DRIFTWOOD CANYON: FOSSIL TAPIRS, HEDGEHOGS, BIRDS & FLOWERS

Early Eocene Tapir from Driftwood Canyon

Driftwood Canyon in British Columbia is known for its beautiful early Eocene plants. It's not surprising to find wonderful wee mammals making a living in this warm, wet, steamy rainforest setting 51 million years ago.

Today, Driftwood Provincial Park is about halfway between Prince George and Prince Rupert near the town of Smithers. The rocks that make up the strata here started out further to the south, riding geologic plates to their current location.

Along with the Tapir and a rather sweet hedgehog, we also find birds, insects, and a huge variety of fossil plants in these outcrops. Fossils of plant remains are rare but include up to 29 genera. The most common plant fossils found are leafy shoots of the dawn redwood, Metasequoia, and the floating fern Azolla primaeva as mats of plants or as isolated fossils.

Fossil fish from Driftwood Canyon in the Canadian Museum of Nature includes specimens collected in the 1930s; however, Driftwood Canyon fossils have only been studied since the 1950s.

The Driftwood Canyon fossil beds are best known for the abundant and well-preserved insect and fish fossils (Amia, Amyzon, and Eosalmo). The insects are particularly diverse and well preserved and include water striders (Gerridae), aphids (Aphididae), leafhoppers (Cicadellidae), green lacewings (Neuroptera), spittlebugs (Cercopidae), march flies (Bibionidae), scorpionflies (Mecoptera), fungus gnats (Mycetophilidae), snout beetles (Curculionidae), and ichneumon wasps.

A fossil species of green lacewing (Neuroptera, Chrysopidae) was recently named Pseudochrysopa harveyi to honour the founder of the park, Gordon Harvey. Fossil feathers are sometimes found and rare rodent bones are sometimes found in fish coprolites. Most recently, fossil palm beetles (Bruchidae) were described from the beds, confirming the presence of palms (Arecaceae) in the local environment in the early Eocene.

Alder, Alnus sp., still common today are also found, as well as the leaves or needles and seeds of pines, Pinus sp., the golden larch, Pseudolarix sp., cedars, Chamaecyparis and/or Thuja spp., redwood Sequoia sp., and rare Ginkgo and sassafras, Sassafras hesperia, leaves. A lovely permineralized pine cone Pinus driftwoodensis and associated 2-needle foliage were described from the site in the 1980s.

Rare flowers and the seeds of flowering plants have been collected, including Ulmus, Florissantia, and Dipteronia, a genus of trees related to maples, Acer. spp., that today grows in eastern Asia.

If you fancy a trip to Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park, follow Driftwood Road from Provincial Highway 16. A car park just off the road access leads to an interpretive sign and a bridge across Driftwood Creek. A short interpretive trail leads visitors to a cliff-face exposure of Eocene shales. Signate speaks to how these beds were deposited in an inter-montane lake. Interbedded within the shales are volcanic ash beds, the result of area volcanoes that were erupting throughout the life of the Eocene lake that produced the shales.

WOLVERINE RIVER DINOSAUR TRACKS

Jen Becker, British Columbia Paleontological Alliance Field Trip

In the summer of 2005, I joined Jen Becker, and fellow delegates from the British Columbia Paleontological Symposium for an impromptu late-night tour of Wolverine River, one of many prolific research sites of Lisa Buckley, a vertebrate paleontologist working in the Tumbler Ridge area of British Columbia.

There are two types of footprints at the Wolverine River Trackside –theropods (at least four different sizes) and ankylosaurs. The prints featured in this photo were laid down by some lumbering ankylosaurs out for a stroll in soft mud. Many of the prints are so shallow that they can only be recognized by the skin impressions pressed into the mud. We'd been up to the fossil sites in the day but wanted to come back in the evening to see them by lamplight. After a lovely dinner, we hiked up to Wolverine in the dark. We filled the tracks with water and lit them with warm yellow lamplight. Some clever soul brought a sound system and played spooky animal calls to add prehistoric ambiance. A truly amazing evening.

DARWIN AND THE GREAT DEBATE

Oxford University Museum of Natural History was established in 1860 to draw together scientific studies from across the University of Oxford.

On 30 June 1860, the Museum hosted a clash of ideologies that has become known as the Great Debate.

Even before the collections were fully installed, or the architectural decorations completed, the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its 30th annual meeting to mark the opening of the building, then known as the University Museum. 

It was at this event that Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Thomas Huxley, a biologist from London, went head-to-head in a debate about one of the most controversial ideas of the 19th century – Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

Notable collections include the world's first described dinosaur,  Megalosaurus bucklandii, and the world-famous Oxford Dodo, the only soft tissue remains of the extinct dodo. Although fossils from other areas have been assigned to the genus, the only certain remains of Megalosaurus come from Oxfordshire and date to the late Middle Jurassic. 

