Tuesday 19 October 2010

HUMAN REMAINS FOUND IN TRANSILVANIA

I travelled to Transylvania last year and spent some time in the newly minted anthro-capilal of Romania. I was lucky enough to brush shoulders and prep tools with paleoanthropologists working on a new find that changes what we know about early human activity in Eastern Europe.

If Van Helsing were poking around Transylvania these days, chances are he'd be more likely to be looking for the decaying remains of 35,000 year old humans than blood drinking vampires. Romania's dark history extends back way past the days of Vlad. Seems vampires and ghouls aside, something darker and much more interesting lurks.

The remains of a man, woman and teenage boy, the first Romanian family if you will, tell the most complete picture of what our ancestors were like some 35,000 years ago.

International scientists have been carrying out further analysis to get a clearer picture on the find, said anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis.

But it's already clear that, "this is the most complete collection of modern humans in Europe older than 28,000 years," he told The Associated Press. "We are very excited about it," And they have reason to be. The find is changing perceptions about modern humans.

Romanian recreational cavers unearthed the remains of three facial bones last year, and gave them to Romanian scientists. Romanian scientists asked Trinkaus to analyze the fossils, and he traveled to the Romanian city of Cluj this week with Portuguese scientist Joao Zilhao , a fossil specialist.

Included in the find was a jawbone belonging to a male around 35-years in age. It was found alongside a partial skull and teeth from another male, likely his son or perhaps another relative, around 15-years old. The bone fragments were near a temporal bone to a woman of unspecified age.

"This was 25,000 years before agriculture. Certainly they were hunters," said Trinkaus . He said the bones were discovered in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains . Trinkaus said the humans would have had religious beliefs, used stone tools, and a well-defined social system and lived in a period in during which early modern humans overlapped with late surviving Neanderthals in Europe.

The humans survived because the area was ecologically variable being close the Banat plain and close to the mountains. A team of international scientists from the United States , Norway , Portugal and Britain will return to the cave to continue their field work next year.

Look out Van Helsing, there are new kids in town.

Sunday 17 October 2010

Tuesday 5 October 2010

Sunday 26 September 2010

Monday 20 September 2010

CHUCKANUT DRIVE: EOCENE TROPICAL PARADISE

The siltstones, sandstones, mudstones and conglomerates of the Chuckanut Formation were laid down about 40-54 million years ago during the Eocene epoch, a time of luxuriant plant growth in the subtropical flood plain that covered much of the Pacific Northwest.

Tuesday 14 September 2010

PUFFER FISK

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Saturday 11 September 2010

MOONLIT NIGHT: DINOSAUR TRACKWAYS

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 magnificent vertebrate paleontologist working in the Tumbler Ridge area of British Columbia.

There are two types of footprints at the Wolverine River Tracksite - theropods (at least four different sizes) and ankylosaurs. The prints featured in this photo were laid down by ankylosaurs. Many of the prints are so shallow that they can only be recognised by the skin impressions pressed into the tracks.

At Wolverine, we filled in the dinosaur trackways with water and then lit them by lamplight to mysterious effect.

No visit to BC's Peace Region is complete without a trip to the Tumbler Ridge Museum and Dinosaur Lake Campground.

In 2000, two young boys, Mark Turner and Daniel Helm, were tubing down the rapids of Flatbed Creek just below Tumbler Ridge. As they walked up the shoreline excitement began to build as they quickly recognized a series of regular depressions as dinosaur footprints. Their discovery spurred an infusion of tourism and research in the area.

The Hudson's Hope Museum, also in the Peace Region, has an extensive collection of terrestrial and marine fossils from the area. They feature ichthysaurs, a marine reptile and hadrosaur tracks.

Driftwood Canyon Provincial Park, near Smithers, is open to visitors interested in photographing significant marine fossils. If you do not have a chance to get out to the site, you can also view the collections at the Bulkley Valley Museum in Smithers.

Friday 27 August 2010

FOSSILS OF OREGON: FARALLON PLATE

Had you been swimming with the marine fossils that were laid down in the Eocene Epoch in Oregon, some 55 to 38 million years ago, you'd be treading water right up to where the Cascade Mountains are today.

The Farallon Plate took a turn north some 57 million years ago, sweeping much of western coastal Oregon along with it. The Cascades were beginning to uplift and were fast becoming the breakwater for a retreating Pacific Ocean.

By the middle Oligocene, the Cascadia Subduction Zone was in full force with growing pressure erupting volcanoes along the Western Cascades, a pattern that was to continue well into the Miocene. The soft ocean sediments of Oregon contain beautifully preserved gastropods, bivalves and cephalopods.

Wednesday 25 August 2010

Friday 20 August 2010

Wednesday 11 August 2010

Monday 2 August 2010

Saturday 31 July 2010

DOGWOOD BOUNTY

The Bowron Lake Circuit is home to a variety of plant life. Large sections of the forest floor are carpeted in the green and white of dogwood, a prolific ground cover we are lucky enough to see in full bloom. Moss, mushrooms and small wild flowers grown on every available surface.

