MCABEE: FOSSILS & FIREWORKS

"Look, a fossil fish!" The cries of a young paleontologist in the making echoed down the shale cliffs at the Eocene fossil quarry of McAbee time and time again this past summer... and will continue if the folks who operate the quarry have anything to say about it. 

Known to locals for many years, the site is becoming more and more popular with tourists who flock to the hill wide-eyed with wonder at the bountiful fossils to be found.

Over the Canada Day long weekend, a group of keen collectors from Vancouver met up with several keen locals to enjoy a weekend of fossils and fireworks. Just four hours from Vancouver, McAbee is just outside the town of Cache Creek, deep in Cariboo country.

While the site is now an arid hillside topped with finger-like hoodoos, some 51 million years ago McAbee was a large, flourishing lake. As fish and other inhabitants died, their remains settled to the bottom and were preserved in the diatom rich sediments that would one day become shale.

The light shales allow for easy collecting and most of our group opt for small geologic hammers over the more weighty sledges required at other sites. Patricia Coutts and Philip Torrens worked their magic and chisels, unveiling fish and many plant fossils from freshly mined slabs, while Amir Zarifnia and Leanne Sylvest searched the plentiful float for missed treasure – insects and rare flowers. 

No matter what your collecting style, McAbee is very satisfying as you can find dozens of magnificently preserved fossils within a few hours of collecting. Named after settlers of a nearby homestead, McAbee has been a popular collecting site for locals for over twenty years. 

Originally sampled as part of a paper on fossil plants by Dawson back in 1879 and dated by Mathews in the early 1960’s, the site was all but ignored until local fossil collectors began making regular visits in the mid-eighties.

Today, McAbee is in high demand. Easy access off the highway and having much of the overburden being removed for you make the site a dream. Smack dab in the Interior, McAbee is 65 km west of Kamloops and just 13.6 km east of Cache Creek, an easy four-hour drive north of Vancouver. 

Both popular and prolific, McAbee is unusual in that it is the only site in British Columbia to operate as a commercial venture. In the early 1990’s, Dave Langevin, a local fossil collector from Kamloops, secured the mineral rights and together with Robert Drachuk, opened the site up to the public.

Dave’s enthusiastic vision of McAbee as a fossil research and popular collecting site for new paleo enthusiasts has not waned. He has worked hard to share the site with scientists and families alike. Many locals have had their first introduction to paleontology on the hillside and many papers and articles have been published because of his cooperation.

Looking back on photos from my collecting trips with my family in the early 1990’s, the only giveaway that this is the same site are the telltale hoodoos, tall pillars of basalt that line the hillside. Back in the day, McAbee had a few small quarries, a steep path and a large scree slope. Today, the 300-meter outcropping is largely exposed with a rugged, but drivable road. The road provides multiple benefits, one being an easy route up and down for those with tired legs and plentiful finds another is the greatly expanded collecting area.

This expansion has led to the discovery of many new and exciting finds. When I originally collected at the site most of my finds were of Ginkgo dissecta, one of the more popular plant varieties found here. Within a few hours, more than a dozen species of plants and insects could be collected. 

Today that list is greatly expanded. Comptonia, a common shrub, sassafras, katsura and over 40 Broadleaves and 17 Conifer species have been found in the shales of this as yet unnamed formation. Wasps, leafhoppers, flies, including a 3.5 cm Scorpion fly, have been added to the long list of fossil insects.

McAbee affords a magnificent view of the Thompson River Valley. It is also very near the town of Cache Creek and along with its cowboy charm has many tourist offerings, the Shuswap Native Village, Bonaparte Bend Winery & the Historic Hat Creek Ranch.

We stayed at one of the cabins at the ranch. Enjoying the warmth of a fire and a bottle of wine from the Bonaparte Winery in the evening, we were excitedly going over the day’s booty when we met the Boucq family traveling from France. 

Their two sons were mesmerized by the fossils and with their interest peaked; we shared tales of fossil bounty at McAbee. We were pleased to welcome them when they showed the next day to collect fossils for themselves. In no time they were set up with safety and collecting gear and in a few short hours had made many nice finds themselves.

