CHARLES 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

TUSKED TITANS OF THE ARCTIC: WALRUS ᐊᐃᕕᖅ

A lazy walrus lounges on an ice floe, its massive, blubbery body shimmering under the low Arctic sun. 

With a deep, rumbling sigh, it shifts its weight and scratches an itch on its side—more out of habit than necessity. Life, for this marine titan, moves at the pace of the tides.

Odobenus rosmarus, the walrus is the only surviving member of the family Odobenidae, a once-diverse group of pinnipeds that includes extinct relatives such as Dusignathus and Pontolis. 

Fossil remains place their lineage back to the late Miocene, around 10–11 million years ago. Early odobenids first appeared in the North Pacific and were more varied than the tusked, bottom-feeding walrus we know today—some had shorter tusks or none at all, and many hunted fish rather than clams.

These ancient walruses belonged to a broader superfamily, the Pinnipedia, which also includes seals and sea lions. Genetic and fossil evidence suggests pinnipeds split from terrestrial carnivores roughly 25–30 million years ago, likely from bear-like ancestors that took to the water during the Oligocene. Odobenids evolved later, perfecting their specialization as suction feeders. 

Their powerful tongues can vacuum soft-bodied mollusks straight from their shells—a skill that defines modern walrus diets.

Today, walruses inhabit the icy Arctic and subarctic waters of the Northern Hemisphere, with two recognized subspecies: the Atlantic walrus, O. r. rosmarus, found in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland, and the Pacific walrus, O. r. divergens, ranging from the Bering Sea to the Chukchi Sea. They prefer shallow continental shelf regions where bivalves abound and haul out on sea ice or rocky shores in vast, noisy colonies.

Despite their ponderous appearance, walruses are powerful swimmers and social creatures with intricate communication and hierarchy systems. Their tusks—elongated canines present in both males and females—serve for dominance displays, hauling out, and defense. 

To Arctic peoples, walruses have long been vital for food, hides, and ivory, woven into traditional lifeways and mythology.

In Inuktitut, the word for walrus is “aiviq” (ᐊᐃᕕᖅ). It’s pronounced roughly eye-vik or ay-vik, depending on the dialect. The plural form is “aiviat” (ᐊᐃᕕᐊᑦ). The walrus, aiviq, holds deep cultural and spiritual importance in Inuit communities, long valued for its meat, ivory, and hide—vital resources for survival in the Arctic.

From Miocene shores to the modern polar ice, the walrus story is one of adaptation and endurance—a lineage that has survived shifting seas and ice ages, still scratching its ancient itch beneath the northern sun.

BARNACLES: K'WITA'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 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.

HOW DO FOSSILS FORM? CAN I BECOME A FOSSIL?

Let us begin with a rather brutal truth. You are probably not going to become a fossil.

Neither am I.

Neither is the salmon that washed onto the riverbank, the beetle beneath the cedar tree nor the unfortunate vole currently being carried away by an owl.

Most living things disappear completely after death. 

They are eaten, scavenged, scattered, dissolved, trampled, weathered or dismantled by bacteria and fungi. Their nutrients return to the ecosystem, but their physical remains leave no lasting geological record.

Fossilization is the exception. Yet, it is still a conversation I have with my fossil friends more times than I can count. We would all love to become fossils ourselves. Geeky? Yes, but one can dream!

To become a fossil requires the right organism to die in the right place, at the right time, under the right conditions—and then remain protected through thousands, millions or even billions of years of geological upheaval.

To become a fossil is to win one of the most improbable lotteries on Earth.

Even then, success is not guaranteed. A fossil must survive burial, pressure, mineral-rich water, chemical change, shifting continents, rising mountains and erosion. Finally, it must reach the surface at precisely the moment when someone is there to recognize it.

Too early, and it remains hidden. Too late, and it erodes into dust.

Fossilization is therefore not a single event. It is a journey—a long and perilous passage from life to stone and, with extraordinary luck, back into the light.

STEP ONE: SOMETHING DIES

Upper Cambrian Trilobite

Every body fossil begins with death. This may happen quietly. A leaf drops into a lake. A clam dies on the seafloor. A fish sinks into deep water.

Or it may happen with considerably more geological enthusiasm.

A volcanic eruption blankets an ecosystem in ash. A flood sweeps animals into a river channel. A mudslide buries an entire community. A tree releases sticky resin around a struggling insect. A creature wanders into natural tar and discovers, much too late, that the surface is not as solid as advertised.

The cause of death can influence what happens next, but death alone does not begin fossilization.

The critical issue is what happens to the remains immediately afterward.

A dead organism is suddenly of great interest to nearly everything around it. Scavengers arrive. Insects feed and lay eggs. Microorganisms begin breaking down tissues. Sunlight, oxygen, water and temperature all accelerate physical and chemical change.

Fossilization begins as a race between destruction and preservation. Destruction usually wins.

STEP TWO: THE BODY BEGINS TO DECAY

Soft tissues generally disappear first.

Eyes, skin, internal organs, muscles and other delicate tissues are quickly attacked by bacteria, fungi, insects and scavengers. Under ordinary conditions, little may remain after days, weeks or months.

Hard parts last longer. Bones, teeth, shells, exoskeletons and wood resist decay, giving them a greater opportunity to be buried. This is why the fossil record contains far more shells and teeth than jellyfish and worms.

It is also why our picture of ancient life is biased.

An ecosystem may have been filled with soft-bodied creatures, but unless unusually favourable conditions preserved them, their absence from the fossil record can make them nearly invisible to us.

Imagine trying to reconstruct the modern ocean using only shark teeth, clam shells and the occasional whale bone. You would learn a great deal, but you would miss most of the story.

Hard body parts and rapid burial are two of the most important factors increasing an organism’s chance of fossilization. Without them, the journey often ends before it begins.

