lamberticeras) lamberti and 89 other species in the Black Hills collection — with healed predation injuries. It seems Quenstedtoceras (Lamberticeras) lamberti are the most common specimens found here and so not surprisingly the most common species found injured. Of the 1,000, 655 of the Quenstedtoceras (Lamberticeras) lamberti displayed some sort of deformation or growth on the shell or had grown in a tilted manner. 

Again, some of the Q. lamberti had small depressions in the centre likely due to a healed bite and hosting infestations of the immature bivalve Placunopsis and some Ostrea. 

The bivalves thrived on their accommodating hosts and the ammonites carried on, growing their shells right up and over their bivalve guests. This relationship led to some weird and deformities of their shells. They grow in, around, up and over nearly every surface of the shell and seem to have lived out their lives there. It must have gotten a bit unworkable for the ammonites, their shells becoming warped and unevenly weighted. Over time, both the flourishing bivalves and the ammonite shells growing up and over them produced some of the most interesting pathology specimens I have ever seen.    

In the photo here from Emil Black, you can see some of the distorted shapes of Quenstedtoceras sp. Look closely and you see a trochospiral or flattened appearance on one side while they are rounded on the other. 

All of these beauties hail from the Dubki Quarry near Saratov, Russia. The ammonites were collected in marl or clay used in brick making. The clay particles suggest a calm, deep marine environment. One of the lovely features of the preservation here is the amount of pyrite filling and replacement. It looks like these ammonites were buried in an oxygen-deficient environment. 

The ammonites were likely living higher in the water column, well above the oxygen-poor bottom. An isotopic study would be interesting to prove this hypothesis. There's certainly enough of these ammonites that have been recovered to make that possible. It's estimated that over a thousand specimens have been recovered from the site but that number is likely much higher. But these are not complete specimens. We mostly find the phragmocones and partial body chambers. Given the numbers, this may be a site documenting a mass spawning death over several years or generations.

If you fancy a read on all things cephie, consider picking up a copy of Cephalopods Present and Past: New Insights and Fresh Perspectives edited by Neil Landman and Richard Davis. Figure 16.2 is from page 348 of that publication and shows the hosting predation quite well. 

Photos: Courtesy of the deeply awesome Emil Black. These are in his personal collection that I hope to see in person one day. 

It was his sharing of the top photo and the strange anomaly that had me explore more about the fossils from Dubki and the weird and wonderful hosting relationship between ammonites and bivalves. Thank you, my friend!

CANADA'S GREAT BEARS: TLA'YI

Look at how this protective mamma bear holds her cub in her arms to give him a bit of a wash. 

Her gentle maternal care is truly touching. This mamma has spent late Autumn to Spring in a cave, having birthed them while still hibernation and staying in the den to feed them on her milk.

Black bear cubs stay with their mamma for the first one to three years of their lives while she protects them and teaches them how to thrive in the wild using their keen sense of smell, hearing, vision and strength. Once they are old enough, they will head off into the forest to live solo until they are ready to mate and start a family of their own. 

Mating is a summer affair with bears socializing shoulder to shoulder with potential mates. Once they have mated, black bears head off on their own again to forage and put on weight for their winter hibernation. If the black bear lives in the northern extent of their range, hibernation lasts longer — they will stay in their dens for seven to eight months longer than their southern counterparts. For those that enjoy the warmer climes in the south, hibernation is shorter. If food is available year-round, the bears do not hibernate at all.

The American black bear, Ursus americanus, is native to North America and found in Canada and the United States. 

They are the most common and widely distributed of the three bear species found in Canada. 

There are roughly 650,000 roaming our forests, swamps and streams — meaning there is a good chance of running into them if you spend any amount of time in the wild. 

Full-grown, these fuzzy monkeys will be able to run 48 kilometres (30 miles)  an hour and smell food up to 32 kilometres (20 miles) away.

With their excellent hearing, black bears usually know you are near well before you realize the same and generally take care to avoid you. Those that come in contact with humans often tend to want to check our garbage and hiking supplies for tasty snacks — hey, a free meal is a free meal.    

In British Columbia, we share our province with nearly half of all black bears and grizzly bears that reside in Canada. The 120,000 - 150,000 black bears who live in the province keep our Conservation Officers busy. They account for 14,000 - 25,000 of the calls the service receives each year. Most of those calls centre around their curiosity for the tasty smells emanating from our garbage. They are omnivores with vegetation making up 80-85% of their diet, but they are flexible around that — berries and seeds, salmon or Doritos — bears eat it all. 