McAbee makes for a great family trip as there is very little hiking, the fossil are plentiful and well off the road. Everyone in our group found more fossils than they could have imagined. My collection grew to include many more insects, several flowers, a few fish and even some fossil feathers – sweet!

Much of the more interesting finds of late have been discovered by, John Leahy, who now acts as guide and interpreter. With a natural love of the outdoors and keen interest in fossils and geology, John has undertaken the monumental task of documenting the specimens found at the site and generously sharing his work with the paleontological community. 

After a rocky road, those with an interest in McAbee have found a truce. As John says, they continue to work hard to blend commercial and scientific interests – a concept that remains unpopular in BC.

But McAbee remains popular with those who love fossils and those who want an afternoon away with their families. On one particularly hot afternoon, there are more than a dozen keen collectors dotting the hillside. Leaving them to their work, Patricia and I enjoyed a relaxing visit with Linda, Dave’s wife and Dot, her sister, down at Dot’s home at the base of the hill. Hailed by Dave, we scrambled from the shelter below to one high on the hill, set up to provide a little protection from the elements and today providing a nice retreat for a bite of lunch as we pool our culinary resources and enjoy an impromptu weenie roast a la Dave in the welcome shade.

As well as the land of plentiful sunshine, the Cariboo is known as rattlesnake country. In between hotdog bites, John continued our orientation and assures us no snakes have been seen but there have been a few black widow spiders. Good to know but as I poke about, weary of reaching my hand into dark holes… you can never be too cautious. For the most part we pose a much greater risk to them than they do to us. 

With the group gathered, John shows us his finds from earlier in the day… fish, fish, flower, sassafras…more fish. A keen eye and quick wit make him a delight as our guide. Over the weekend, he and his family hosted us, along with Cheryl Kabloona of the Thompson Nicola group, for a dinner and evening of that famous Interior hospitality including a much coveted tour of his personal fossil collection, all carefully prepared and meticulously catalogued.

One of John’s more romantic finds is of his family of Eohiodon rosei fossil fish… mom, dad and baby. A find that elicits an “ahhhh” from the group. Eohiodon rosei are extinct relatives of the modern mooneyes, a smallish (7.5cm) freshwater fish found in many rivers and lakes to the south and east of British Columbia today.

The Eohiodon rosei were likely in their heyday back in the Eocene lake at McAbee, being the one of the larger carnivorous predators in the lake and enjoying the many insects blown from above and perhaps even some of the small crustaceans below. Partial specimens of another larger fish have been found but have not been described to date. Perhaps we’ll see a paper on this from Dr. Mark Wilson, from the Royal Ontario Museum, who has studied the Middle Eocene Freshwater fish of the Okanagan Highlands, including the Eohiodon rosei found at McAbee.

One of the most prolific researchers on the site is Bruce Archibald, founder of the Vancouver Paleontological Society. Now at Simon Fraser University, he published on the bountiful insects while working and studying at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University. At the Fourth BC Paleontological Symposium in Kamloops he presented “Eocene Insect Fauna of the Okanagan Highlands: Change in Diversity and Assemblage through Climate and Time.” 

His work tells us that the Okanagan Highland fossil sites, a slightly misleading term used to describe the fossil sites at Smithers, Quilchena, Allenby, Tranquille, McAbee, Princeton and Republic, range from Early to Middle Eocene, a broader time span than originally thought.

The Eocene is considered to be 33.9 +_ 0.1 to 55.8 +_ 0.2 million years ago. The fossil record tells us that this part of British Columbia and much of the Earth was significantly warmer around that time, so warm in fact that we find temperate and tropical plant fossils in areas that now sport plants that prefer much colder climes, or as is the case in the Arctic, snow and ice.

A sediment core excavated from 400m below the seabed of the Arctic Ocean in 2004 showed that Fifty-five million years ago the North Pole was ice-free enjoying tropical temperatures and the sea temperature was about 20C, instead of the average we see now of about –1.5C, a truth that is hard to imagine today even with all the hype around global warming.

The bottom end of that core helped explain the warmer temperatures seen at McAbee and around the globe by revealing a dramatic global event known at the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. It looks as though a gigantic emission of greenhouse gases was released into the atmosphere and the global temperature warmed by about 5C. While we are the likely culprits of much of the warming of the Arctic today, natural processes operating in the not too distant past have also resulted in significant temperature fluxuations on a world-wide scale.

