HOW DO FOSSILS FORM? THE MOST UNLIKELY AFTERLIFE ON EARTH

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.

SAXMAN TOTEM PARK AND TLINGIT HISTORY

In the hard-edged years of the Great Depression, when darkness settled across the American economy and hope felt threadbare, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched an unprecedented experiment. 

His New Deal programs sent electricity into rural Tennessee, built schools and dams across the nation, and—far to the northwest in the dripping rainforests of Southeast Alaska—sparked a cultural resurgence few federal planners could have imagined.

Between 1938 and 1942, more than two hundred Tlingit and Haida artists were hired through the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). 

Their charge was to carve monumental cedar poles and restore others standing in the mossy remains of unoccupied villages. 

Officials imagined the creation of “totem parks” that would lure American tourists northward. Perhaps not in the short term, as the recession raged across the nation and the world, but eventually, these parks would bring new visitors and their welcome dollars to the north.

Instead, the project became something far more profound: a revitalization of cultural memory, clan identity, and sovereignty, expressed through carving, paint, story, and the spirits of crest beings older than the United States itself.

Historian Emily L. Moore explores this unlikely convergence in her landmark book Proud Raven, Panting Wolf: Carving Alaska’s New Deal Totem Parks. 

Her research reveals the New Deal not as a moment of cultural salvage, but as one of Indigenous resurgence—an era when Tlingit families reclaimed their visual histories and reaffirmed their relationships to ancestral land.

 
Crests: Living Ancestors, Sacred Property

To understand the poles of Saxman Totem Park, one must understand the Crests depicted upon them. Among the Tlingit, a Crest is not a symbol in the Western sense. 

It is a living being—an animal person, a supernatural entity, or a powerful natural force—encountered by clan ancestors in the ancient past. 

 Dogfish Memorial Pole for Chief Ebbits 

These encounters, often world-changing and sometimes life-threatening, established the unique identity, character, and territorial rights of each clan.

The right to depict a Crest is sacred. In many histories, the ownership of a crest was acquired as kaa naawuweidi'—a payment for the life of an ancestor who survived or was lost during the clan's originating event—a death for a crest. 

That payment bestowed upon the clan not only the right to portray the being, but stewardship over its spirit, the land where the encounter occurred, and all material expressions of that relationship. 

These include carved house screens, frontlets and headdresses, Chilkat robes (naaxein), Chilkat tunics (naaxein k'oodás') spruce root hats, carved cedar war canoes, grave posts, weapons, ceremonial objects, stories, songs, mourning calls at ku.éex’, personal names, and place names.

Crests are held in perpetuity as at.óow—sacred clan property regarded as very much alive. Their spirits dwell within the objects and narratives that represent them. 

Seen in this way, you begin to understand that a totem pole is a monument, a being, a lineage, a territorial claim, and a continuation of the moment when a human ancestor first encountered a powerful other-than-human life.

 
The Lincoln Pole: A Crest, a Claim, a Lineage

One of the most discussed poles brought into Saxman Totem Park during the CCC era was the Lincoln Pole, relocated in 1938. 

The Lincoln Pole

At its summit, a familiar face gazes outward—a stylized representation of Abraham Lincoln. Many visitors assume the figure references American politics, but Tlingit Elders have long taught that the image originally referred to the first white man seen in Tlingit territory in the 1700s.

By the 1880s, members of the Gaanax.ádi Raven clan of the Tongass Tlingit—my ancestors—commissioned this pole to commemorate the event. Carvers selected Lincoln’s likeness simply because it was widely recognizable. 

As with many Crests, the visual representation is less important than the lineage of the encounter and the rights it affirms. This particular pole claims Gaanax.ádi presence and sovereignty long before American expansion reached Alaska.

When CCC carvers restored the pole in the 1940s, they revived more than cedar. They revived the voice of a clan asserting its ancient rights—rights transmitted through at.óow, through story, and through carved beings whose spirits continue to watch over their homeland.
The Dogfish Pole: Honour for a Chief, Story of a Life

Not far from the Lincoln Pole stands another monument filled with ancestral power: the Dogfish Pole, carved for Chief Ebbits Andáa of the Teikweidi, Valley House. Raised in Old Tongass Village in 1892, the pole memorializes the Head Chief of the Tongass Tlingit, whose crest relationships, titles, and life story are carved into its cedar body.

At birth, he was Neokoots. In adulthood, he inherited the title of Chief Sheiks from his father—Chief of Chiefs among the Tlingit of the region. Tlingit names are tides, earned and bestowed throughout a lifetime. 

Yet the transition from Sheiks to Ebbits was unusual. In the late nineteenth century, while trading with Americans aboard one of John Jacob Astor’s vessels, the Chief formed a deep friendship with a fur trader named Ebbits. In a rare ceremony, the two exchanged names. Their act created a bond that echoed through generations.

