Friday 18 February 2022

BOAS, ANNIE SPENCER, LUCY HOMISKANIS, CADWALLADER AND LYON

In 1885, at the age of twenty-seven, Franz Boas received the assignment of cataloguing a First Nation mask, which the explorer Johan Adrian Jacobsen had purchased on northern Vancouver Island and sent back to the Royal Museum of Ethnology. 

Boas was a German-born American anthropologist who spent considerable time on the west coast — much of it with my extended family. 

During the previous year, the museum had seized upon the German Empire’s expansion to assemble the world’s largest collection of bones and curios from “vanishing” cultures.

But this mask was no artefact of the past. It was in use until the moment its owner removed it from her box of treasures. 

The mask belonged to Lucy Homiskanis known as T’łaliłi’lakw, the wife of George Hunt (1864-1932), first born son of Robert Hunt and Mary Ebbets. Lucy had contributed to her husband’s ascent among the Kwakiutl of Fort Rupert by displaying her dances—property rights that Hunt, the son of HBC Factor Robert Hunt and his highborn Tlingit wife— Mary Ebbets, Anisalaga, mixed with wealth, rhetoric, and political genius to join the Kwakiutl nobility.

As a teenager Lucy had disappeared while digging for clams, leaving only a pile of clothes on the beach. For a month she was thought to be gone—until the winter ceremonies when the dance leaders of Fort Rupert called the people to their secret spot in the woods to compose two songs for the supposedly vanished girl. 

That night a Killer Whale dancer appeared in the house, spouting water from his blowhole. Suddenly he pulled a hidden string, splitting his face in two and revealing the form of a supernatural Monster Fish said to have taken the girl away. Following this transformation, and shocking those who thought her gone, Lucy emerged to dance, enacting her role as a bearer of wealth for her family.

Boas, who printed a picture of this mask in 1897, would not learn the identity of its owner, much less the dramatic story of Lucy’s disappearance and reappearance, until the early 1920s, when Lucy had been dead for more than a decade. 

George Hunt, now approaching his seventies, sent Boas a list of corrections to their monumental, coauthored ethnography. Almost as if posing a counter-point to the classifying outlook Boas expressed in his title for the book, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians,

George Hunt titled his latest work “name of the masks on the Book and who there Belong to.” 

In each sentence, Hunt contradicted Boas’s pursuit of the typical and tribal with an account of the personal and particular—beginning with his own family. “This mask,” Hunt wrote Boas, “was my wife's Killer Whale mask.”

It was Hunt, it turns out, who had sent the mask to Germany. 

500+ Kwakwaka’wakw Ceremonial Objects Send to Berlin 

In 1881, Hunt had served as Jacobsen’s guide, aiding in his collection of the more than five hundred Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial objects now in Berlin that stirred in Boas visions of a foreign world. “My fancy was first struck,” Boas recalled, “by the flight of imagination exhibited in the works of art of the British Columbians as compared to the severe sobriety of the eastern Eskimo.” 

Sea monsters, fantastical birds of prey, tangle-haired hags assaulted his senses, striking him as strange, “grotesque.” But as he held the masks in hand, noting mouths, eyes, snapping mandibles, faces that divided by the pull of a string to reveal a second face within, Boas realized “what a wealth of thought” lay hidden behind the designs.

Boas’s newfound interest in masks, a layer interposed between the self and the world, was more than a metaphor for his interest in culture. Boas lived behind a kind of mask—a look at his face revealed cracks in the facade: three scars over the eye, one across the nose, and a long, cruel slash from cheek to ear.

Boas had earned his Schmisse while fencing at university between 1877 and 1881 when a revived version of the Judenfrage or Jewish question, posed by the distinguished historian Hein-rich von Treitschke gripped the country, and students rallied to “emancipate the German people from a kind of foreign domination.”

Boas, a secular Jew, fought several duels to defend his honour against attacks from anti-Semites, but his attempt to escape his outsider’s identity, living by the code of his German secret society, marked him as the outsider he did not wish to be.