While the area around the Interior of British Columbia was affected. McAbee was not as warm as some of the other Middle Eocene sites, a fact inferred by what we see and what is conspicuously missing. In looking at the plant species, it has been suggested that the area of McAbee had a more temperate climate, slightly cooler and wetter than other Eocene sites to the south at Princeton, British Columbia and Republic and Chuckanut, Washington. Missing are the tropical Sabal (palm), seen at Princeton and the impressive Ensete (banana) and Zamiaceae (cycad) found at Republic and Chuckanut, Washington.

Through a slight misunderstanding, for years I was convinced there were pond frogs found at these sites. It wasn’t until sometime around 1997 that I realized they were p-a-l-m…f-r-o-n-d-s. Even after much collecting I hadn’t put two and two together. 

But, palms, frogs and cycads excluded, the group found plentiful fossils, great hospitality and memories to hold onto. While the site boasts fossils from a temperate climate, the warmth of our hosts and the heat from the sun made McAbee feel likely much as it would have during the tropical heyday of the Eocene. Everyone on the trip came away satisfied with more fossils than they had imagined they would find and a keen interest to return next year.

References

Archibald, S.B. and Makarkin, V.N. 2006. Tertiary Giant Lacewings (Neuroptera: Polystoechotidae): Revision and description of new taxa from western North America and Denmark. Journal of Systematic Paleontology 4 (2):119-155.

Archibald, S.B. Cover, S. P., and Moreau, C. S. 2006 Bulldog Ants of the Eocene Okanagan Highlands and History of the Subfamily (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Myrmeciinae). Annals of the Entomological Society of America 99: 487 – 523.

Archibald, S.B. 2005. New Dinopanorpidae (Insecta: Mecoptera) from the Eocene Okanagan Highlands (British Columbia, Canada; Washington State, USA). Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 42: 119-136.

Archibald, S.B. and Greenwood, D.R. 2005. The Okanagan Highlands: Eocene biota, environments and geological setting, southern British Columbia, Canada and northeastern Washington, USA. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 42: 111-114.

Archibald, S.B., Rasnitsyn, A.P., and Akhmetiev, M.A. 2005. The ecology and distribution of Cenozoic Eomeropidae (Mecoptera), and a new species of Eomerope Cockerell from the Early Eocene McAbee locality, British Columbia, Canada. Annals of the Entomological Society of America, 98: 503-514.

Archibald, S.B. and Makarkin, V.N. 2004. A new genus of minute Berothidae (Neuroptera) from Early Eocene amber of British Columbia, Canada.The Canadian Entomologist, 136: 61-76.

Archibald, S.B. and Mathewes, R.W. 2000. Early Eocene insects from Quilchena, British Columbia and their paleoclimatic implications. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 78: 1441-1462.

Archibald, S. B. 1995. Some Eocene insects from the Interior of British Columbia. Vancouver Paleontological Society Publication No. 1

Beard, G. 1996. Behaviour of Some Eocene Insects, BCPA Newsletter No. 12

Bowen, D. 1999. McAbee – Eocene Freshwater Deposit, BCPA Newsletter No. 23.

Dawson, J.W., 1879. List of Tertiary plants from localities in the southern part of British Columbia, with the description of a new species of Equisetum. Can. Geol. Surv. Rept. Prog. 1877-8 B, pp. 186-187.

Engel, M.S. and Archibald, S.B. 2003. An Early Eocene bee (Hymenoptera: Halictidae) from Quilchena, British Columbia. The Canadian Entomologist,135: 63-69.

Evolving Earth. 2006. http://www.evolvingearth.org/paleocollaborator

Greenwood, D.R., Archibald, S.B., Mathewes, R.W. and Moss, P.T. 2005. Fossil biotas from the Okanagan Highlands, southern British Columbia and northern Washington State: climates and ecosystems across an Eocene landscape. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 42: 167-185.

Huck, B, Henderson, H.M., Torrens. 2006. In search of ancient British Columbia. Heartland Associates Inc. 112-114.

Makarkin, V.N. and Archibald S.B. 2005. Substitute names for three genera of fossil Neuroptera, with taxonomic notes. Zootaxa, 1054: 15-23.