And, as with all wild animals, diet is regional. In Labrador, the local black bear population lives mostly on caribou, rodents and voles. In the Pacific Northwest, salmon and other fish form a large part of the protein in their diet versus the bees, yellow jackets and honey others prefer. The braver of their number have been known to hunt elk, deer and moose calves — and a few showy bears have taken on adults of these large mammals. 

Bears hold a special place within our culture and in First Nation mythology in particular — celebrated in art, dance and song. In the Kwak'wala language of the Kwakiutl First Nations of the Pacific Northwest, the word for black bear is t̕ła'yi — mother is a̱bas and łaxwa̱lap̓a means to love each other. 

Kermode or Spirit Bear, Ursus americanus kermodei

From the photos here you can see that black bears are not always black —  ranging in colour from cinnamon to brown, tan, blonde, red — and even white. 

The Kermode or Spirit Bear, Ursus americanus kermodei, a subspecies of black bear found only in British Columbia — and our official provincial mammal — is a distinctive creamy white. 

They are not albinos, their colouring stems from a recessive mutant gene — meaning that if they receive two copies it triggers a single, nonsynonymous nucleotide substitution that halts all melanin production. Well, not all. They have pigmented eyes and skin but no colour in their fur. The white colour is an advantage when you are hunting salmon by day. Salmon will shy away from their black cousins knowing their intention is to enjoy them as a tasty snack. 

Spirit Bears live in the Great Bear Rainforest on British Columbia's north and central coast alongside the Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation who call the Kermode moskgm’ol or white bear.

The Kitasoo/Xai’xais have a legend that tells of Goo-wee, Raven making one in every ten black bears white to remind us of the time glaciers blanketed the land then slowly retreated — their thaw giving rise to the bounty we harvest today.  

Black bears of any colour are a wee bit smaller than their brown bear or grizzly bear cousins, with males weighing in at 45 to 400 kilograms (100 to 900 pounds) and females ranging from 38 to 225 kilograms (85 to 500 pounds). 

Small by relative standards but still very large animals. And they are long-lived or at least can be. Bears in captivity can live up to 30 years but those who dwell in our forests tend to live half as long or less from a mixture of local hazards and humans. 

Reference: Wild Safe BC: https://wildsafebc.com/species/black-bear/

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 LIAS LYTOCERAS

A superbly prepped and extremely rare Lytoceras (Suess, 1865) ammonite found as a green ammonite nodule by Matt Cape in the Lower Lias of Dorset. 

Lytoceras are rare in the Lower Lias of Dorset — apart from the Belemnite Stone horizon — so much so that Paul Davis, whose skilled prep work you see here, initially thought it might be a Becheiceras hidden within the large, lumpy nodule. 

One of the reasons these lovelies are rarely found from here is that they are a Mediterranean Tethyian genus. The fossil fauna we find in the United Kingdom are dominated by Boreal Tethyian genera. 

We do find Lytoceras sp. in the Luridum subzone of the Pliensbachian showing that there was an influx of species from the Mediterranean realm during this time. This is the first occurrence of a Lytoceras that he has ever seen in a green nodule and Paul's seen quite a few. 

This absolutely cracking specimen was found and is in the collections of the awesome Matt Cape. Matt recognized that whatever was hidden in the nodule would take skilled and careful preparation using air scribes. Indeed it did. It took more than five hours of time and skill to unveil the lovely museum-worthy specimen you see here. 

We find Lytoceras in more than 1,000 outcrops around the globe ranging from the Jurassic through to the Cretaceous, some 189.6 to 109.00 million years ago. Once this specimen is fully prepped with the nodule material cut or scraped away, you can see the detailed crinkly growth lines or riblets on the shell and none of the expected coarse ribbing. 

Lytoceras sp. Photo: Craig Chivers

If you imagine running your finger along these, you would be tracing the work of decades of growth of these cephalopods. 

While we cannot know their actual lifespans, but we can make a healthy guess. 

The nautilus, their closest living cousins live upwards of 20 years — gods be good — and less than three years if conditions are poor.

The flanges, projecting flat ribs or collars, develop at the edge of the mouth border on the animal's mantle as they grow each new chamber. 