Megalosaurus

In 1824, Megalosaurus was the first genus of non-avian dinosaur to be validly named. The type species is Megalosaurus bucklandii, named in 1827.

In 1842, Megalosaurus was one of three genera on which Richard Owen based his Dinosauria. On Owen's direction, a model was made as one of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, which greatly increased the public interest for prehistoric reptiles. 

Subsequently, over fifty other species would be classified under the genus, originally because dinosaurs were not well known, but even during the 20th century after many dinosaurs had been discovered. 

Today it is understood these additional species were not directly related to M. bucklandii, which is the only true Megalosaurus species. Because a complete skeleton of it has never been found, much is still unclear about its build.

The Museum is as spectacular today as when it opened in 1860. As a striking example of Victorian neo-Gothic architecture, the building's style was strongly influenced by the ideas of 19th-century art critic John Ruskin. Ruskin believed that architecture should be shaped by the energies of the natural world, and thanks to his connections with a number of eminent Pre-Raphaelite artists, the Museum's design and decoration now stand as a prime example of the Pre-Raphaelite vision of science and art.

CRETACEOUS HADROSAUR FROM ALBERTA

A rare and very beautifully preserved Cretaceous Hadrosaur Tooth. This lovely specimen is from one of our beloved herbivorous "Duck-Billed" dinosaurs from 68 million-year-old outcrops near Drumheller, Alberta, Canada, and is likely from an Edmontosaurus.

When you scour the badlands of southern Alberta, most of the dinosaur material you'll find are from hadrosaurs. These lovely tree-less valleys make for excellent-searching grounds and have led us to know more about hadrosaur anatomy, evolution, and paleobiology than for most other dinosaurs.

We have oodles of very tasty specimens and data to work with. We've got great skin impressions and scale patterns from at least ten species and interesting pathological specimens that provide valuable insights into hadrosaur behaviour. Locally, we have an excellent specimen you can visit in the Courtenay and District Museum on Vancouver Island, Canada. The first hadrosaur bones were found on Vancouver Island a few years back by Mike Trask, VIPS, on the Trent River near Courtenay.

The Courtenay hadrosaur is a first in British Columbia, but our sister province of Alberta has them en masse. Given the ideal collecting grounds, many of the papers on hadrosaurs focus on our Canadian finds. These herbivorous beauties are also found in Europe, South America, Mexico, Mongolia, China, and Russia. Hadrosaurs had teeth arranged in stacks designed for grinding and crushing, similar to how you might picture a cow munching away on the grass in a field. These complex rows of "dental batteries" contained up to 300 individual teeth in each jaw ramus. But even with this great number, we rarely see them as individual specimens.

They didn't appear to shed them all that often. Older teeth that are normally shed in our general understanding of vertebrate dentition, were resorped, meaning that their wee osteoclasts broke down the tooth tissue and reabsorbed the yummy minerals and calcium.

As the deeply awesome Mike Boyd notes, "this is an especially lucky find as hadrosaurs did not normally shed so much as a tooth, except as the result of an accident when feeding or after death. Typically, these fascinating dinosaurs ground away their teeth... almost to nothing."

In hadrosaurs, the root of the tooth formed part of the grinding surface as opposed to a crown covering over the core of the tooth. And curiously, they developed this dental arrangement from their embryonic state, through to hatchling then full adult.

There's some great research being done by Aaron LeBlanc, Robert R. Reisz, David C. Evans and Alida M. Bailleul. They published in BMC Evolutionary Biology on work that looks at the histology of hadrosaurid teeth analyzing them through cross-sections. Jon Tennant did a nice summary of their research. I've included both a link to the original journal article and Jon Tennant's blog below.

LeBlanc et al. are one of the first teams to look at the development of the tissues making up hadrosaur teeth, analyzing the tissue and growth series (like rings of a tree) to see just how these complex tooth batteries formed.

They undertook the first comprehensive, tissue-level study of dental ontogeny in hadrosaurids using several intact maxillary and dentary batteries and compared them to sections of other archosaurs and mammals. They used these comparisons to pinpoint shifts in the ancestral reptilian pattern of tooth ontogeny that allowed hadrosaurids to form complex dental batteries.

References:

LeBlanc et al. (2016) Ontogeny reveals function and evolution of the hadrosaurid dinosaur dental battery, BMC Evolutionary Biology. 16:152, DOI 10.1186/s12862-016-0721-1 (OA link)

To read more from Jon Tennant, visit: https://blogs.plos.org/paleocomm/2016/09/14/all-the-better-to-chew-you-with-my-dear/

Photo credit: Derrick Kersey. For more awesome fossil photos like this from Derrick, visit his page: https://www.facebook.com/prehistoricexpedition/