STEP THREE: RAPID BURIAL CHANGES EVERYTHING

Burial is the great opportunity.

When remains are quickly covered by mud, sand, silt, volcanic ash or another material, they become less accessible to scavengers and less exposed to weather.

Burial can also reduce the amount of oxygen reaching the remains. Many bacteria and scavenging organisms require oxygen, so low-oxygen conditions can slow decomposition.

This does not mean all buried organisms become fossils. Most do not. But rapid burial buys time.

The best locations for fossilization are therefore usually places where sediment accumulates:

• River channels and floodplains
• Lakes
• Deltas
• Beaches
• Shallow seas
• Deep ocean basins
• Sand dunes
• Caves
• Volcanic ash deposits
• Tar seeps
• Peat bogs

An animal dying on a rocky mountaintop has poor prospects. Its remains may be scattered by wind, water and scavengers without ever being buried.

A clam dying on a muddy seafloor has much better odds. Sediment is already accumulating around it, and its shell is resistant to decay.

This is one reason marine organisms are so well represented in the fossil record. Oceans have covered enormous portions of the planet, and their floors provide vast areas where sediment can accumulate.

Many rocks now exposed high in mountains began as sediment beneath ancient seas.

Finding seashells on a mountain does not mean clams were once exceptionally skilled climbers. It means the seafloor was lifted. We can look to the Burgess Shale Biota as a wonderful example of this.

HOW MUCH BURIAL IS ENOUGH?

The first thin layer may protect remains temporarily, but continued burial is usually necessary for long-term preservation.

New sediment settles on top of older sediment. Layer after layer accumulates, gradually increasing the pressure on the material below.

The sediment becomes compacted. Water is squeezed from the spaces between grains. Dissolved minerals precipitate and act like cement, binding those grains together.

Loose mud may become shale. Sand may become sandstone. Accumulations of shells and carbonate mud may become limestone.

Sedimentary rocks form when deposited material is buried, compacted and cemented. These rocks are particularly important to palaeontology because they form at Earth’s surface under conditions capable of preserving evidence of life.

Fossils are rarely found in rocks that once existed as molten magma. Lava is not known for its gentle handling of organic remains.

Metamorphism can also destroy fossils. When sedimentary rocks are subjected to intense heat and pressure, their minerals recrystallize. Delicate structures may be distorted or erased entirely.

Fossils therefore survive best when their rocks experience enough burial to become solid, but not so much heat and pressure that their history is cooked beyond recognition.

It is a narrow path. Sinking to the bottom of a body of water with little to no oxygen will also do the trick in many cases. 

THE ODDS ARE NOT IN YOUR FAVOUR

Even rapid burial does not guarantee fossilization. The remains may later dissolve. Groundwater may carry them away. Geological pressure may crush them. The surrounding rock may be heated, folded, faulted or dragged deep into Earth’s crust.

Entire fossil-bearing formations can disappear through erosion or be transformed so completely that no recognizable trace of life remains.

Then there is the final difficulty: discovery.

A fossil may remain safely hidden underground for millions of years. Tectonic movement must lift the fossil-bearing rocks, and erosion must remove enough material to expose them at the surface.

Exposure creates another race against time.

Wind, rain, waves, frost and flowing water reveal fossils—but they also destroy them. A bone that survived 100 million years underground may begin crumbling within a few seasons of reaching the surface.

Someone must pass by during that brief window, notice an unusual shape and understand that it matters.

A line of vertebrae. The curve of a shell. A tooth emerging from sandstone. A delicate leaf pressed into shale.

The moment of discovery may feel sudden, but it is the final stage of a journey that began with death and continued through deep time.

AN IMPROBABLE MESSAGE FROM THE PAST

Fossils are often described as the remains of dead organisms. I prefer to think of them as survivors.

They survived decay, scavengers and weather. They survived burial, pressure and chemical change. They survived the shifting, folding and fracturing of Earth’s crust. Finally, they survived erosion long enough for someone to find them.

OF LAND AND SEA

Our dear penguins, seals, sea lions, walruses, whales, crocodiles and sea turtles were once entirely terrestrial. Yes, they lived mostly or entirely on land. 

Many of these once land-dwelling animals returned to the sea throughout evolutionary history. We have beautifully documented cases from amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals from over 30 different lineages over the past 250 million years.

Some dipped a toe or two into freshwater ponds, but make no mistake, they were terrestrial. Each of these animals had ancestors that tried out the sea and decided to stay. They evolved and employed a variety of adaptations to meet their new saltwater challenges. Some adapted legs as fins, others became more streamlined, and still, others developed specialized organs to extract dissolved oxygen from the water through their skin or gills. The permutations are endless.

Returning to the sea comes with a whole host of benefits but some serious challenges as well. Life at sea is very different from life on land. Water is denser than air, impacting how an animal moves, sees and hears. More importantly, it impacts an air-breathing animal's movement on a pretty frequent basis. If you need air and haven't evolved gills, you need to surface frequently. Keeping your body temperature at a homeostatic level is also a challenge as water conducts heat much better than air. Even with all of these challenges, the lure of additional food sources and freedom of movement kept those who tried the sea in the sea and they evolved accordingly.

Most major animal groups appear for the first time in the fossil record half a billion years ago. We call this flourishing of species the Cambrian Explosion. While this was a hugely intense period of species radiation, the evolutionary origins of animals are likely to be significantly older. About 700 million years ago the Earth was covered in ice and snow. This was an ice age so intense we refer to this time in our ancient history as Snowball Earth. Once that ice receded, it exposed rocks that contained a variety of weird and wonderful fossils that speak to ancient animals that are only now being studied.