Chief Ebbits married Aanseet, Chief-of-All-Women of Drifted Ashore House. Their children—Anisalaga Mary Ebbits Hunt, Gaachnéin, Abbie (Atk'géigee), Keenanúk, Kéilsháawat, and the son Yaashút’, who died tragically in 1876—became ancestors to hundreds of descendants across British Columbia and Alaska. Anisalaga, renowned for her Chilkat weaving, carried many names, as is the way among Tlingit and Kwaguʼł families. 

Seattle Pole in Pioneer Square raised for Aanseet

Her artistry and lineage unite today’s Cadwallader, Spencer, Lyons, Hunt, Henderson, and many families of the Pacific Northwest.

Aanseet drowned on the Nass River in 1870. Two memorial poles, Princess-Shining-on-Copper, were raised in her honour: one in Alaska, and one in Tsaxis (Fort Rupert), raised by her daughter Anisalaga. 

The pole that stands in Pioneer Square in Seattle is a replica of the original pole stolen from Tongass Island back in 1899. The theft was undertaken by a group of Seattle businessmen on an expedition to the north. They moored near the village of Old Tongass and went ashore to cut down the pole. It was later presented to the city of Seattle and erected in Pioneer Square. 

In 1938, it was heavily damaged by arson and a new pole, a replica, was made. Once the families found out where their pole had gone, a court case ensued. A federal grand jury indicated eight men, but the case was dismissed. 

The Dogfish Pole weathered to a silvery grey by the early twentieth century, its paint long stripped by wind and time now stands restored in Saxman Totem Park. 

CCC artists restored it in 1938. In 2022, a new restoration stabilized its cedar and freshened its paint so that coming generations might continue to read its stories and honour its spirit.
Letters Across Time

Chief Abbits to Anisalaga

Not all history is carved. Some is fragile as paper. 

Among our family records is a letter from Chief Ebbits—signed “Abbits”—written in 1876 to his daughter Anisalaga, informing her of her brother’s death. 

The shifting spelling of names in these documents reflects not inconsistency, but the complexity of translating Tlingit sounds into English—a multilingual echo of a time when Indigenous and Euro-American worlds were learning to speak across profound differences.

 
A Legacy of Sovereignty

Today, visitors strolling through Saxman Totem Park near Ketchikan see more than restored poles—they see a forest of living beings, each carrying the spirits of crest ancestors. 

Ironically, a program designed to reshape Indigenous lives helped strengthen them. CCC carvers, many of them young Tlingit and Haida men, used federal wages to carve their clan stories back into visibility.

It also put carving tools back into the hands of artists to use their skills and refine them in the refurbishing of poles that would have (rightly) decayed into the moss and sands of these windswept shores.  

The Tlingit, along with other Northwest Coast peoples, hold the belief that totem poles should be allowed to decay naturally and return to the earth as part of the life cycle of these crests 

Photographer Jeff Whyte, whose work captures the saturated greens and mist-washed cedar of the Pacific Northwest, shared images with me from Saxman. 

His lens reveals what Tlingit communities have always known: the poles are alive, watching over their descendants as steadfastly as the spruce and hemlock rising behind them.

For those seeking deeper understanding, The Wolf and the Raven by anthropologist Viola Garfield and architect Linn Forrest—another talented member of our extended family—remains essential reading.
Cedar Memory

Saxman Totem Park

Alaska’s totem parks do not exist soley because a federal program sought to ease unemployment. That was the action that set them in motion but to carry out the work takes skill honed over many years. 

These parks exist because Tlingit clans chose to pick up their adzes, reclaim their Crests, restore their at.óow, and reassert their sovereignty in a rapidly changing world.

What stands at Saxman today is a story-forest, a lineage made visible, a gathering of ancestral beings raised toward the sky and carried into the future by those who continue to speak their names.

Visiting Saxman Totem Park

Saxman Totem Park is a public park located just south of Ketchikan in the Tlingit community of Saxman, Alaska. Established during the New Deal as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps’ ambitious totem restoration project, the park today houses one of the world’s most significant collections of Tlingit and Haida poles.

Many poles were relocated from unoccupied villages including Old Tongass, Cat Island, Village Island, Pennock Island, and Fox Village. Others were re-carved by master Tlingit artists hired through the CCC in the 1930s, and then again later as the poles once more weathered to show their age. 

Among the cultural treasures recovered from abandoned sites was a marble statue of a grizzly bear—an exceptional example of Indigenous stone carving.

Notable Poles and House Posts

• Sun and Raven
• Raven and Frog
• Tired-Wolf House Posts
• The Beaver Posts
• The Blackfish Pole
• Klawak Blackfish Fin
• The Frog Tree
• Grizzly Bear Monument
• Kats and his Bear Wife
• The Lincoln Totem
• Secretary of State Pole
• Raven Pole
• The Grizzly Bear Post
• The Loon Tree
• Owl Memorial
• Pointing Figure
• Giant Rock Oyster Pole
• Memorials of Eagle Tail House
• Dogfish Totem

Photo Credit: Saxman Totem Park poles courtesy of Jeff Whyte of  www.jeffwhytephotography.com

SEALS OF THE NORTH PACIFIC: FOSSILS AND LIVING STORIES OF THE KWAKIUTL

Along the storm-polished shores of northern Vancouver Island, where cedar-dark forests lean out over the Salt Chuck and the tide breathes in long, tidal sighs, the seal has long held a place of honour—not only as a keystone species of the coast, but as a cultural relative, teacher, and provider to the First Nations of northern Vancouver Island. 