Thursday 29 July 2010

BLUE LAKE RHINO: PRESERVED IN IGNEOUS PILLOW LAVA

The Miocene pillow basalts from the Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area of central Washington hold an unlikely fossil mold of a small rhinoceros, preserved by sheer chance as it's bloated carcass sunk to the bottom of a shallow pool or lake just prior to a volcanic explosion.

We've known about this gem for a long while now. The fossil was discovered by hikers back in 1935 and later cast by University of California paleontologists in 1948. These were the Dirty Thirties and those living in Washington state were experiencing the Great Depression along with the rest of the country and the world. Franklin D. Roosevelt was President of the United States, navigating the States away from laissez-faire economics. Charmingly, Roosevelt would have his good name honored by this same park in April of 1946, a few years before researchers at Berkeley would rekindle interest in the site.

Both hiking and fossil collecting were a fine answer to these hard economic times and came with all the delights of discovery with no cost for the natural entertainment. And so it was that two fossil enthusiast couples were out looking for petrified wood just south of Dry Falls on Blue Lake in Washington state. While searching the pillow basalt, the Frieles and Peabodys came across a large hole high up in a cave that had the distinctive shape of an upside down rhino. 

This fossil is interesting in all sorts of ways. First, we so rarely see fossils in igneous rocks. As you might suspect, both magma and lava are very hot. Magma, or molten rock, glows a bright red/orange as it simmers at a toasty 700 °C to 1300 °C (or 1300 °F to 2400 °F) in hot chambers beneath the Earth's surface. As the magma pushes up to the surface becoming lava, it cools to a nice deep black. In the case of our rhino friend, this is how this unlikely fellow became a fossil. Instead of vaporizing his remains, the lava cooled relatively quickly preserving his outline as a trace fossil and remarkably, a few of his teeth, jaw and bones. The lava was eventually buried then waters from the Spokane Floods eroded enough of the overburden to reveal the remains once more.

Diceratherium (Marsh, 1875) is known from over a hundred paleontological occurences from eighty-seven collections. While there are likely many more, we've found fossil remains of Diceratherium, an extinct genus of rhinoceros, in the Miocene of Canada in Saskatchewan, China, France, Portugal, Switzerland, and multiple sites in the United States. He's also been found in the Oligocene of Canada in Saskatchewan, and twenty-five localities in the US, specifically in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington and Wyoming.

We know a bit about him. He roamed a much warmer, wetter Washington state some 15 million years ago. By then, the Cascades had arrived and we'd yet to see the volcanic eruptions that would entomb whole forests up near Vantage in the Takama Canyon of Washington state. He had two horns on his nose and was a distant relative of our modern rhinoceros. He was also a chunky fellow, weighing in at about one tonne (or 2,200 lbs). You can visit the site, but it is one of the most difficult to reach and comes with significant risk. Head to the north end of Blue Lake in Washington. Take a boat and search for openings in the cliff face. You'll know you're in the right place if you see a white "R" a couple hundred feed up inside the cliff. Inside the cave, look for a cache left by those who've explored here before you. Once you find the cache, look straight up. That hole above you is the outline of the rhino.

If you don't relish the thought of basalt caving, you can visit a cast of the rhino at the Burke Museum in Seattle, Washington. They have a great museum and are pretty sporting as they've built the cast hardy enough to let folk climb inside. The Burke Museum is having a bit of a facelift at the moment and is closed while they move their collections to the New Burke, a 113,000 sq.ft. building opening in the Fall of 2019.

Wednesday 28 July 2010

EARTH: THE BLUE PLANET: BACTERIA

Exquisitely beautiful, yet small, silent and deadly, bacteria were some of the first true life forms. Our Earth formed 4,500 million years ago but bacteria didn't arise until 1,000 million years ago, well after the Big Bang.

Since that time, a great variety of life has evolved. Most of the plant and animal life that has arisen has subsequently gone extinct and our only ties to them are through the fossil record.

Wednesday 21 July 2010

Friday 16 July 2010

PADDLING BEFORE THE FRONT

As a weather system approaches, the wind picks up, with the strongest force just ahead of the front. The wind brings waves, making our paddling unstable.

Like most mountainous areas, Bowron makes its own weather system and it appears you get everything in a 24-hour period. In fact, whatever weather you are enjoying seems to change 40 minutes later; good for rain, bad for sun. Wisps of cloud that seemed light and airy only hours early have become dark. Careful to hug the shore, we are ready for a quick escape from lightening as thundershowers break.

For this small band of kayakers, the weather forecast is helpful, but it just one portion of the equation. Local weather, and more importantly, wind, comes from a mixture of factors.

Local knowledge of the topography, the relative temperature of land and lake we paddle help predict how windy and soggy our afternoon will be.

Today, the cooler air is flowing off the water up the forested slopes, heating and rising as it does so, creating a 5-15 knot intermittent force that turns ripples into small white caps.

A few strong gusts of wind drive us off the lake, breaking for lunch to wait out the worst of it, and knowing that the winds that started mid-morning will subside by late afternoon and rise again after sunset. We snack on warm soup and flatbread, watching as our once crystal clear oasis turns to froth. Warm, dry and now with full bellies, we get back on the water. We’re eager to push through to our next destination knowing that by nightfall the katabatic winds will arrive, as warmer air from the hillsides flows down and out over the chilly lake.