Dr Frankie Dunn, a palaeontologist and an Early Career Research Fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and Merton College is one of the folks who are examining this early history of some of our first animals. Her research focuses on the origin and early evolution of animals and particularly on the fossil record of the late Ediacaran Period (570 – 540 million years ago).  Dr Dunn's research is exploring ancient species like the long-extinct Rangeomorpha to help understand how animal body plans evolved in deep time well before the divergence of the extant (living) animal lineages.

Andy Temple (bless him) sent me a link for an online talk Dr Dunn is giving, The Chronicles of Charnia, Wed, June 17th at 7PM. She's based in Oxford so adjust your timezone accordingly. The talk is free but booking is required. Here's the link: https://event.webinarjam.com/register/59/xyy07flg 

This is an interesting article from Alicia Ault writing for the Smithsonian who interviewed Nick Pysenson and Neil Kelley about some of their research that touches on this area. They published a paper on it in the journal Science. Here's the link: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6232/aaa3716

And Ault's work is definitely worth a read: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/take-deep-dive-reasons-land-animals-moved-seas-180955007/

HOLLARDOPS: LE MAÎTRE

Hollardops sp. Devonian Trilobite

Hollardops is a genus of trilobite in the order Phacopida that lived during the Eifelian of the Middle Devonian. It was described by Le Maître in 1952 under type species Metacanthina mesocristata. 

The genus underwent reclassification in 1997 and emerged as Hollardops. We find this extinct arthropod in present-day Morocco. They share similarities with Greenops of New York and Canada but are generally larger than most Greenops species.

Hollardops have schizochroal eyes and a glabella that is slightly raised on the surface of the cephalon. Genal spines extend from the cephalon and extend to approximately the 6th thoracic segment.

Hollardops has eleven thoracic segments and also has five pairs of spines extending from the segments of the pygidium. Length ranges from approximately 3 to 9 cm.

Palaeo Coordinates — If you are a keen bean to head out in search of this lovely yourself, head to the Tazoulait Formation at Jbel (Jebel) Oufatène 30.8374368°N 4.9018067°W and Issimour 30.9669834°N 5.0373266°W SE of Alnif, western of Oued Alnif, Ma'ider region, Morocco.

THE CURIOUS TALE OF THE FOSSIL RHINO

The Miocene pillow basalts from the Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area of central Washington hold an unlikely fossil. 

What looks to be a rather unremarkable ballooning at the top of a cave is actually the mould of a small rhinoceros, preserved by sheer chance as its bloated carcass sunk to the bottom of a shallow lake just prior to a volcanic explosion.

We have known about this gem for a long while now. The fossil was discovered by hikers back in 1935 and later cast by the University of California palaeontologists in 1948. 

The Dirty Thirties & The Great Depression

These were the Dirty Thirties and those living in Washington state were experiencing the Great Depression along with the rest of the country and the world. Franklin D. Roosevelt was President of the United States, navigating the States away from laissez-faire economics. 

Charmingly, Roosevelt would have his good name honoured by this same park in April of 1946, a few years before researchers at Berkeley would rekindle interest in the site.

Both hiking and fossil collecting was a fine answer to these hard economic times and came with all the delights of discovery with no cost for natural entertainment. And so it was that two fossil enthusiast couples were out looking for petrified wood just south of Dry Falls on Blue Lake in Washington State. 

While searching the pillow basalt, the Frieles and Peabodys came across a large hole high up in a cave that had the distinctive shape of an upside-down rhinoceros.

This fossil is interesting in all sorts of ways. First, we so rarely see fossils in igneous rocks. As you might suspect, both magma and lava are very hot. Magma, or molten rock, glows a bright red/orange as it simmers at a toasty 700 °C to 1300 °C (or 1300 °F to 2400 °F) beneath the Earth's surface.

A Rhinoceros Frozen in Lava

During the late Miocene and early Pliocene, repeated basaltic lava floods engulfed about 63,000 square miles of the Pacific Northwest over a period of ten to fifteen million years. After these repeated bathings the residual lava accumulated to more than 6,000 feet.

As magma pushes up to the surface becoming lava, it cools to a nice deep black. In the case of our rhino friend, this is how this unlikely fellow became a fossil. Instead of vaporizing his remains, the lava cooled relatively quickly preserving his outline as a trace fossil and remarkably, a few of his teeth, jaw and bones. The lava was eventually buried then waters from the Spokane Floods eroded enough of the overburden to reveal the remains once more.

Diceratherium tridactylum (Marsh, 1875)

Diceratherium (Marsh, 1875) is known from over a hundred paleontological occurrences from eighty-seven collections.

While there are likely many more, we have found fossil remains of Diceratherium, an extinct genus of rhinoceros, in the Miocene of Canada in Saskatchewan, China, France, Portugal, Switzerland, and multiple sites in the United States.

He has also been found in the Oligocene of Canada in Saskatchewan, and twenty-five localities in the United States — in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington and Wyoming.  

Diceratherium was a scansorial insectivore with two horns and a fair bit of girth. He was a chunky fellow, weighing in at about one tonne (or 2,200 lbs). That is about the size of a baby Humpback Whale or a walrus.

Back in the Day: Washington State 15 Million-Years Ago

He roamed a much cooler Washington state some 15 million years ago. Ice dams blocked large waterways in the northern half of the state, creating reservoirs. Floodwaters scoured the eastern side of the state, leaving scablands we still see today. In what would become Idaho, volcanic eruptions pushed through the Snake River, the lava cooling instantly as it burst to the surface in a cloud of steam. 

By then, the Cascades had arrived and we had yet to see the volcanic eruptions that would entomb whole forests up near Vantage in the Takama Canyon of Washington state. 