Long before marine biologists began tagging pinnipeds or calculating biomass, Kwakwaka'wakw families, my family, understood the rhythms, migrations, and behaviours of ts’áxwi (harbour seals) intimately. 

Seals were never merely animals of the sea; they were participants in the community of beings, woven through stories, ceremony, and the practical technologies that allowed coastal life to flourish.

This deep relationship is reflected vividly in one of the most important annual institutions of Kwakiutl society: the Seal Society.

The Seal Society (Tsawadi): Winter Dances, Identity, and the First Step Into Knowledge

During the winter tseka—the great ceremonial season—First Nation communities transformed their bighouses into worlds between worlds. Flames swayed across cedar-planked walls. Dancers and masked performers embodied supernatural beings, ancestors, and the animal nations with whom the Kwakiutl share their homelands.

Among these dramatic and spiritually potent societies, the Seal Society (Tsawadi) held special significance.

For younger initiates, it was often the first step on a lifelong path into deeper ceremonial knowledge. Through dance, drama, and story, they learned to see the seal not only as a source of subsistence but as a teacher of adaptability, cooperation, and ocean wisdom.

The performances were more than representations—they were conversations across species, reaffirming relationships renewed each winter.

The Most Useful Animal of the Salt Chuck

Kwakiutl oral historians often remark that no other sea animal has been more consistently useful than the seal. Before the arrival of Europeans, seals provided:

• Meat and fat — rich, nutritious, and vital for winter survival
• Skin and fur — warm, water-resistant, stitched into clothing, blankets, and waterproof gear
• Intestines and sinew — fashioned into floats, fishing nets, and line
• Oil — for lamps, waterproofing, and trade

Because the seal was gentle and could be quietly approached on rocky islets and river-mouth sandbars, it became an essential part of coastal subsistence rounds.

Even feasts—the great ceremonial showcases of wealth, generosity, and status—featured seal meat as a prestige dish. The most tender portions were reserved for honoured guests. Thus, the seal became a motif in carved feast bowls, cooking vessels, and serving dishes, often inlaid with glistening abalone shell. I have a beautiful carved seal bowl that holds a place of honour in my house.

To eat seal at a potlatch was not simply to partake of food; it was to acknowledge relationship, territory, and gratitude.

The Thunder Bird and the Cedar Stump: A Kwakiutl Legend of Hunger and Humility

Stories, like tides, reveal deeper truths beneath the surface. Among the Kwakiutl, one legend tells of Tootooch, the Thunder Bird—a being of immense power and appetite—whose hunger leads to a moment of both humour and humility.

One day, Thunder Bird descended near the mouth of a river where a herd of seals slept on the rocks.

Using a rough club, he struck them down, piled them into a great roast, and consumed the lot.

But even after the feast, he remained ravenous—a reminder that supernatural hunger is never easily satisfied.

Borrowing a man’s canoe and seal spear, he hunted four more seals and placed them atop fire-heated rocks to cook. Needing skunk cabbage leaves to wrap the meat, he left his feast unattended beside a great cedar stump.

Before leaving he teased the stump:

“Don’t you wish you had some?”

But cedar stumps are not as passive as they appear.

While Thunder Bird was away, the stump crept over—quiet as old growth moss—and sat directly on the roasting seals, flattening and spoiling the meal. When Thunder Bird returned, he wept and cursed, fearing the long hunger ahead before he could find more seals.

To the Kwakiutl, the story is a reminder of humility before the natural world—and a playful nudge toward respecting even those beings we think rooted and still. Kwakiutl stories and practices align strikingly with ecological realities that scientists are only now fully appreciating.

Harbour Seals (Phoca vitulina richardsi) 

Common along the BC coast, they haul out on beaches, rocks, and estuaries—the very places described in oral traditions. Genetic studies show strong site fidelity: seals return to the same haul-outs generation after generation, much as families return to ancestral fishing grounds.

Elephant Seals (Mirounga angustirostris)

Once hunted nearly to extinction, they are now returning to Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii and all the waters of the Pacific Northwest—something First Nation Guardians and researchers alike have noted with fascination.

Today, we Kwakwaka'wakw continue to honour seals through art, stories, and cultural practice. This knowledge offers a vital human perspective to modern marine conservation—our ecosystems are not only ecological networks, but relationships of reciprocity, story, and responsibility.

And in every tale—from scientific surveys to Thunder Bird’s misadventures—one truth remains:

The seal is not merely an animal of the sea. It is a relative, a resource, a teacher, and a partner in the great living web of the Northwest Coast.