Few frontal portraits of Boas survive today because he tended to present his profile to the camera, leaving the scarred side in shadow.

The violence inscribed on Boas’s face signified a deeper conflict between his self-image as a romantic explorer and the flesh-and-blood reality of a scientist measuring humans in an age of empire.

Inspired by the globetrotting humanism of Alexander von Humboldt, whose magnum opus,

Cosmos, offered Europeans a vision of New World grandeur, Boas had set off in 1883 to live with the Inuit of Baffin Island, there awakening to the radical variety of human practice, the universality of human experience, and the sordid power performances involved in extracting information about both.

He returned in 1885 to an altered Germany, which had acquired an empire in his absence and now possessed colonies in Africa and the Pacific. The merging of imperial politics and romantic science provoked a profound crisis for Boas now defined at home as the ethnic outsider he had travelled so far to see.

As his mentors, Rudolf Virchow and Adolf Bastian received packets of salted skin, hair, and severed hands from German collectors around the globe, Boas groped for a new self-understanding. 

He came to the conclusion that science must change. Though categorizing experience and generalizing data to form laws of nature could be one way of seeing the world, one must not lose one's sense of feeling. The “effective” search for the inner nature of the thing itself, rather than the way one might define it from the outside, could reveal a different form of truth.

Just as he came to this insight, the Northwest Coast artwork arrived, opening a door to affective perception. Lucy’s transformation mask, representing two faces, linked three states of being, those of the human (Dancer), animal (Killer Whale), and supernatural (Monster Fish) realms. It was an image of interconnection, portraying the relationships of humans with the nonhuman members of an animate cosmos. 

Even as Boas classified the mask, categorizing it by region and tribe, the object escaped his grasp, permeating the borders of being that locked Boas 

in place. This global consciousness remained dead to Boas so long as the mask remained severed from the message. But a potential existed. 

If the mask and the message could be reunited, they would transmit to Boas an Indigenous narrative. Through this opening, this crack in thought danced “die Bella Coola.” In the Hamburg animal merchant Carl Hagenbeck, who would later contribute to the invention of the modern zoo, toured Germany with an exhibition of humans.

Nine Nuxalk dancers from Bella Coola, a village north of Hunt’s home in Kwak’wala land, spent a year performing in zoos, hotels, and theaters across Germany.

The ethnographer Aurel Krause, who had recently returned from a stay with the Tlingit of Alaska, invited Boas to join him on a visit to the performers at Krolls Establishment, the amusement centre where they lived and danced.

The following days proceeded for Boas like a dreamer a vision as the dancers took the artefacts he had been struggling to lock into place and spun them, for a moment, into splendid motion. Donning the masks collected by Hunt, cocking their beaks to the beat, the Nuxalk posed as supernatural cranes and ravens. They rolled up their sleeves to display their scars, explained to Boas that the masks were tied to the secret societies of the Northwest Coast, and described the arduous initiation rituals—an experience to which Boas, a secret society initiate himself, could relate. 

A conversation began. 

The Nuxalk taught Boas their local trade jargon. They sang of love, and of loss, in the Puget Sound hop fields (“Ya, that is good! Ya, that is good! That worthless woman does not like me”).

One man, a skilled storyteller named Nuskilusta, taught Boas the rudiments of the Nuxalk language.

After four days Boas wrote to his fiancée, Marie Krackowizer, that he felt “wie in Himmel,” as if he were in heaven. By the time the group left for Breslau he had recorded four songs, sent a report to the Berliner Tageblatt, described the Nuxalk language, and written a sketch for the American magazine Science.

Boas had found his effective inspiration, a message for his developing medium.

The performers offered Boas an Indigenous education, a Bella Coola Bildung.

Making use of another people’s masks as found objects, they code-switched Boas to their mnemonic logic, transmitting their messages to him. The embodied materialism of this meeting, in which ideas moved through masks, blankets, and even scars, accommodated Boas’s German ideas about culture, for the ornate carvings of the Northwest Coast showed that this so-called “primitive” people, in fact, possessed a richly developed civilization.