Each delicate flange grows over the course of the ammonites life, marking various points in time and life stages as the ammonite grew. There is a large variation within Lytoceras with regards to flanges. They provide both ornamentation and strength to the shell to protect it from water pressure as they moved into deeper seas.

The concretion prior to prep

This distinctive genus with its evolute shells are found in the Cretaceous marine deposits of: 

Antarctica (5 collections), Austria (19), Colombia (1), the Czech Republic (3), Egypt (2), France (194), Greenland (16), Hungary (25), Italy (11), Madagascar (2), Mexico (1), Morocco (4), Mozambique (1), Poland (2), Portugal (1), Romania (1), the Russian Federation (2), Slovakia (3), South Africa (1), Spain (24), Tanzania (1), Trinidad and Tobago (1), Tunisia (25); and the United States of America (17: Alaska, California, North Carolina, Oregon).

We also find them in Jurassic marine outcrops in:

Austria (15), Canada (9: British Columbia), Chile (6), France (181), Germany (11), Greenland (1), Hungary (189), India (1), Indonesia (1), Iran (1), Italy (50), Japan (14), Kenya (2), Luxembourg (4), Madagascar (2), Mexico (1), Morocco (43), New Zealand (15), Portugal (1), Romania (5), the Russian Federation (1), Slovakia (1), Spain (6), Switzerland (2), Tunisia (11), Turkey (12), Turkmenistan (1), Ukraine (5), the United Kingdom (12), United States (11: Alaska, California) — in at least 977 known collections. 

References:

Sepkoski, Jack (2002). "A compendium of fossil marine animal genera (Cephalopoda entry)". Bulletins of American Paleontology. 363: 1–560. Archived from the original on 2008-05-07. Retrieved 2017-10-18.

Paleobiology Database - Lytoceras. 2017-10-19.

Systematic descriptions, Mesozoic Ammonoidea, by W.J Arkell, Bernhard Kummel, and C.W. Wright. 1957. Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology, Part L. Geological Society of America and University of Kansas press.

KAZAKHSTAN ANAHOPLITES

This tasty block of Semenovites (Anahoplites) cf. michalskii ammonites hails from Cretaceous, Albian deposits that outcrop on the Tupqaraghan — Mangyshlak Peninsula on the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan. 

Present-day Kazakhstan is made up of several micro continental blocks that were broken up in the Cambrian and then crushed back together then smashed up against Siberia and came to rest where we find them today. 

Mangyshlak or Mangghyshlaq Peninsula is a large peninsula located in western Kazakhstan. It borders on the Caspian Sea in the west and with the Buzachi Peninsula, a marshy sub-feature of the main peninsula, in the northeast. The Tyuleniy Archipelago lies off the northern shores of the peninsula.

Lowlands make up one-third of Kazakhstan’s huge expanse, hilly plateaus and plains account for nearly half, and low mountainous regions about one-fifth. Kazakhstan’s highest point, Mount Khan-Tengri (Han-t’eng-ko-li Peak) at 22,949 feet (6,995 metres), in the Tien Shan range on the border between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and China, contrasts with the flat or rolling terrain of most of the republic. 

The western and southwestern parts of Kazakhstan are dominated by the low-lying Caspian Depression, which at its lowest point lies some 95 feet below sea level. South of the Caspian Depression are the Ustyurt Plateau and the Tupqaraghan (formerly Mangyshlak) Peninsula jutting into the Caspian Sea. 

Vast amounts of sand formed the Greater Barsuki and Aral Karakum deserts near the Aral Sea, the broad Betpaqdala Desert of the interior, and the Muyunkum and Kyzylkum deserts in the south. Most of these desert regions have slight vegetative cover eeking out a slim existence fed by subterranean groundwater.

Depressions filled by salt lakes — whose water has largely evaporated — dot the undulating uplands of central Kazakhstan. 

In the north, the mountains reach about 5,000 feet, and there are similar high areas among the Ulutau Mountains in the west and the Chingiz-Tau Range in the east. In the east and southeast, massifs — enormous blocks of crystalline rock — are furrowed by valleys. 

The Altai mountain complex to the east sends three ridges into the republic, and, farther south, the Tarbagatay Range is an offshoot of the Naryn-Kolbin complex. Another range, the Dzungarian Alatau, penetrates the country to the south of the depression containing the icy waters of Lake Balkhash. The beautiful Tien Shan peaks rise along the southern frontier with Kyrgyzstan. 