Makarkin, V.N., Archibald, S.B. and Oswald, J.D. 2003. New Early Eocene Brown Lacewings (Neuroptera: Hemerobiidae) from Western North America, The Canadian Entomologist, 135: 637-653

Makarkin, V.N. and Archibald, S.B. 2003. Family affinity of the genus Palaeopsychops Andersen with description of a new species from the Early Eocene of British Columbia, Canada (Neuroptera: Polystoechotidae). Annals of the American Entomological Society, 96: 171-18.

Mathews, W.H., 1964. Potassium-argon age determination of Cenozoic rocks from British Columbia. Geol. Soc. Am. Bull. 75, pp. 465-468.

Mathews, W.H. and Rouse, G.E., 1963. Late Tertiary volcanic rocks and plant-bearing deposits in British Columbia. Geol. Soc. Am. Bull. 74, pp. 55-60.

Moss, P.T., Greenwood, D.R., and Archibald, S.B. 2005. Regional and Local Vegetation Community Dynamics of the Eocene Okanagan Highlands (British Columbia/Washington State) from Palynology. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 42: 187-204.
Pagani, M., Pedentchouk, N., Huber, M., Sluijs, A., Schouten, S., Brinkhuis, H., Sinninghe Damsté, J.S., Reichart, G.-J., Dickens, G.R. and Expedition-Scientists, 2006. Arctic hydrology during global warming at the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum. Nature, 442 (7103): 671-675.
Poinar, G. Jr., Archibald, B. and Brown, A. 1999. New amber deposit provides evidence of Early Paleogene extinctions, paleoclimates, and past distributions. Canadian Entomologist, 131: 171-177.

Sluijs, A., Schouten, S., Pagani, M., Woltering, M., Brinkhuis, H., and 10 others, (2006). Subtropical Arctic Ocean temperatures during the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum. Nature, 441, 610-613 doi:10.1038.

Van Romondt Verschoor, K., 1974. Paleobotany of the Tertiary (Early Middle Eocene) McAbee Beds, British Columbia, Graduate Thesis, University of Calgary.
Wilson, M.V.H. 1977. Middle Eocene Freshwater Fishes from British Columbia, Life Sciences Contributions Royal Ontario Museum, 113.

ANCIENT SWAMPS AND SOLAR FLARES

If fossil fuels are made from fossils, are oil, gas and coal made from dead dinosaurs? Well, no, but they are made from fossils. We do not heat our homes or run our cars on dead hadrosaurs. Instead, we burn very old plants and algae. 

It sounds much less exciting, but the process by which algae and other plant life soak up the Sun's energy, store it for millions of years, then give it all up for us to burn as fuel is a pretty fantastic tale.

Fossil fuel is formed by a natural process — the anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms. These plants and algae lived and died many millions of years ago, but while they lived, they soaked up and stored energy from the sun through photosynthesis. Picture ancient trees, algae and peat soaking up the sun, then storing that energy for us to use millions of years later. These organisms and their resulting fossil fuels are millions of years old, sometimes more than 650 million years. That's way back in the day when Earth's inhabitants were mostly viruses, bacteria and some early multi-cellular jelly-like critters.

Fossil fuels consist mainly of dead plants – coal from trees, and natural gas and oil from algae, a diverse group of aquatic photosynthetic eukaryotic organisms I like to think of as pond scum. These deposits are called fossil fuels because, like fossils, they are the remains of plants and animals that lived long ago.

If we could go back far enough, we'd find that our oil, gas, and coal deposits are really remnants of algal pools, peat bogs and ancient muddy swamps. Dead plants and algae accumulate and over time, the pressure turns the mud mixed with dead plants into rock. Geologists call the once-living matter in the rock kerogen. If they haven't been cooked too badly, we call them fossils.

Kerogen is the solid, insoluble organic matter in sedimentary rocks and it is made from a mixture of ancient organic matter. A bit of this tree and that algae all mixed together to form a black, sticky, oily rock. The Earth’s internal heat cooks the kerogen. The hotter it gets, the faster it becomes oil, gas, or coal. If the heat continues after the oil is formed, all the oil turns to gas. The oil and gas then seep through cracks in the rocks. Much of it is lost. We find oil and gas today because some happened to become trapped in porous, sponge-like rock layers capped by non-porous rocks. We tap into these the way you might crack into a bottle of olive oil sealed with wax.