SVALBARD: A WINDOW INTO THE END PERMIAN EXTINCTION EVENT

Trekking in Svalbard, Norwegian Arctic

When the end-Permian extinction struck 252 million years ago, it nearly wiped the slate clean. 

More than 80% of marine species vanished. Coral reefs collapsed. Food webs unraveled. 

We've long believed that ocean life, particularly vertebrates, clawed its way back slowly and stepwise, with ecosystems taking millions of years to re-establish complexity.

But new research from the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard is rewriting that narrative.

Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole. One of the world’s northernmost inhabited areas, it's known for its rugged, remote terrain of glaciers and frozen tundra sheltering polar bears, Svalbard reindeer and Arctic foxes. 

It's a place close to my heart as a lover of cold, rugged landscapes and tasty fossils. We've been excavating Jurassic and Triassic marine reptile skeletons here since the early 2000s. 

It is a brutal place to do fieldwork, but the results are worth it, as Aubrey J. Roberts and team (and others) have discovered. The frozen tundra hides the answers to mysteries millions of years in the making.

A study led by Roberts and colleagues reveals a remarkable fossil treasure: a condensed bone bed on the island of Spitsbergen that captures an entire marine ecosystem only ~3 million years after the cataclysmic event. 

Rather than a slow, cautious re-entry into marine ecosystems, vertebrates appear to have surged back in a series of rapid evolutionary radiations—filling ecological niches far sooner than anyone expected.

A Fossil Window Into Early Triassic Seas

The newly described site dates to the early Spathian stage of the Early Triassic (~249 Ma), a time when Earth was still recovering from its worst biological crisis. Yet the bone bed tells a story of surprising ecological richness.

This ecosystem hosted:

• Apex predator ichthyosaurians — large, streamlined marine reptiles at the top of the food chain.
• Small-bodied ichthyopterygians — early relatives of ichthyosaurs, nimble hunters of smaller prey.
• Durophagous ichthyosauriforms — animals with crushing teeth adapted to hard-shelled prey.
• Semiaquatic archosauromorphs — early representatives of a group that later gave rise to crocodiles, dinosaurs, and birds.
• Euryhaline temnospondyls — amphibians comfortable in both fresh and salt water.
• Coelacanths and lungfish — living fossils of a lineage stretching back hundreds of millions of years.
• Ray-finned fish and sharks — the ever-present backbone of marine food webs.

Ichthyosaur Bone Bed

Taken together, these species formed an unexpectedly complex trophic network, one far more diverse and structured than previously assumed for such an early recovery interval.

We had once imagined a slow buildup of post-extinction ecosystems—simple communities giving way to more complex ones as time allowed evolutionary innovation. 

But the Svalbard bone bed challenges this view.

Diversity analyses by Roberts et al. show that heterogeneous marine vertebrate communities were already present by the late-earliest Triassic (Dienerian–Smithian, ~251 Ma).

These fully variegated tetrapod niches were re-established by ~3 million years after the extinction. Meaning vertebrates rebounded quickly, diversifying explosively into vacant ecological spaces left behind by the crisis. The recovery was not slow and linear—it was dynamic, fast, and opportunistic.

The discovery suggests that the complexification of marine ecosystems occurred through rapid radiations, not gradual, stepwise escalation. This is a new vision of our post-extinction oceans.

Picture the Early Triassic seas of Spitsbergen: warm, oxygen-stressed waters swirling with predators and prey, from sleek ichthyosaurs to ancient coelacanths. Against a backdrop of environmental turmoil, these animals built ecosystems every bit as intricate as the ones that existed before the extinction.

The implications reach far beyond Svalbard. They reshape our understanding of how life rebounds from global crises, hinting at a resilience and evolutionary adaptability more powerful than previously imagined.

The world after the end-Permian extinction was bruised, battered, and biologically diminished—but not for long. Within a geological blink, vertebrates were back in force, pioneering new ways of life in oceans still recovering from near-total collapse.

Life, as ever, found a way.

Reference: Earliest oceanic tetrapod ecosystem reveals rapid complexification of Triassic marine communities. https://scim.ag/4i1IKqK

TRENT RIVER FOSSIL TURTLE

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

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

While you might just gloss over that tidbit of information with a casual nod, consider how unlikely this particular fossil site is. 

We find fossils of species that lived on the land just metres from those who lived in our ancient oceans — remarkable!

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

If you stroll along the Trent solo or as part of a guided tour through the Courtenay Museum, you can walk right up to the Hadrosaur site. 

It was here many years ago that Mike Trask (whose name may ring a bell as he found the first elasmosaur on the Puntledge River) found bones from a duck-bill dinosaur. Now in Alberta, the province just east of British Columbia, there are areas where if you throw a rock, you'll hit a duck-bill bone, but in British Columbia, they were unheard of. 

This was not just the first duck-billed dinosaur, it was also the first dinosaur found on Vancouver Island — ever.   