As well as lovely ammonite outcrops, dinosaurian material and pterosaur remains are also found in Kazakhstan. The ammonites you see here are in the collections of the deeply awesome Emil Black.

Paleo Coordinates: 44 ° 35'46 ″ 51 ° 52'53″ 

HUMPBACK WHALES: MEGAPTERA NOVAENGLIAE

Look deep into the knowing eye of this magnificent one. He is a Humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae, a species of baleen whale for whom I hold a special place in my heart. 

Baleens are toothless whales who feed on plankton and other wee oceanic tasties that they consume through their baleens, a specialised filter of flexible keratin plates that frame their mouth and fit within their robust jaws.

Baleen whales, the mysticetes, split from toothed whales, the Odontoceti, around 34 million years ago. The split allowed our toothless friends to enjoy a new feeding niche and make their way in a sea with limited food resources. There are fifteen species of baleen whales who inhabit all major oceans. Their number include our humbacks, grays, right whales and the massive blue whale. Their territory runs as a wide band running from the Antarctic ice edge to 81°N latitude. These filter feeders

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, and my cousins on my father's side, whales are known as g̱wa̱'ya̱m. Both the California grey and the Humpback whale live on the coast. Only a small number of individuals in First Nation society had the right to harpoon a whale. This is a practice from many years ago. It was generally only the Chief who was bestowed this great honour. Humpback whales like to feed close to shore and enter the local inlets. Around Vancouver Island and along the coast of British Columbia, this made them a welcome food source as the long days of winter passed into Spring.

Humpback whales are rorquals, members of the Balaenopteridae family that includes the blue, fin, Bryde's, sei and minke whales. The rorquals are believed to have diverged from the other families of the suborder Mysticeti during the middle Miocene. 

While cetaceans were historically thought to have descended from mesonychids—which would place them outside the order Artiodactyla—molecular evidence supports them as a clade of even-toed ungulates—our dear Artiodactyla. 

It is one of the larger rorqual species, with adults ranging in length from 12–16 m (39–52 ft) and weighing around 25–30 metric tons (28–33 short tons). The humpback has a distinctive body shape, with long pectoral fins and a knobbly head. It is known for breaching and other distinctive surface behaviours, making it popular with whale watchers and the lucky few who see them from the decks of our local ferries.

Both male and female humpback whales vocalize, but only males produce the long, loud, complex "song" for which the species is famous. Males produce a complex soulful song lasting 10 to 20 minutes, which they repeat for hours at a time. I imagine Gregorian Monks vocalizing their chant with each individual melody strengthening and complimenting that of their peers. All the males in a group produce the same song, which differed in each season. Its purpose is not clear, though it may help induce estrus in females and bonding amongst the males.

Humpback Whale, Megaptera novaeangliae

Found in oceans and seas around the world, humpback whales typically migrate up to 25,000 km (16,000 mi) each year. 

They feed in polar waters and migrate to tropical or subtropical waters to breed and give birth, fasting and living off their fat reserves. Their diet consists mostly of krill and small fish. 

Humpbacks have a diverse repertoire of feeding methods, including the bubble net technique.

Humpbacks are a friendly species that interact with other cetaceans such as bottlenose dolphins. They are also friendly and oddly protective of humans. You may recall hearing about an incident off the Cook Islands a few years back. Nan Hauser was snorkelling and ran into a tiger shark. Two adult humpback whales rushed to her aid, blocking the shark from reaching her and pushing her back towards the shore. We could learn a thing or two from their kindness. We have not been as good to them as they have been to us.

Like other large whales, the humpback was a tasty and profitable target for the whaling industry. My grandfather and uncle participated in that industry out of Coal Harbour on northern Vancouver Island back in the 1950s. So did many of my First Nation cousins. My cousin John Lyon has told me tales of those days and the slippery stench of that work.

Six whaling stations operated on the coast of British Columbia between 1905 and 1976. Two of these stations were located at Haida Gwaii, one at Rose Harbour and the other at Naden Harbour. Over 9,400 large whales were taken from the waters around Haida Gwaii. The catch included blue whales, fin whales, sei whales, humpback whales, sperm whales and right whales. In the early years of the century, primarily humpback whales were taken. In later years, fin whales and sperm whales dominated the catch. 