Know Before You Go

You are welcome to go see his final resting site beside the lake but it is difficult to reach and comes with its own risks. Head to the north end of Blue Lake in Washington. Take a boat and search for openings in the cliff face. You will know you are in the right place if you see a white "R" a couple hundred feet up inside the cliff. Inside the cave, look for a cache left by those who've explored here before you. Once you find the cache, look straight up. That hole above you is the outline of the rhino.

If you don't relish the thought of basalt caving, you can visit a cast of the rhino at the Burke Museum in Seattle, Washington. They have a great museum and are pretty sporting as they have built the cast sturdy enough for folk to climb inside. 

The Burke Museum 

The Burke Museum recently underwent a rather massive facelift and has re-opened its doors to the public. You can now explore their collections in the New Burke, a 113,000 sq. ft. building at 4300 15th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98105, United States. Or visit them virtually, at https://www.burkemuseum.org/

Photo: Robert Bruce Horsfall - https://archive.org/details/ahistorylandmam00scotgoog, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12805514

Reference: Prothero, Donald R. (2005). The Evolution of North American Rhinoceroses. Cambridge University Press. p. 228. ISBN 9780521832403.

Reference: O. C. Marsh. 1875. Notice of new Tertiary mammals, IV. American Journal of Science 9(51):239-250

Lincoln, Roosevelt and Recovery from The Great Depression

Rural Tennessee has electricity for the same reason Southeast Alaska has totem parks. In order to help the nation recover from The Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, created a number of federal agencies to put people to work. From 1938-1942 more than 200 Tlingit and Haida men carved totem poles and cleared land for the Civilian Conservation Corps in an effort to create “totem parks” the federal government hoped would draw travelers to Alaska.

This odd intersection of federal relief, Alaska Native art and marketing is the subject of Emily L. Moore’s book “Proud Raven, Panting Wolf: Carving Alaska’s New Deal Totem Parks.”

This effort to bring poles out of abandoned villages includes the Lincoln Pole being moved to Saxman Totem Park by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), who established the Saxman Totem Park in 1938.  

The top carving on the Lincoln Pole bears a great likeness of Abraham Lincoln. According to the teachings of many Tlingit elders, this carving was meant to represent the first white man seen in Tlingit territory in the 18th century.  

A century later, in the 1880s, one of my ancestors from the Gaanax.ádi Raven clan of the Tongass Tlingit commissioned the pole to commemorate our ancestor's pride to have seen this first white man—which has become a Gaanax.ádi crest—using a photograph of Abraham Lincoln as the model. 

It is important not only for these various readings of the crests but also because it claims Gaanax.ádi clan territory before the first Europeans and budding Americans came to these shores—territory that Tlingit carvers who were re-carving the pole in the 1940s were trying to assert to the U.S. government as sovereign land.

Interestingly, another pole in that same park is the Dogfish Pole, carved for Chief Ebbits Andáa, Teikweidi, Valley House. The Chief Ebbits Memorial Pole—the Dogfish Kootéeyaa Pole—was raised in 1892 in Old Tongass Village in honour of a great man, Head Chief of the Tongass and my ancestor. It was then moved, re-carved and re-painted at Saxman Totem Park in 1938 as part of Roosevelt's program—and it due to be re-carved again this year. 

It tells the story of his life and the curious way he became Ebbits as he was born Neokoots. He met and traded with some early American fur traders. One of those traders was a Mister Ebbits. The two became friends and sealed that friendship with the exchanging of names.  

If you would like to read more about that pole and others, I recommend, The Wolf and the Raven, by anthropologist Viola Garfield and architect Linn Forrest (my talented cousin), published in 1961 and still in print as I ordered a copy for a friend just this year.

TRACKING WHALES WITH BARNACLES

We can trace the lineage of barnacles back to the Middle Cambrian. That is half a billion years of data to sift through. 

If you divide that timeline in half yet again, we begin to understand barnacles and their relationship to other sea-dwelling creatures — with a lens that reveals ancient migration patterns.

Barnacles are in the infraclass Cirripedia in the class Maxillopoda. They are marine arthropods related to crabs and lobsters. 

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, barnacles are known as k̕wit̕a̱'a and broken barnacle shells are known as t̕sut̕su'ma. Unless scraped off, barnacles live on one single sturdy object for their entire lives — 8 to 20 years — while chowing down on tasty snacks like plankton and algae they absorb from the surrounding water.

One of the most interesting aha moments in palaeontology came from the study of 270,000 million-year-old k̕wit̕a̱'as. These sticky wee crustaceans have enabled us to trace the course of ancient whale migration. 

University of California Berkeley doctoral student Larry Taylor published some clever findings on how fossil barnacles hitched a ride on the backs of humpback and grey whales millions of years ago and used this data to reconstruct the migrations of ancient whale populations.

The barnacles record details about the whales’ yearly travels in the fossil record. By following this barnacle trail, Taylor et al. were able to reconstruct migration routes of whales from millions of years in the past.

Today, Humpback whales come from both the Southern Hemisphere (July to October with over 2,000 whales) and the Northern Hemisphere (December to March about 450 whales along with Central America) to Panama (and Costa Rica). They undertake annual migrations from polar summer feeding grounds to winter calving and nursery grounds in subtropical and tropical coastal waters.

One surprise find is that the coast of Panama has been a meeting ground for humpback whales going back at least 270,000 years. To see how the barnacles have travelled through the migration routes of ancient whales, the team used oxygen isotope ratios in barnacle shells and measured how they changed over time with ocean conditions. 

Did the whale migrate to warmer breeding grounds or colder feeding grounds? Barnacles retain this information even after they fall off the whale, sink to the ocean bottom, and become fossils. As a result, the travels of fossilized barnacles can serve as a proxy for the journeys of whales in the distant past.