When the Nuxalk danced, Boas wrote, “We saw ourselves transported into a foreign world whose outlook, whose customs, have taken a quite different course from ours, but which we must acknowledge as a high cultural state.”

Yet even by altering his judgment, Boas retained the authority to be the judge. A more powerful transformation was underway, one concerning the question of agency.

Transformation Masks

As he studied the artwork displayed by the Nuxalk, Boas noted an aesthetic feature of the Northwest Coast: the eye design.

This “repeated motif” deco-rated nearly every spoon, blanket, and mask that he saw. Boas did not yet know that sight—vision—was a central idea on the Northwest Coast. Visions of encounters with animals and spirits were a form of social currency. By performing visions, elites claimed their ancestral privileges and responsibilities. By experiencing visions, shamans received their healing powers. Stories were visions shared by a teller, pictures painted in words.

Through visions, through the metaphor of vision, the people of the coast depicted themselves as Eyes, not Others: vision seekers, vision speakers. Ultimately it is the person with vision, the person who glimpses a potential that others have missed, who is capable of altering a situation, thus bringing about a transformation. At the heart of this transformation was the idea of a mask. In the European outlook familiar to Boas, a mask concealed: it hid the wearer’s true identity, superimposing a false front. 

For the Nuxalk and for the Kwakwaka’wakw, masks were not merely coverings but skins, part and parcel of the substance beneath. A mask enabled its wearer to alter states, to don a second face. It provided a new way of being and of seeing.

Rather than hiding behind the mask, the people of the Northwest Coast took on the mask’s identity. When they put on their masks, they positioned themselves not as objects of anthropology but as subjects of history. Agents of change, they possessed the power to transform. There is no evidence to suggest that Boas felt tempted to wear one of these masks, thus donning the skin of the Nuxalk and their neighbours, seeing the world through their eyes. If he did so, quietly and out of view, we have no record of it.

We do know that Boas sought the meanings behind the masks. He asked what each design depicted, but the performers from Bella Coola could not tell him. The masks collected by Jacobsen were not their masks, they said. They did not know the stories behind them.

Once intrigued, Boas now found himself confronted by a mystery, and with this mystery, the door opened wider. To findout more, it would be necessary to visit the place where the masks were made. Twenty-five years later Boas would look back upon this moment, the moment of his Bella Coola

Bildung, as the beginning of his own transformation. The performers from Bella Coola, Boas wrote, offered him a chance to “cast a brief glimpse behind the veil that covered the life of these people.

Had it not been for the Nuxalk performers, Boas might very easily have remained at home, where he would have become a professor of geography in Germany and, had he lived long enough, a stumbling stone on the streets of present-day Berlin.

It was due to the influence of Indigenous performers that his life veered in a new direction and began to take consequential shape. 

In 1886, Boas took leave of the museum to travel to the Northwest Coast. “The attraction,” he later wrote, “was irresistible.”

DRIFTED ASHORE HOUSE

Boas arrived on Vancouver Island like a parody of a detective, clutching sketches of the masks as his clues. The only drawback to these clues was that they lacked any connection to a case. Boas envisioned the masks as signs that Natives could connect to referents, lifting the veil that obscured their world of thought. But the masks were not signs. They were property that related the histories of their owners, and knowledge of the designs was limited to the circle whose history they discussed. No one else had a right to talk. 

After a week of sodden searching in the labour camps of Victoria, poking his head into tents, sharing pictures, requesting information in the shards of Chinook trade jargon he had learned from the Nuxalk, Boas had come no closer to the meanings that had eluded him in Berlin. He gave up his hunt in order to buy new masks, thus creating a clean set of signs and referents.

As he headed north on an old steamer toward Kwakwaka’wakw country, a case of tobacco and a bolt of cotton by his side, Boas formed the perfect caricature of the white man’s globalization. Money for masks, tobacco for tales, was Europe’s colonial calculus. Boas, no exception, needed masks to fund his trip. His pursuit of “handsome” objects to sell to Bastian in Berlin formed the subtext of his dealings at Newitti, a remote island town off the northern tip of Vancouver Island, twice razed by British gunboats yet still a bastion of the potlatch, the outlawed form of Indigenous governance that took place through a reciprocal exchange of feasts, dances, and most important to Boas, the display of masks.