Whales were hunted off South Moresby in Haida Gwaii, on the north side of Holberg Inlet in the Quatsino Sound region. It was the norm at the time and a way to make a living, especially for those who had hoped to work in the local coal mine but lost their employment when it shut down. 

While my First Nations relatives hunted whales in small numbers and many years ago, my Norwegian relatives participated in the hunt on a scale that nearly led to their extinction before the process was banned. The Coal Harbour Whaling Station closed in 1967. Once it had closed, my grandfather Einar Eikanger, my mother's father, took to fishing and my uncle Harry lost his life the year before when he slipped and fell over the side of the boat. He was crushed between the hull and a Humpback in rough seas. 

Humpback populations have partially recovered since that time to build their population up to 80,000 animals worldwide—but entanglement in fishing gear, collisions with ships, and noise pollution continue to negatively impact the species. So be kind if you see them. Turn your engine off and see if you can hear their soulful cries echoing in the water.

I did up a video on Humpback Whales over on YouTube so you could see them in all their majesty. Here is the link: https://youtu.be/_Vbta7kQNoM

SUNSETS AND SUPERNOVAE

Sunsets — pure visual poetry: peaceful, meditative, mesmerizing.

What is sunlight, actually? Yes, it's light from the Sun but so much more than that. Sunlight is both light and energy. Once it reaches Earth, we call this energy, "insolation," a fancy term for solar radiation. The amount of energy the Sun gives off changes over time in a never-ending cycle.

Solar flares (hotter) and sunspots (cooler) on the Sun's surface impact the amount of radiation headed to Earth. These periods of extra heat or extra cold (well, cold by Sun standards...) can last for weeks, sometimes months. The beams that reach us and warm our skin are electromagnetic waves that bring with them heat and radiation, by-products of the nuclear fusion happening as hydrogen nuclei fuse and shift violently to form helium, a process that fires every star in the sky.

Our bodies convert the ultraviolet rays to Vitamin D. Plants use the rays for photosynthesis, a process of converting carbon dioxide to sugar and using it to power their growth (and clean our atmosphere!) That process looks something like this: carbon dioxide + water + light energy — and glucose + oxygen = 6 CO2(g) + 6 H2O + photons → C6H12O6(aq) + 6 O2(g).

Photosynthetic organisms convert about 100–115 thousand million metric tonnes of carbon to biomass each year, about six times more power than used us mighty homo sapien sapiens. Our plants, forests and algae soak up this goodness and much later in time, we harvest this energy from fossil fuels.

We've yet to truly get a handle on the duality between light as waves and light as photons. The duality of the two-in-oneness of light; of their waves and alter-ego, particle photons is a physicists delight. Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity in part by thinking about what it would be like to ride around on these waves. What would space look and feel like? How would time occur? It bends the mind to consider. His wave-particle view helped us to understand that these seemingly different forms change when measured. To put this in plain English, they change when viewed, ie. you look them "in the eye" and they behave as you see them.

Light fills not just our wee bit of the Universe but the cosmos as well, bathing it in the form of cosmic background radiation that is the signature of the Big Bang and the many mini-big bangs of supernovae as they go through cycles of reincarnation and cataclysmic death — exploding outward and shining brighter than a billion stars.

In our solar system, once those electromagnetic waves leave the Sun headed for Earth, they reach us in a surprising eight minutes. We experience them as light mixed with the prism of beautiful colours. But what we see is actually a trick of the light. As rays of white sunlight travel through the atmosphere they collide with airborne particles and water droplets causing the rays to scatter.

We see mostly the yellow, orange and red hues (the longer wavelengths) as the blues and greens (the shorter wavelengths) scatter more easily and get bounced out of the game rather early.

WOOLLY MAMMOTHS: ANCIENT SNOW POUGHS

Woolly Mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius,  have always held wonder for me. These massive, hairy — and likely very smelly beasts — lived alongside us for a time. 

If you stood beside him and reached way up, you might be able to touch his tusks but likely not reach up to his mouth or even his eyes. 

He had a shaggy coat of light or dark coloured hair with long outer hair strands covering a dense thick undercoat. His oil glands would have worked overtime to secrete oils, giving him natural waterproofing. Some of the hair strands we have recovered are more than a meter in length. These behemoth proboscideans boasted long, curved tusks, little ears, short tails and grazed on leaves, shrubs and grasses that would have been hard work to get at as much of his world was covered in ice and snow during his reign.