Barnacles can play an important role in estimating paleo-water depths. The degree of disarticulation of fossils suggests the distance they have been transported, and since many species have narrow ranges of water depths, it can be assumed that the animals lived in shallow water and broke up as they were washed down-slope. 

Barnacles have few predators. Their one nemesis is the whelk. It seems that catching a lifetime's ride on a passing whale would have extended their ability to feed on plankton in a variety of settings whelk-free and likely live longer than they might have cemented to something closer to the seafloor.

OPABINIA: QUIRKY CAMBRIAN ARTHROPOD

Meet one of the most wonderfully peculiar animals to ever grace our ancient seas. 

This five-eyed marvel swam through the Cambrian oceans some 508 million years ago, its soft body drifting above the seafloor of what is now British Columbia—preserved in exquisite detail within the famed Burgess Shale of Yoho National Park.

At first glance, Opabinia regalis feels almost mischievous in its design. I think of them as Cambrian submarines. Five stalked eyes sit atop its head like a crown of periscopes, scanning a world teeming with early life. 

Along its sides, a series of delicate lobes ripple in coordinated waves, propelling it forward with gentle, undulating grace. But it is the feeding apparatus that truly steals the show—a long, flexible proboscis ending in a tiny claw, perfectly suited for plucking soft prey from the seafloor and delivering it to its backward-facing mouth tucked beneath the head.

Yes—five eyes. And a claw-tipped trunk. Nature was experimenting, and Opabinia was one of her boldest sketches.

When Charles Doolittle Walcott first described this curious creature in 1912, it puzzled generations of paleontologists. At the time, he believed it was an anostracan branchiopod. I don't see the resemblance but I wasn't looking at a fossil mystery with his lived experience of the time.

Walcott named the species Opabinia after Opabin Peak in the Canadian Rockies. While his initial classification as a crustacean was later debated and revised by researchers like Harry Whittington in the 1970s—who identified it as a far more enigmatic "weird wonder"—Walcott's 1912 publication remains the initial scientific description of this marvelous fancy of nature.

For decades, its place on the tree of life remained uncertain, its anatomy so unlike anything alive today that it seemed almost alien. 

Thanks to the careful work of Harry Whittington and colleagues—that Opabinia was understood as part of an early branch of arthropod evolution, a relative—albeit a very strange one—of the lineage that would eventually give rise to insects, crustaceans and spiders.

Soft-bodied and delicate, Opabinia would never have fossilized under ordinary circumstances. It is only through the extraordinary preservation of the Burgess Shale—where rapid burial in fine mud and low-oxygen conditions halted decay—that we are gifted this glimpse into deep time’s more experimental chapters.

In Opabinia, we see evolution not as a straight line, but as a riot of possibilities—forms tried, tested, and sometimes abandoned with countless strange and beautiful designs flickering briefly before fading into the stone. I am truly thrilled that we got a chance to see this one as so many never had the chance to fossilize and we'll never get to know their quirky selves. 

BARNACLES: CUVIER TO DARWIN

Barnacles All Closed Up

One of the most interesting and enigmatic little critters we find at the seashore are barnacles. 

They cling to rocks 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.

A clever fellow from Duke University's Marine Laboratory in Durhan, North Carolina finally cracked that puzzle. Instead of chopping up barnacles to see what makes them stick, he observed and collected the oozing glue from some Amphibalanus amphitrite as they secreted it.

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.

Barnacle Cirri Seeking Tasty Plankton

Those wee feather-like bits you see are called cirri. Eight pairs of these thoracic limbs help barnacles to filter tasty bits of plankton from the surrounding water into their mouths.

Barnacles are cirripedes, a kind of crustacean that is covered with hard plates of calcium carbonate. Named for their cirri, they live stuck to hard surfaces in and around our world's oceans. While they do not look like crustaceans, they are definitely part of this taxonomic grouping that includes crab, lobster, crayfish, prawn, krill, and woodlice.

BARNACLES IN KWAK'WALA

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, barnacles are known as k̕wit̕a̱'a and broken barnacle shells are known as t̕sut̕su'ma.

BARNACLES IN THE FOSSIL RECORD

They have an old history. Their ancestors can be traced back to animals such as Priscansermarinus that lived during the Middle Cambrian – some 510 to 500 million years ago. I found my first barnacle fossil at a fossil site called Muir Creek on the south end of Vancouver Island. The fossil exposures at Muir are Oligocene, 20-25 million years old. This is about the time that barnacles can be found more readily as skeletal remains.

One of the reasons for the limited number of barnacle remains in the fossil record is their preferred habitat – high energy, shallow ocean environments. These tend to see a lot of tidal action that leads to erosion and barnacles being broken apart, slowly eroded down to bits too small to recognize for what they are.

One of the fossil remains we do find are not the barnacles themselves, but trace fossils of acrothoracican barnacle borings from Rogerella. These are commonly found in the fossil record beginning in the Devonian right up to today. Rogerella is a small pouch-shaped boring (a type of trace fossil) with a slit-like aperture currently produced by acrothoracican barnacles. 

These crustaceans extrude their legs upwards through the opening for filter-feeding (Seilacher, 1969; Lambers and Boekschoten, 1986). They are known in the fossil record as borings in carbonate substrates (shells and hardgrounds) from the Devonian to the Recent (Taylor and Wilson, 2003).

Barnacle Ancestry Goes Back to the Middle Cambrian

FROM MOLLUSCA TO ARTICULATA

Barnacles were originally classified by Linnaeus and Cuvier as Mollusca, but in 1830 John Vaughan Thompson published observations showing the metamorphosis of the nauplius and cypris larvae into adult barnacles. He noted how these larvae were similar to those of crustaceans.

In 1834 Hermann Burmeister published further information, reinterpreting these findings. The effect was to move barnacles from the phylum of Mollusca to Articulata, showing naturalists that detailed study was needed to reevaluate their taxonomy.