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

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

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

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

Mesopuzosia sp.; Collection of Rick Ross

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to Know Before You Go — Trent River Walk

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

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

SALMON CANNERIES IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

Tallheo Cannery

Perched atop weathered, rotting pilings and wrapped in the mist and mood of British Columbia’s wild north coast sits the Tallheo Cannery — a faded red relic standing stubbornly against rain, tide, and time.

It was once a place of steam whistles, clanging machinery, shouted greetings from the docks, and the silver flash of salmon arriving by the boatload from the cold Pacific.

Tallheo rests near the former Nuxalk village of Talyu, at the meeting of the Taleomy and Noerick Rivers where they spill into South Bentinck Arm through Taleomy Narrows. 

It is a place we used see enroute to our favourite fishing spots when I was a child. I heard the stories of its history growing up. How it was once a thriving centre of fish production, along with tales of Talyu and which families used to live here.

This is Nuxalk territory — ancient, rich, and deeply storied. The Nuxalk are a distinct people of this coast, with their own language, traditions, and enduring relationship to land and sea.

Tallheo is the name of a cannery, yes, but it is also the name of a dialect of the Nuxalk language spoken by the Talhyumc people who lived here, and by those at Q'umk'uts' near the Bella Coola River estuary. 

Names matter. They hold memory. They hold history. 

Before European contact, the Nuxalk population was more than 35,000 strong and thriving. Then came disease, violence, and colonial disruption. Smallpox and conflict reduced that number to a devastating few hundred souls. Yet here is the story that matters most: they endured. 

Today the population has rebounded to roughly 3,000 and growing — a powerful testament to resilience, kinship, and cultural strength.

In 1905, Tallheo Cannery opened its doors to the hum and thrum of the industrial age. Founded by a Norwegian immigrant, it employed many local residents — Indigenous and settler alike. 

Boats came heavy with Chinook, Pink, Chum, Sockeye, and Spring salmon, their holds brimming with the wealth of these northern waters.

Inside, skilled hands cleaned, cut, packed, and sealed the catch into tins bound for markets near and far. 

Imagine the delight of some London clerk or prairie farm family cracking open a tin of wild Pacific salmon for the very first time — a taste of the far western edge of Canada.

The canning process itself began in France in the early 1800s, spreading across Europe before arriving in North America. What started as military provisioning became one of the great food revolutions of the modern world. British Columbia embraced it with gusto. 

British Columbia welcomed the first canneries in the 1860s. The industry soon became the bread and butter for many local families and allowed those far from the coast and indeed, across the seas, to dine on fresh-caught salmon. 

At one time, British Columbia boasted more than 200 such canneries. Now, nearly all are gone.

One notable survivor is St. Jean’s Cannery and Smokehouse, the last commercial cannery of its kind in British Columbia. A family favourite in my own household, they once bought oysters and fish from my Uncle Dick and Uncle Doug — transformed into chowders, smoked delicacies, and tins of salmon that sold for a tidy 25 cents each. Honest food. Coastal gold.

St. Jean's got their start selling smoked oysters or smudgies to locals, then expanded to chowder and finally salmon. They were a family favourite of ours growing up on the coast. 

Today, they sell hand-packed wild Pacific salmon, tuna and shellfish in their online store and process fresh-caught salmon from sport fishermen. 

Wild, smoked Pink salmon and wild, skinless, boneless Sockeye salmon will run you $5.95 per tin and wild smoked sockeye a few pennies more at $6.50. They also sell candied salmon, a personal favourite of mine, for $7.95-$27.95 in sealed foil pouches. 

The expansion in products led to an expansion of the business itself. St. Jean's is now in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, a fitting local as this community is known as the Salmon Capital of the World, and Delta along the Fraser Lowland south of the Fraser River in British Columbia's Lower Mainland. 

It would be wonderful to see this industry grow even further to bring back the cannery traditions to British Columbia's wild west coast and the bounty found here.

Today, Tallheo has traded fish barrels for feather duvets. Visitors can stay at the Tallheo Cannery Guest House, a bed and breakfast where one can wander the old cannery grounds, explore the original general store, and soak in the moody grandeur of the north coast.

And perhaps that is fitting.

For places like Tallheo are never truly abandoned. They remain layered with stories — of salmon runs and steam engines, of hard labour and family tables, of loss and endurance, of the Nuxalk people whose roots here run far deeper than any piling driven into the mud.

The tide comes in. The tide goes out. The stories remain and the world evolves.

• References: http://nuxalk.net
• St. Jean's Cannery and Smokehouse: https://stjeans.com
• Tallheo Cannery Guest House: https://www.bellacoolacannery.com
• Alaska Historical Society: https://alaskahistoricalsociety.org/history-in-a-can-2
• The Tyee: https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/08/22/Last-BC-Cannery-Standing/

MOSASAURS: PREDATORS OF THE DEEP

Slip beneath the surface of a Late Cretaceous ocean—if you dare—and you enter the domain of one of Earth’s most spectacular marine predators: the mosasaur. 