We first see Woolly Mammoths in northeastern Siberia dating back 700,000 years. We find them in East Asia as far back as 800,000 years ago. They arose from the massive steppe mammoths, Mammuthus trogontherii, slowly evolving traits we see in this older species to the mammoths we think of today. 

Over time, their body size shrank and their teeth and tusks evolved to take advantage of the tough vegetation available to those few animals who could chew their way through ice and snow and work these tundra grasses into a digestible form. 

The enamel plates of their cheek teeth multiplied while the enamel itself became thinner. Tusks slowly took on more of a curved to act as ploughs for the snow. 

Those smaller than their predecessors, they were still formidable. Their size offered protection against predators once full grown. Sadly for the juveniles, they offered tasty prey to big cats like Homotherium who roamed these ancient grasslands alongside them.

The Mammoths of the Steppe spread to the northern areas of Eurasia, down through Europe, into the British Isles to Spain and crossed over to populate North America via the Bering Isthmus. It was the lowered sea levels during the last Ice Age that exposed dry land between Asia and the Americas. Here in this flat, grassy treeless plain known as the Bering Land Bridge or Isthmus, animals, including humans, could migrate from Europe west into North America.

The woolly mammoth coexisted with our ancestors who made good use of their bones and tusks for tools, housing, art and food. The last of their lineage died out relatively recently on Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago — a time when we were making our first harps and flutes in Egypt, dams, canals and stone sculptures in Sumer, using numbers for the first time and using tin to make tools.

THE DUDLEY BUG: ROLLED TRILOBITE

A lovely rolled trilobite, Calymene blumenbachii,  from outcrops in the UK. This wee beauty is in the collections of the deeply awesome Theresa Paul Spink Dunn — or perhaps in her daughter Layla's collections as she is quite the budding palaeontologist. This Silurian beauty is from the Homerian, Wenlock Series, Wrens Nest, Dudley, UK.

Calymene blumenbachii, sometimes erroneously spelled blumenbachi, is a species of trilobite found in the limestone quarries of the Wren's Nest in Dudley, England.

Nicknamed the Dudley Bug or Dudley Locust by an 18th-century quarryman, it became a symbol of the town and featured on the Dudley County Borough Council coat-of-arms. Calymene blumenbachii is commonly found in Silurian rocks (422.5-427.5 million years ago) and is thought to have lived in the shallow waters of the Silurian, in low energy reefs.

This particular species of Calymene — a fairly common genus in the Ordovician-Silurian — is unique to the Wenlock series in England and comes from the Wenlock Limestone Formation in Much Wenlock and the Wren's Nest in Dudley. 

These sites seem to yield trilobites more readily than any other areas on the Wenlock Edge, and the rock here is dark grey as opposed to yellowish or whitish as it appears on other parts of the Edge, just a few miles away, in Church Stretton and elsewhere suggesting local changes in the environment in which the rock was deposited. 

The Wenlock Edge quarry is closed now to further collecting but may be open to future research projects. We shall have to wait and see.

CRAB: HEART OF A WARRIOR

Look how epic this little guy is! 

He is a crab — and if you asked him, the fiercest warrior that ever lived. While that may not be strictly true, crabs do have the heart of a warrior and will raise their claws, sometimes only millimetres into the air, to assert dominance over their world. 

Crabs are decapod crustaceans of the Phylum Arthropoda. 

In the Kwak'wala language of the Kwakwaka'wakw of the Pacific Northwest, this brave fellow is ḵ̓u'mis — both a tasty snack and familiar to the supernatural deity Tuxw'id, a female warrior spirit. Given their natural armour and clear bravery, it is a fitting role.

They inhabit all the world's oceans, sandy beaches, many of our freshwater lakes and streams. Some few prefer to live in forests.

Crabs build their shells from highly mineralized chitin — and chitin gets around. It is the main structural component of the exoskeletons of many of our crustacean and insect friends. Shrimp, crab, and lobster all use it to build their exoskeletons.

Chitin is a polysaccharide — a large molecule made of many smaller monosaccharides or simple sugars, like glucose. 