Charles Darwin took up this challenge in 1846 and developed his initial interest in a major study published as a series of monographs in 1851 and 1854. Darwin undertook this study, at the suggestion of his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker, to thoroughly understand at least one species before making the generalizations needed for his theory of evolution by natural selection.

BARNACLES IN A NUT SHELL

Barnacles are suspension feeders, sweeping small food into their mouth with their curved 'feet'. They are cemented to rock (usually), and covered with hard calcareous plates, which they shut firmly when the tide goes out. The barnacles reproduce sexually and produce little nauplius larvae that disperse in the plankton. Eventually, the larvae change into cypris form and attach on other hard surfaces to form new barnacles.

FOSSIL HUNTRESS PALEONTOLOGY PODCAST

Step into deep time with the Fossil Huntress Podcast—your warm and wonder-filled gateway to dinosaurs, trilobites, ammonites, and the astonishing parade of life that has ever walked, swum, or crawled across our planet.

Close your eyes and travel with me through ancient oceans teeming with early life, lush primeval forests echoing with strange calls, and sunbaked badlands where the bones of giants rest beneath your feet. 

Each episode is a journey into Earth’s secret past, where every fossil tells a story and every stone remembers.

Together, we’ll wander across extraordinary fossil beds, sacred landscapes, and timeworn shores that have witnessed the rise and fall of worlds. 

From tiny single-celled pioneers to mighty dinosaurs, from cataclysms to new dawns, this is where science meets storytelling—and where the past comes vividly alive.

So wherever you are—on the trail, by the sea, or cozy at home—bring your curiosity and join me in the great adventure of discovery. Favourite the show and come fossil-hunting through time with me!

Listen now: Fossil Huntress Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1hH1wpDFFIlYC9ZW5uTYVL

HUMPBACK WHALES: GWA'YAM

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

NUU-CHAH-NULTH FIRST NATIONS, HISTORY AND FOSSILS ON CANADA'S WEST COAST

Nootka Fossil Field Trip. Photo: John Fam

The rugged west coast of Vancouver Island offers spectacular views of a wild British Columbia. Here the seas heave along the shores slowly eroding the magnificent deposits that often contain fossils. 

Just off the shores of Vancouver Island, east of Gold River and south of Tahsis is the picturesque and remote Nootka Island.

This is the land of the proud and thriving Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations who have lived here always. 

Always is a long time, but we know from oral history and archaeological evidence that the Mowachaht and Muchalaht peoples lived here, along with many others, for many thousands of years — a time span much like always. 

While we know this area as Nootka Sound and the land we explore for fossils as Nootka Island, these names stem from a wee misunderstanding. 

Just four years after the 1774 visit by Spanish explorer Juan Pérez — and only a year before the Spanish established a military and fur trading post on the site of Yuquot — the Nuu-chah-nulth met the Englishman, James Cook.  

Captain Cook sailed to the village of Yuquot just west of Vancouver Island to a very warm welcome. He and his crew stayed on for a month of storytelling, trading and ship repairs. Friendly, but not familiar with the local language, he misunderstood the name for both the people and land to be Nootka. In actual fact, Nootka means, go around, go around. 

Two hundred years later, in 1978, the Nuu-chah-nulth chose the collective term Nuu-chah-nulth — nuučaan̓uł, meaning all along the mountains and sea or along the outside (of Vancouver Island) — to describe themselves. 

It is a term now used to describe several First Nations people living along western Vancouver Island, British Columbia. 

It is similar in a way to the use of the United Kingdom to refer to the lands of England, Scotland and Wales — though using United Kingdom-ers would be odd. Bless the Nuu-chah-nulth for their grace in choosing this collective name.  

An older term for this group of peoples was Aht, which means people in their language and is a component in all the names of their subgroups, and of some locations — Yuquot, Mowachaht, Kyuquot, Opitsaht. While collectively, they are the Nuu-chah-nulth, be interested in their more regional name should you meet them. 

But why does it matter? If you have ever mistakenly referred to someone from New Zealand as an Aussie or someone from Scotland as English, you have likely been schooled by an immediate — sometimes forceful, sometimes gracious — correction of your ways. The best answer to why it matters is because it matters.

Each of the subgroups of the Nuu-chah-nulth viewed their lands and seasonal migration within them (though not outside of them) from a viewpoint of inside and outside. Kla'a or outside is the term for their coastal environment and hilstis for their inside or inland environment.

It is to their kla'a that I was most keen to explore. Here, the lovely Late Eocene and Early Miocene exposures offer up fossil crab, mostly the species Raninid, along with fossil gastropods, bivalves, pine cones and spectacularly — a singular seed pod. These wonderfully preserved specimens are found in concretion along the foreshore where time and tide erode them out each year.

Five years after Spanish explorer Juan Pérez's first visit, the Spanish built and maintained a military post at Yuquot where they tore down the local houses to build their own structures and set up what would become a significant fur trade port for the Northwest Coast — with the local Chief Maquinna's blessing and his warriors acting as middlemen to other First Nations. 

Following reports of Cook's exploration British traders began to use the harbour of Nootka (Friendly Cove) as a base for a promising trade with China in sea-otter pelts but became embroiled with the Spanish who claimed (albeit erroneously) sovereignty over the Pacific Ocean. 

Dan Bowen searching an outcrop. Photo: John Fam

The ensuing Nootka Incident of 1790 nearly led to war between Britain and Spain (over lands neither could actually claim) but talk of war settled and the dispute was settled diplomatically. 

George Vancouver on his subsequent exploration in 1792 circumnavigated the island and charted much of the coastline. His meeting with the Spanish captain Bodega y Quadra at Nootka was friendly but did not accomplish the expected formal ceding of land by the Spanish to the British. 