Long before whales ruled the deep, these muscular, paddle-limbed lizards patrolled warm inland seas with the quiet confidence of creatures that knew very little could challenge them for long.

Picture a body built like a torpedo, jaws hinged like a bear trap, and teeth designed for the twin jobs of slicing and holding. 

Some species stretched more than 15 metres in length—longer than a city bus—yet they moved through the water with the agility of an oversized crocodile on turbo mode. 

With a powerful tail beating side to side, they could lunge forward in explosive bursts, swallowing ammonites whole or ambushing unsuspecting fish, turtles and even sharks. Yes—sharks were on the menu.

Scientifically, mosasaurs are a wonderful paradox. They were reptiles—close cousins of modern monitor lizards—but they evolved flippers, streamlined skulls and powerful tail flukes remarkably similar to those of whales and ichthyosaurs. 

It’s convergent evolution at its flashiest: different lineages arriving at the same sleek design for life in the fast lane of the sea.

Their fossils tell a sweeping story of ancient oceans that once covered vast swaths of the planet. The chalk cliffs of Europe, the phosphate beds of Morocco and the great Western Interior Seaway of North America have all yielded the remains of these sea dragons. Each vertebra and jawbone is a relic of a vanished world where reptiles ruled the waves.

Along the rugged shores of Vancouver Island, mosasaurs left their mark as well. During the Late Cretaceous, much of what is now the island lay beneath a warm coastal sea. 

The rocks of the Nanaimo Group—thick marine sandstones and shales laid down between roughly 90 and 66 million years ago—preserve tantalising traces of the predators that cruised this ancient Pacific margin.

Several mosasaur taxa have been reported from these deposits, including Tylosaurus, Mosasaurus, Plioplatecarpus, and Clidastes, animals that would have prowled these coastal waters alongside plesiosaurs, sharks and vast schools of fish. 

These remains are often fragmentary—vertebrae, teeth, bits of jaw—but they speak clearly of formidable hunters moving through the same seas that deposited the coal beds and marine fossils of the Nanaimo Basin.

One of the most exciting discoveries came from the Comox Valley. In 1988, local fossil enthusiast Rick Ross discovered mosasaur remains near Dove Creek, just south of Courtenay on Vancouver Island. 

The specimen, preserved in the marine rocks of the Nanaimo Group, included vertebrae and portions of the skeleton that confirmed the presence of these apex predators along our ancient coastline. 

The Dove Creek mosasaur remains one of the most significant mosasaur finds on Vancouver Island and a wonderful reminder that our local rocks still hold secrets from the final chapters of the Age of Reptiles.

Imagine that Cretaceous shoreline for a moment: broad deltas feeding sediment into a shallow sea, ammonites drifting through the water column, and somewhere below the surface a mosasaur gliding silently past—sleek, powerful and very much in charge.

Their reign, however spectacular, was brief in geological terms. When the asteroid struck 66 million years ago, oceans darkened, food chains collapsed, and even these magnificent hunters could not outswim the global catastrophe that followed.

But in stone, they still roar. Their bones—sleek, predatory, impossibly elegant—remind us that the waters around Vancouver Island were once home to sea lizards the size of whales… and that the rocks beneath our feet are pages from an ocean epic still waiting to be read.

If you fancy listening to the story of the Dove Creek Mosasaur, check out the Fossil Huntress Podcast on your favourite listening stream. Tis an epic tale! 

Science owes a great thank you to Rick Ross for his quick thinking and above-and-beyond action in saving that specimen! 

#Mosasaurus #mosasaur #fossilhunting #paleontology #palaeontology

AMMONITES IN CONCRETION

At first glance they look like ordinary stones—rounded, weathered, unassuming. 

But then you notice the delicious hints: a spiral ghosting through the surface, a faint rib, a seam where time is ready to split wide open—it's magic!

Ammonites, long extinct cephalopods, so often appear this way because, shortly after death, their shells became chemical centres of attraction on the seafloor. 

As the soft tissues decayed, they altered the surrounding sediment, triggering minerals—often calcium carbonate or iron-rich compounds—to precipitate rapidly around the shell. 

This early cementation formed a concretion, a protective stone cocoon that hardened long before the surrounding mud was compressed into rock. While everything around it flattened, cracked, and distorted under pressure, the ammonite inside remained cradled and whole.

What you see here is a gathering of these time capsules: a cluster of ammonites preserved in their concretions, each one split or weathered just enough to reveal the coiled story within. 

Some are neatly halved, spirals laid bare like fingerprints from ages past; others are only just beginning to show themselves, teasing their presence beneath rough stone skins. 

Together, they tell a familiar fossil-hunter’s tale—of patience, sharp eyes, and the thrill of knowing that this unassuming rock holds an ancient ocean inside.

QUIKY CAMBRIAN CURIOSITIES: OPABINIA

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. 

BEAUTIFUL PATHOLOGY: QUENSTEDTOCERAS

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!