It is handy stuff, forming crystalline nanofibrils or whiskers. Chitin is actually the second most abundant polysaccharide after cellulose. It is interesting as we usually think of these molecules in the context of their sugary context but they build many other very useful things in nature — not the least of these are the hard shells or exoskeletons of our crustacean friends.

Crabs in the Fossil Record

The earliest unambiguous crab fossils date from the Early Jurassic, with the oldest being Eocarcinus from the early Pliensbachian of Britain, which likely represents a stem-group lineage, as it lacks several key morphological features that define modern crabs. 

Most Jurassic crabs are only known from dorsal — or top half of the body — carapaces, making it difficult to determine their relationships. Crabs radiated in the Late Jurassic, corresponding with an increase in reef habitats, though they would decline at the end of the Jurassic as the result of the decline of reef ecosystems. Crabs increased in diversity through the Cretaceous and represented the dominant group of decapods by the end.

We find wonderful fossil crab specimens on Vancouver Island. The first I ever collected was at Shelter Point, then again on Hornby Island, down on the Olympic Peninsula and along Vancouver Island's west coast near Nootka Sound. They are, of course, found globally and are one of the most pleasing fossils to find and aggravating to prep of all the specimens you will ever have in your collection. Bless them.

JURASSIC SEA URCHIN: AM'DA'MA

This lovely little biscuit is a Holectypus sea urchin from 120 million-year-old deposits from the Lagniro Formation of Madagascar.

The specimen you see here is in the collections of my beautiful friend Ileana. She and I were blessed to meet in China many years ago and formed an unbreakable bond that happens so few times in one's life. 

Holectypus are a genus of extinct echinoids related to modern sea urchins and sand dollars. They were abundant from the Jurassic to the Cretaceous (between 200 million and 65.5 million years ago).

This specimen is typical of Holectypus with his delicate five-star pattern adorning a slightly rounded test and flattened bottom. The specimen has been polished and was harvested both for its scientific and aesthetic value. 

I have many wonderful memories of collecting their modern cousins that live on the north end of Vancouver Island and along the beaches of Balaklava Island. In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, sea urchins are known as a̱m'da̱'ma and it is this name that I hear in my head when I think of them.

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. 

Sea Urchin Detail

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.

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.

Because most echinoids have rigid tests, their ability to fossilize is greater than that of more delicate echinoderms such as starfish, and they are common fossils in many deposits. 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 (Early 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 event, evolving the diverse forms we find them in today. 

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. They remain one of my favourite echinoderms and stand tall amongst the most pleasing of the invertebrates.

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.

MAMMOTHS LAST MEAL

One of the first scientific accounts of a well-preserved woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, frozen in Siberia described the meat as enticingly red and marbled but smelling so putrid that researchers could only tolerate a minute in its proximity.

Despite this initial review, numerous apocryphal tales exist of dinners made from centuries-old mammoths found frozen whole in clear blocks of ice. 

These accounts have not only enchanted the public but also heavily influenced early scientific thought on Quaternary extinctions and climate; many researchers resorting to catastrophism to explain the instantaneous freezing necessary to preserve palatable meat.

The possibility of cloning is now the major draw of frozen mammoths but the public remains curious about eating prehistoric meat, especially because some modern paleontologists have credibly described tasting mammoth and extinct bison found preserved in permafrost.

Although less publicized today, eating study specimens was once common practice for researchers. Charles Darwin belonged to a club dedicated to tasting exotic meats, and in his first book wrote almost three times as much about dishes like armadillo and tortoise urine than he did on the biogeography of his Galapagos finches.

One of the most famously strange scientific meals occurred on January 13, 1951, at the 47th Explorers Club Annual Dinner (ECAD) when members purportedly dined on frozen woolly mammoth. The prehistoric meat was supposedly found on Akutan Island in Alaska, USA, by the eminent polar explorers Father Bernard Rosecrans Hubbard, “the Glacier Priest,” and Captain George Francis Kosco of the US Navy.

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, making the Club as well-known for its notorious hors d’oeuvres like fried tarantulas and goat eyeballs as it is for its notable members such as Teddy Roosevelt and Neil Armstrong.

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.

Green Sea Turtle, Chelonia mydas

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 DNA 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. 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 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

The image of the mammoth you see here is by the very talented Daniel Eskridge. To see more of his work, and indeed purchase it, head over to: https://daniel-eskridge.pixels.com/