It resulted however in his vain naming the island "Vancouver and Quadra." The Spanish captain's name was later dropped and given to the island on the east side of Discovery Strait. Again, another vain and unearned title that persists to this day.

Early settlement of the island was carried out mainly under the sponsorship of the Hudson's Bay Company whose lease from the Crown amounted to 7 shillings per year — that's roughly equal to £100.00 or $174 CDN today. Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, was founded in 1843 as Fort Victoria on the southern end of Vancouver Island by the Hudson's Bay Company's Chief Factor, Sir James Douglas. 

With Douglas's help, the Hudson's Bay Company established Fort Rupert on the north end of Vancouver Island in 1849. Both became centres of fur trade and trade between First Nations and solidified the Hudson's Bay Company's trading monopoly in the Pacific Northwest.

The settlement of Fort Victoria on the southern tip of Vancouver Island — handily south of the 49th parallel — greatly aided British negotiators to retain all of the islands when a line was finally set to mark the northern boundary of the United States with the signing of the Oregon Boundary Treaty of 1846. Vancouver Island became a separate British colony in 1858. British Columbia, exclusive of the island, was made a colony in 1858 and in 1866 the two colonies were joined into one — becoming a province of Canada in 1871 with Victoria as the capital.

Dan Bowen, Chair of the Vancouver Island Palaeontological Society (VIPS) did a truly splendid talk on the Fossils of Nootka Sound. With his permission, I have uploaded the talk to the ARCHEA YouTube Channel for all to enjoy. Do take a boo, he is a great presenter. Dan also graciously provided the photos you see here. The last of the photos you see here is from the August 2021 Nootka Fossil Field Trip. Photo: John Fam, Vice-Chair, Vancouver Paleontological Society (VanPS).

Know Before You Go — Nootka Trail

The Nootka Trail passes through the traditional lands of the Mowachaht/Muchalat First Nations who have lived here since always. They share this area with humpback and Gray whales, orcas, seals, sea lions, black bears, wolves, cougars, eagles, ravens, sea birds, river otters, insects and the many colourful intertidal creatures that you'll want to photograph.

This is a remote West Coast wilderness experience. Getting to Nootka Island requires some planning as you'll need to take a seaplane or water taxi to reach the trailhead. The trail takes 4-8 days to cover the 37 km year-round hike. The peak season is July to September. Permits are not required for the hike. 

Access via: Air Nootka floatplane, water taxi, or MV Uchuck III

• Dan Bowen, VIPS on the Fossils of Nootka: https://youtu.be/rsewBFztxSY
• https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sir-james-douglas
• file:///C:/Users/tosca/Downloads/186162-Article%20Text-199217-1-10-20151106.pdf
• Nootka Trip Planning: https://mbguiding.ca/nootka-trail-nootka-island/#overview

HUNTING NEUTRINOS AND DARK MATTER

Deep inside the largest and deepest gold mine in North America scientists are looking for dark matter particles and neutrinos instead of precious metals. It may not seem exciting on the surface — but it was far below!

The Homestake Gold Mine in Lawrence County, South Dakota was a going concern from about 1876 to 2001.

The mine produced more than forty million troy ounces of gold in its one hundred and twenty-five-year history, dating back to the beginnings of the Black Hills Gold Rush.

To give its humble beginnings a bit of context, Homestake was started in the days of miners hauling loads of ore via horse and mule and the battles of the Great Sioux War. Folk moved about via horse-drawn buggies and Alexander Graham Bell had just made his first successful telephone call.

Wyatt Earp was working in Dodge City, Kansas — he had yet to get the heck outta Dodge — and Mark Twain was in the throes of publishing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  — And our dear Thomas Edison had just opened his first industrial research lab in Menlo Park. 

The mine is part of the Homestake Formation, an Early Proterozoic layer of iron carbonate and iron silicate that produces auriferous greenschist gold. What does all that geeky goodness mean? 

If you were a gold miner it would be music to your ears. They ground down that schist to get the glorious good stuff and made a tiny wee sum doing so. But then gold prices levelled off — from 1997 ($287.05) to 2001 ($276.50) — and rumblings from the owners started to grow. They bailed in 2001, ironically just before gold prices started up again.

But back to 2001, that levelling saw the owners look to a new source of revenue in an unusual place. One they had explored way back in the 1960s in a purpose-built underground laboratory that sounds more like something out of a science fiction book. 

The brainchild of chemist and astrophysicists, John Bahcall and Raymond Davis Jr. from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the laboratory was used to observe solar neutrinos, electron neutrinos produced by the Sun as a product of nuclear fusion.

Davis had the ingenious idea to use 100,000 gallons of dry-cleaning solvent, tetrachloroethylene, with the notion that neutrinos headed to Earth from the Sun would pass through most matter but on very rare occasions would hit a chlorine-37 atom head-on turning it to argon-37. His experiment was a general success, detecting electron neutrinos,  though his technique failed to sense two-thirds of the number predicted. 

In particle physics, neutrinos come in three types: electron, muon and tau. Think yellow, green, blue. What Davis had failed to initially predict was the neutrino oscillation en route to Earth that altered one form of neutrino into another. Blue becomes green, yellow becomes blue... He did eventually correct this wee error and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 for his efforts.

Though Davis’ experiments were working, miners at Homestake continued to dig deep for ore in the belly of the Black Hills of western South Dakota for almost another forty years. As gold prices levelled out and ore quality dropped the idea began to float to re-purpose the mine as a potential site for a new Deep Underground Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL).