GRACEFUL BEAUTY: ALBERTONIA

This graceful beauty, with its elegant, sail-like fins and armour of shimmering scales, is Albertonia sp.—an Early Triassic ganoid fish whose lineage once glided through the recovering seas of what is now western Canada. 

Belonging to a group of extinct bony fishes remarkable for their enamel-coated, diamond-shaped ganoid scales, Albertonia offers a rare and intimate glimpse into life shortly after the end-Permian mass extinction, when marine ecosystems were slowly rebuilding themselves.

Specimens of Albertonia have been discovered in two significant rock units: the Sulphur Mountain Formation near Wapiti Lake in British Columbia and the Lower Triassic Montney Formation of Alberta. 

These formations preserve an extraordinary record of Early Triassic marine life—ecosystems shaped by fluctuating sea levels, restricted basins, and the evolutionary experimentation that followed Earth’s most profound biological crisis.

The Sulphur Mountain Formation, in particular, is renowned for its exceptional vertebrate fossils, including fishes, marine reptiles, and rare soft-tissue impressions. Within these beds, Albertonia appears as a slender, streamlined fish with surprisingly tall dorsal and anal fins—features that give it that distinctive “sail-like” profile. These fins likely played a role in stabilization and maneuverability, allowing it to dart through the shallow carbonate-siliciclastic seas with speed and precision.

Ganoid fishes like Albertonia are characterized by their thick, lustrous scales, locking together like a natural chainmail. These scales not only protected the fish from predators but also provide paleontologists with exquisite fossil details. In well-preserved specimens, you can sometimes see the subtle ornamentation—ridges, pits, and patterns—etched into the ganoine coating, each reflecting the biology of a world more than 245 million years removed from our own.

Though Albertonia is long extinct, its fossils help illuminate the pivotal evolutionary story that unfolded during the Early Triassic. As life clawed its way back from catastrophe, species like this little ganoid fish were among the pioneers of new ecological niches, their presence a quiet testament to resilience in ancient oceans.

KU'MIS: 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 Kwak'wala, the 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.

DODOS AT THE RIVER

Dodo Birds by Daniel Eskridge

Two dodo birds—one warm brown like sun-baked coconut husk, the other a pale, ghostly white with hints of grey—stand beak-deep in the shallows of a river that winds like a silver serpent through the tropical jungles of ancient Mauritia. 

Their feet sink into cool silt and damp leaves at a rivers edge. 

The air is thick with the scent of pandanus and damp leaves, heavy enough to taste. Dragonflies hover in lazy spirals above them, iridescent flashes stitching over the water’s skin.

The brown male dodo dips first, scooping up a beakful of water with a gentle glop, while the white female one pauses, head cocked, watching a fruit drift downstream. For a moment the world feels impossibly quiet—no humans, no predators bold enough to trouble them, only the chorus of the forest and the steady rhythm of their drinking.

These feathered oddities belong to an island that itself has slipped through time. Mauritia, a now-lost microcontinent once nestled between Madagascar and India, cracked and sank more than 60 million years ago as the Indian Ocean spread and rearranged the world’s geography. All that remains today are a few scattered fragments—Mauritius, Réunion, Rodrigues—emerald crumbs left atop an ancient submerged landmass.

Dodo Birds by Daniel Eskridge

It is on one of these volcanic islands, long after Mauritia’s foundering, that the dodo evolved into its peculiar glory. 

Descended from flighted pigeons that likely swept in on storm winds from Southeast Asia, the dodo abandoned the sky entirely. 

With no natural predators and an island full of fruits, nuts, and fallen seeds, wings became more decorative than practical. Their legs grew stout. Their bodies rounded. 

Their beaks curved into the iconic hooked silhouette now etched into the imagination of every natural historian.

The brown dodo nudges the white one aside, perhaps a sign of affection, perhaps mild irritation—dodos, after all, were social birds, not the clumsy caricatures drawn centuries later. 

They waddled in flocks, nested on the ground, and lived comfortably beneath the canopy of ebony forests. Their feathers, described by early visitors as soft and hair-like, varied from gray-brown to white depending on age, sex, and perhaps even seasonal cycles.

But their peace was fragile, vulnerable to change they could not see coming.

When humans finally set foot on Mauritius in the late 1500s, they brought ships that carried pigs, rats, goats, and monkeys, all eager for eggs, seedlings, and anything edible. 

Forests were cut, nests trampled, and the trusting dodos, unaccustomed to fear, walked directly into the hands of sailors who considered them a convenient, if not particularly tasty, meal. Within roughly a century, they were gone.

But in this imagined moment—two birds drinking from a clear jungle river on an island born from a drowned continent—they live again. 

The sun breaks through a gap in the canopy, scattering gold across their backs. The white dodo lifts its head, droplets falling like tiny jewels, and lets out a soft, throaty grunt.

Here, in the cool breath of Mauritia’s shadowed past, the dodos are a symbol of loss—curious, gentle, utterly at home.

And for a heartbeat, we remember them.