Paddling in unison, we enjoy the crisp air, confident that well before then we’ll be snugged in our tents sipping hot cocoa.

Monday 12 July 2010

Sunday 11 July 2010

Sunday 4 July 2010

Saturday 3 July 2010

Monday 28 June 2010

Friday 25 June 2010

Sunday 13 June 2010

Friday 4 June 2010

WOODLAND THERMOMETER: BRITISH COLUMBIA

Out in the woods of British Columbia and wondering what the temperature is? Slip down to the nearest stand of deciduous trees to search for the wee Snowy Tree Cricket, Oecanthus Fultoni, part of the order orthoptera.

Snowy Tree Crickets and their cousins double as thermometers and wee garden predators, dining on aphids and other wee beasties. Weather conditions, both hot and cold, affect the speed at which they rub the base of their wings together and consequently regulate their rate of chirping.

Listen for their tell-tale high pitch triple chirp sound in the early evening. Being in Canada, our crickets chirp in Celsius. Simply count the number of chirps over a seven second period and add five to learn your local temperature.

If didn't bring your calculator with you into the woods and you're still operating in old-skool Fahrenheit use this handy conversion. Double the temperature in Celsius, add 32 you'll get the approximate temperature in Fahrenheit.

Thursday 13 May 2010

ANCIENT RIVER DELTA

The exposures of the Chuckanut Formation were once part of a vast river delta; imagine, if you will, the bayou country of the Lower Mississippi.

The siltstones, sandstones, mudstones and conglomerates of the Chuckanut Formation were laid down about 40-54 million years ago during the Eocene epoch, a time of luxuriant plant growth in the subtropical flood plain that covered much of the Pacific Northwest. This ancient wetland provided ideal conditions to preserve the many trees, shrubs & plants that thrived here. Rare bird, reptile and mammal tracks have also been immortalized. Tracks from Diatryma, a large flightless bird, were uncovered in 2009. Diatryma reached up to 9 feet in height, making a living in the grasslands and swamps of the Eocene.

Wednesday 12 May 2010

Tuesday 11 May 2010

SERENE BEAUTY

UNEARTHING ANCIENT WASHINGTON

A trip along Chuckanut Drive, in northwestern Washington is a chance to view incredible diversity from sea to sky.

An amazing array of plants and animals call this coastline home. For the fossil enthusiast, it is a chance to slip back in time and have a bird’s eye view to a more tropical time with a visit to the Chuckanut Formation. Snug up against the Pacific Ocean, this 6000m thick exposure yields a vast number of tropical and flowering plants that you might see in Mexico today.

Easily accessible by car, this rich natural playground makes for an enjoyable daytrip just one hour south of the US Border

Monday 10 May 2010

Wednesday 5 May 2010

MOSASAUR: JAWLINE REVEALED

A close-up view of the dentition of an ancient aquatic, carnivorous lizard,the mighty Mosasaur, from Late Cretaceous exposures on Vancouver Island.

This well-prepped specimen is now housed in the collections of the Courtenay Museum, Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

The creature who owned this jaw bone undoubtably swam alongside Kourisodon puntledgensis, another enormous marine predator and new species of Mosasaur unearthed on Vancouver Island who swam our ancient seaway millions of years ago.

Sunday 2 May 2010

Friday 30 April 2010

Tuesday 27 April 2010

Thursday 22 April 2010

GORDES, FRANCE

Gordes est l'une des villes les plus belles dans les sud de la France. Construit sur un grand cliffside de pierre à chaux, il loge également certains des meilleurs échantillons fossiles de la région.

EOCENE PLANT SITE #2

Thursday 15 April 2010

PADDLING VALHALLA

METASEQUOIA: EAST MEETS WEST

Metasequoia, a deciduous conifer, and one of the common fossils found in many of the Eocene sites of the Pacific northwest, flourished in Oregon's forests for millions of years. In honor of this long history, Oregon has named it their official state fossil.

Metasequoia were first described from the Mesozoic from Shigeru Miki in 1941. Miki, thinking they were long extinct was surprised that his 'fossil first' had living relatives. The "dawn redwood" was rediscovered in China in 1941 in Modaoxi. The excitement of the find was diminished by the heating up of World War II. In 1948, Wan Chun Cheng took up their study with fellow scientist, Hu Hsen Hsu, with a study and a replanting program.

Harvard University was asked to participate and brought back a collection of seeds and seedlings to distritute to various universities and arboreta worldwide. Today, the dawn redwood can be found growing in temperate environments across North America and the rest of the globe.

Two of my friends, Mike and Cory, raise these "fossil seedlings" for friends and paleo enthusiasts. Sadly, I tend to underwater for extended periods of time, which has disasterous effects even on this small study sample. Even so, several of the hardiest seedlings grace my yard, adding a bright, fresh green and Oregon's official fossil to the garden. This year, I've started a few new hopefuls of my own to plant on Earth Day.