Fossil fuel experts call this arrangement a reservoir and places like Alberta, Iran and Qatar are full of them. A petroleum reservoir or oil and gas reservoir is a subsurface pool of hydrocarbons contained in porous or fractured rock formations. Petroleum reservoirs are broadly classified as conventional and unconventional reservoirs. In the case of conventional reservoirs, the naturally occurring hydrocarbons, such as crude oil or natural gas, are trapped by overlying rock formations with lower permeability. In unconventional reservoirs, the rocks have high porosity and low permeability which keeps the hydrocarbons trapped in place, so these unconventional reservoirs don't need a rock cap.

Coal is an important form of fossil fuel. Much of the early geologic mapping of Canada — and other countries — was done for the sole purpose of mapping the coal seams. You can use it to heat your home, run a coal engine or sell it for cold hard cash. It's a dirty fuel, but for a very long time, most of our industries used it as the sole means of energy. But what is so bad about burning coal and other fossil fuels? Well, many things...

Burning fossil fuels, like oil and coal, releases large amounts of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere. They get trapped as heat, which we call the greenhouse effect. This plays havoc with global weather patterns and our world does not do so well when that happens. 

The massive end-Permian extinction event, the worst natural disaster in Earth's history — when 90% of all life on Earth died —  was caused by massive volcanic eruptions that spewed gas and lava, covering the Earth in volcanic dust, then acid rain. Picture Mordor times ten. This wasn't a culling of the herd, this was full-on decimation. I'll spare you the details, but the whole thing ended poorly.

Dirty or no, coal is still pretty cool. It is wild to think that a lump of coal has the same number of atoms in it as the algae or material that formed it millions of years ago. Yep, all the same atoms, just heated and pressurized over time. When you burn a lump of coal, the same number of atoms are released when those atoms dissipate as particles of soot. You may wonder what makes a rock burn. It's not intuitive that it would be possible, and yet there it is. Coal is combustible, meaning it is able to catch fire and burn. Coal is made up mostly from carbon with some hydrogen, sulphur — which smells like rotting eggs — oxygen and nitrogen thrown in.

It is just that the long-ago rain forest was far less dense than the coal you hold in your hand today, and so is the soot into which it dissipates once burned. The energy was captured by the algal pool or rain forest by way of photosynthesis, then that same energy is released when the coal is burnt. So the energy captured in gravity and released billions of years later when the intrinsic gravity of the coal is dissipated by burning. It's enough to bend your brain.

The Sun loses mass all the time because of its process of fusion of atomic content and radiating that energy as light. Our ancient rain forests and algal pools on Earth captured some of it. So maybe our energy transformations between the Earth and the Sun could be seen more like ping-pong matches, with energy, as the ball, passing back and forth.

As mass sucks light in (hello, photosynthesis), it becomes denser, and as mass radiates light out (hello, heat from coal), it becomes less dense. Ying, yang and the beat goes on.

ZENASPIS PODOLICA OF THE UKRAINE

A Devonian bony fish mortality plate showing a lower shield of Zenaspis podolica (Lankester, 1869) from Lower Devonian deposits of Podolia, Ukraine.

Podolia or Podilia is a historic region in Eastern Europe, located in the west-central and south-western parts of Ukraine, in northeastern Moldova. Podolia is the only region in Ukraine where 420 million-year-old remains of ichthyofauna can be found near the surface, making them accessible to collection and study. Zenaspis is an extinct genus of jawless fish which thrived during the early Devonian. Being jawless, Zenaspis was probably a bottom feeder, snicking on debris from the seafloor similar to how flounder, groupers, bass and other bottom-feeding fish make a living.

For the past 150 years, vertebrate fossils have been found in more than 90 localities situated in outcrops along banks of the Dniester River and its northern tributaries, and in sandstone quarries. At present, the faunal list of Early Devonian agnathans and fishes from Podolia number seventy-two species, including 8 Thelodonti, 39 Heterostraci, 19 Osteostraci, 4 Placodermi, 1 Acanthodii, and 1 Holocephali (Voichyshyn 2001a).