A pitch was made and the National Science Foundation awarded the contract to Homestake in 2007.  The mine is now home to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) using DUSEL and Large Underground Xenon to look at both neutrinos and dark particle matter. It is a wonderful re-purposing of the site and one that few could ever have predicted. Well done, Homestake. The future of the site is a gracious homage to the now deceased Davis. He would likely be delighted to know that his work continues at Homestake and our exploration of the Universe with it.

RAISE YOUR CLAWS: WARRIOR CRABS

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.

UPPER CRETACEOUS MOTORCROSS SITE: VANCOUVER ISLAND

Steller's Jay, Cyanocitta stelleri

One of the classic Vancouver Island fossil localities is the Santonian-Maastrichtian, Upper Cretaceous Haslam Formation Motocross Pit near Brannen Lake, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada.

The quarry is no longer active as such though there is a busy little gravel quarry a little way down the road closer to Ammonite falls near Benson Creek Falls.

Today it is an active motocross site and remains one of the classic localities of the Nanaimo Group. We find well-preserved nautiloids and ammonites — Canadoceras, Pseudoschloenbachia, Epigoniceras — the bivalves — Inoceramus, Sphenoceramus— gastropods, and classic Nanaimo Group decapods — Hoploparia, Linuparus. We also find fossil fruit and seeds which tell the story of the terrestrial history of Vancouver Island.

Upper Cretaceous Haslam Formation Motocross Pit near Brannen Lake

It was John Fam, Vice-Chair, Vancouver Island Paleontological Society (VanPS), who originally told me about the locality. John is one of the most delightful and knowledgeable people you'd be well-blessed to meet.

While he lived on Vancouver Island, he was an active member of the VanPS back when I was Chair. Several of the best joint VIPS/VanPS paleontological expeditions were planned with or instigated by his passion for fossils. I tip my hat to him for his passion and shared love of all things paleo.

John grew up 15 minutes from the motocross locality and used to collect there a few times a week with his father. John has wonderful parents and since marrying his childhood sweetheart, the amazing Grace, those excellent genetics, curiosity and love of fossils are now being passed to a new generation. It's lovely to see John and Grace continuing tradition with two boys of their own.

I met John way back then and did an overnight at his parent's house the Friday before a weekend field trip to Jurassic Point. It was a joy to have him walk me through his collections and tell his stories from earlier years. After learning about the site from John, I headed up to the Motocross Pit with my Uncle Doug. He was a delightful man who grew up on the coast and had explored much of it but not the fossil site just 10-minutes from his home. It was wonderful to walk through time with him so many years ago and then again solo this past year with sadness in my belly that one of the best I've ever known has left this Earth.

Upper Cretaceous Haslam Formation Motocross Pit near Brannen Lake

There were some no trespassing signs up but no people around, so I walked the periphery looking for the bedrock of the Haslam.

The rocks we find here were laid down south of the equator as small, tropical islands. They rode across the Pacific heading north and slightly east over the past 80 million years to where we find them today.

Jim Haggart and Peter Ward have done much to increase our understanding of the molluscan fauna of the Nanaimo Group. Personally, both personify the charming Indiana Jones school of rugged manly palaeontologists you picture in popular film. Professionally, their singular contributions and collaborative efforts have helped shape our understanding of the correlation of Nanaimo Group fauna to those we find in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia and down in the San Juan Islands of Washington State.

Their work builds on the work of Usher (1952), Matsumoto (1959a, 1959b) and Mallory (1977). A healthy nod goes out to the work of Muller and Jeletzky (1970) for untangling the lithostratigraphic and biostratigraphic foundation for our knowledge of the Nanaimo Group.

Candoceras yokoyama, Photo: John Fam, VanPS

As I walked along the bedrock of the Haslam, a Steller's Jay, Cyanocitta stelleri, followed me from tree to tree making his guttural shook, shook, shook call. Instructive, he seemed to be encouraging me, timing his hoots to the beat of my hammer. Vancouver Island truly has glorious flora and fauna.

Fancy some additional reading? Check out a paper published in the Journal of Paleontology back in 1989 by Haggard and Ward on new Nanaimo Group Ammonites from British Columbia and Washington State.

In it, they look at the ammonite species Puzosia (Mesopuzosia) densicostata Matsumoto, Kitchinites (Neopuzosia) japonicus Spath, Anapachydiscus cf. A. nelchinensis Jones, Menuites cf. M. menu (Forbes), Submortoniceras chicoense (Trask), and Baculites cf. B. boulei Collignon are described from Santonian--Campanian strata of western Canada and northwestern United States.

Stratigraphic occurrences and ranges of the species are summarized and those taxa important for correlation with other areas in the north Pacific region and Late Cretaceous ammonite fauna of the Indo-Pacific region. Here's the link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1305358?seq=1

Peter Ward is a prolific author, both of scientific papers and more popularized works. I highly recommend his book Gorgon: Paleontology, Obsession, and the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History. It is an engaging romp through a decade's research in South Africa's Karoo Desert.

Photo: Candoceras yokoyamai from Upper Cretaceous Haslam formation (Lower Campanian) near Nanaimo, British Columbia. One of the earliest fossils collected by John Fam (1993). Prepared using only a cold chisel and hammer. Photo & collection of John Fam, VIPS.

BUMBLEBEES: FOSSILS AND FIRST NATIONS

Welcome to the world of bees. 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.

My Norwegian cousins on my mother's side call them humle. Norway is a wonderful place to be something wild as the wild places have not been disturbed by our hands. 

There are an impressive thirty-five species of bumblebee species that call Norway hjem (home), and one, Bombus consobrinus, boasts the longest tongue that they use to feast solely on Monkshood, genus Aconitum, you may know by the name Wolf's-bane.

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, and my family on my father's side in 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 a 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 signal those heading out to join them as they return to the perfect 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 focused on their work. Bumblebees collect and carry pollen and nectar back to the nest which 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 in 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.