Illustration Credit: This image was created by the supremely talented Daniel Eskridge, Paleo Illustrator from Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I share it here with permission as I have licensed the use of many of his images over the years, including this one. 

To enjoy his works (and purchase them!) to adorn your walls, visit his website at www.danieleskridge.com

FOSSILS, TEXTILES AND URINE: YORKSHIRE HISTORY

Yorkshire Coast

You may recall the eight-metre Type Specimen of the ichthyosaur, Temnodontosaurus crassimanus, found in an alum quarry in Yorkshire, northern England.

The Yorkshire Museum was given this important ichthyosaur fossil back in 1857 when alum production was still a necessary staple of the textile industry. Without that industry, many wonderful specimens would likely never have been unearthed.

These quarries are an interesting bit of British history as they helped shape the Yorkshire Coast, created an entirely new industry and gave us more than a fixative for dyes. 

With them came the discovery of many remarkable fossil specimens and, oddly, local employment in the collection of urine.

In the 16th century, alum was essential in the textile industry as a fixative for dyes. 

By the first half of the 16th century, the clothing of the Low Countries, German states, and Scandinavia had developed in a different direction than that of England, France, and Italy, although all absorbed the sobering and formal influence of Spanish dress after the mid-1520s. Those fashions held true until the Inquisition when religious persecution, politics and fashion underwent a much-needed overhaul to something lighter.

Fashion in Medieval Livonia (1521): Albrecht Dürer

Elaborate slashing was popular, especially in Germany. In the depiction you see here, an artist pokes a bit of fun at Germanic fashion from the time. Bobbin lace arose from passementerie in the mid-16th century in Flanders, the Flemish Dutch-speaking northern portion of Belgium. Black was increasingly worn for the most formal occasions.

This century saw the rise of the ruff, which grew from a mere ruffle at the neckline to immense, slightly silly, cartwheel shapes. They adorned the necklines of the ultra-wealthy and uber-stylish men and women of the age.

At their most extravagant, ruffs required wire supports and were made of fine Italian reticella, a cutwork linen lace. You can imagine the many hours of skill and patience that would have gone into each piece to create the artful framework of these showy lace collars.

16th Century Fashion / Ruff Collars and Finery

In contrast to all that ruff, lace and cutwork linen, folk needed dyed fabrics. And to fix those dyes, they needed Alum. For a time, Italy was the source of that alum.

The Pope held a tidy monopoly on the industry, supplying both alum and the best dyes. He also did a nice trade in colourful and rare pigments for painting. And for a time, all was well with dandy's strutting their finery to the local fops in Britain.

All that changed during the Reformation. Great Britain, heathens as they were, were cut off from their Papal source and needed to fend for themselves.

The good Thomas Challoner took up the charge and set up Britain's first Alum works in Guisborough. Challoner looked to palaeontology for inspiration. Noticing that the fossils found on the Yorkshire coast were very similar to those found in the Alum quarries in Europe, he hatched a plan to set-up an alum industry on home soil. 

As the industry grew, sites along the coast were favoured as access to the shales and subsequent transportation was much easier.

Alum House, Photo: Joyce Dobson and Keith Bowers

Alum was extracted from quarried shales through a large scale and complicated process which took months to complete. 

The process involved extracting then burning huge piles of shale for 9 months, before transferring it to leaching pits to extract an aluminium sulphate liquor. This was sent along channels to the alum works where human urine was added.

At the peak of alum production, the industry required 200 tonnes of urine every year. That's the equivalent of all the potty visits of more than 1,000 people. Yes, strange but true.

The steady demand was hard to keep up with and urine became an imported resource from markets as far away as London and Newcastle upon Tyne in the northeast of England. Wooden buckets were left on street corners for folk to do their business then carted back to the south to complete the alum extraction process. The urine and alum would be mixed into a thick liquid. Once mixed, the aromatic slosh was left to settle and then the alum crystals were removed.

I'm not sure if this is a folktale or plain truth, but as the story goes, one knows when the optimum amount of alum had been extracted as you can pop an egg in the bucket and it floats on its own.

Alum House. Photo: Ann Wedgewood and Keith Bowers

The last Alum works on the Yorkshire Coast closed in 1871. This was due to the invention of manufacturing synthetic alum in 1855, then subsequently the creation of aniline dyes that contained their own fixative.

Many sites along the Yorkshire Coast bear evidence of the alum industry. These include Loftus Alum Quarries where the cliff profile is drastically changed by extraction and huge shale tips remain.

Further South are the Ravenscar Alum Works, which are well-preserved and enable visitors to visualize the processes which took place. The photos you see here are of Alum House at Hummersea. The first shows the ruin of Alum House printed on a postcard from 1906. The second (bottom) image shows the same ruin from on high with Cattersty Point in the background.

The good folk at the National Trust in Swindon are to thank for much of the background shared here. If you'd like to learn more about the Yorkshire area or donate to a very worthy charity, follow their link below.

Reference: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/yorkshire-coast/features/how-alum-shaped-the-yorkshire-coast