In Podolia, the Lower Devonian Redbeds strata (the Old Red Formation or Dniester Series) are 1800 metres thick and range from Lochkovian to Eifelian in age (Narbutas 1984; Drygant 2000, 2003).

In their lower part, the Ustechko and Khmeleva members of the Dniester Series, they consist of lovely multicoloured, mainly red, fine-grained cross-bedded massive quartz sandstones and siltstones with seams of argillites (Drygant 2000).

We see fossils of Zenaspis in the early Devonian of Western Europe. Both Zenaspis pagei and Zenaspis poweri can be found up to 25 centimetres long in Devonian outcrops of Scotland.

Reference: Voichyshyn, V. 2006. New osteostracans from the Lower Devonian terrigenous deposits of Podolia, Ukraine. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 51 (1): 131–142. Photo care of the awesome Fossilero Fisherman.

CARCHARODON MEGALODON CHUBUTENSIS

Carcharocles chubutensis, which roughly translates to the "glorious shark of Chubut," from the ancient Greek is an extinct species of prehistoric mega-toothed sharks in the genus Carcharocles.

These big beasties lived during Oligocene to Miocene. This fellow is considered to be a close relative of the famous prehistoric mega-toothed shark, C. megalodon, although the classification of this species is still disputed.

Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz first identified this shark as a species of Carcharodon in 1843. In 1906, Ameghino renamed this shark as C. chubutensis. In 1964, shark researcher, L. S. Glikman recognized the transition of Otodus obliquus to C. auriculatus. In 1987, shark researcher, H. Cappetta reorganized the C. auriculatus - C. megalodon lineage and placed all related mega-toothed sharks along with this species in the genus Carcharocles.

At long last, the complete Otodus obliquus to C. megalodon progression began to look clear. Since then, C. chubutensis has been re-named into Otodus chubutensis, also the other chronospecies of the Otodus obliquus - O. megalodon lineage. Chubutensis appears at the frontier Upper Oligocene to Lowest Miocene (evolving from O. angustidens which has stronger side cusps) and turns into O. megalodon in the Lower to Middle Miocene, where the side cusps are already absent. Despite previous publications, there is no chubutensis in the Pliocene.

Victor Perez and his team published on the transition between Carcharocles chubutensis and Carcharocles megalodon (Otodontidae, Chondrichthyes): lateral cusplet loss through time in March of 2018. In their work, they look at the separation between all the teeth of Carcharocles chubutensis and Carcharocles megalodon and published that it is next to impossible to divide them up as a complex mosaic evolutionary continuum characterizes this transformation, particularly in the loss of lateral cusplets.

A modern shark after a tasty snack

The cuspleted and uncuspleted teeth of Carcharocles spp. are designated as chronomorphs because there is wide overlap between them both morphologically and chronologically.

In the lower Miocene Beds (Shattuck Zones) 2–9 of the Calvert Formation (representing approximately 3.2 million years, 20.2–17 Ma, Burdigalian) both cuspleted and uncuspleted teeth are present, but cuspleted teeth predominate, constituting approximately 87% of the Carcharocles spp. teeth represented in their samples.

In the middle Miocene Beds 10–16A of the Calvert Formation (representing approximately 2.4 million years, 16.4–14 Ma, Langhian), there is a steady increase in the proportion of uncuspleted Carcharocles teeth.

In the upper Miocene Beds 21–24 of the St. Marys Formation (approx. 2.8 million years, 10.4–7.6 Ma, Tortonian), lateral cusplets are nearly absent in Carcharocles teeth from our study area, with only a single specimen bearing lateral cusplets. The dental transition between Carcharocles chubutensis and Carcharocles megalodon occurs within the Miocene Chesapeake Group. Although their study helps to elucidate the timing of lateral cusplet loss in Carcharocles locally, the rationale for this prolonged evolutionary transition remains unclear.

The specimen you see here is in the Geological Museum in Lisbon. The photo credit goes to the deeply awesome Luis Lima who shared some wonderful photos of his recent visit to their collections.
If you'd like to read the paper from Perez, you can find it here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02724634.2018.1546732