The potlatch was an answer and an ode to the experience of modernity. It had taken a new form after the smallpox epidemic of 1862 when more than 50 per cent of the people died within a year, some villages vanished, and Northwest Coast peoples faced the possibility of imminent destruction. 

The potlatch was their survival strategy, a gift-giving system that soldered bonds between peoples, redistributed wealth—often in the form of fabricated metal plates known as coppers that were worth thousands of trade blankets—and spread stories across a thousand-mile coastline from the salmon-fishing grounds of the Columbia River to the eulachon harvesting spots by the Nass. 

Through this system of material and intellectual exchange, thousands of people responded to the existential threat that Western networks of power and pathogens posed to their homes, families, and communities. They fashioned a new Indigenous life world, drawing one another into an ongoing conversation that constructed a peaceful, pan coastal community. Because the potlatch system perpetuated Indigenous independence, Canada’s government had banned it in 1884.

But this did not stop the Kwakwaka’wakw, who determined to live—as one chief now put it to Boas—by “the strict law that bids us dance.

The people of Newitti greeted Boas quizzically. Why would a white visitor ask to see the same dances that the white government had only just banned? Boas, compelled to communicate, clarified that he was not a missionary or a government agent but a traveller who had come to learn. “I do not wish to interfere with your celebration,” he promised the head chief, who had called a town meeting, asking the foreigner to explain his purposes. “My people live far away,” Boas said, “and would like to know what people in distant lands do.. . . And so I went and I came here and I saw you eat and drink, sing and dance. And I shall go back and say: ‘See, that is how the people there live. They were good to me and asked me to live with them.’”

In response to the stimulus provided by the people of Newitti, Boas had begun to reconsider his research methods. He talked about himself as the people wanted to see him, not as a collector but as a transmitter of information. During the next week, as Boas put together his 

During the next week, as Boas put together his collection, the people took time out from their dances to chat with the visitor. “Everyone,” Boas wrote, “is most anxious to tell me something.”

By revealing what they valued—their stories—those assembled at Newitti turned Boas from the material products that possessed Western value to the narratives that the objects encoded, which held greater wealth in the Indigenous world. Boas saw the masks in the context of their makers, who expressed their social history in carvings—masks and also poles, posts, family benches, and feasting dishes—all of which related the narratives of their owners.

At night, the head chief of Newitti gathered his people around the fire, where he related legends that Boas scribbled down with the help of a young translator. Sitting on the chief’s settee, carved with the heraldry of his lineage, Boas realized that the designs surrounding him told the history of the house. 

The people of Newitti lived within their narratives, enfolded by their stories. Although Boas styled himself as the intellectual, it was the Kwakwaka’wakw who turned him from objects to ideas.

Boas continued to collect, and he would succeed in paying for his trip by selling his collection (the “best masks available,” he reported home, including, “all the ornaments that belong to one dance”).

But the object of his interest shifted from the masks that brought him there to the storytelling style of theNorthwest Coast. So eager was Boas to hear more stories, and to see stories play out in dances, that he placed his masks at risk to do so, travelling through a severe storm to reach some potlatches at the town of Alert Bay. 

When his guide, blown ashore, refused to venture out again, Boas hired a Native boatman, stowed the masks in his craft, and pushed off into a ferocious wind. They might have died and were once pushed into a rocky peninsula, but somehow Boas and his new pilot managed to catch a friendly gust and steer for the totem poles of Alert Bay. 

A crowd rushed to bring the boat in, Boas springing out so eagerly that his guide burst into laughter. “You were just like a deer,” he said, “so quickly you jumped ashore!” 

Relieved, Boas walked to the dock to find George Hunt’s brother-in-law Stephen Allen Spencer, the owner of the local salmon cannery, whose attention immediately gravitated toward the masks, the constant object of imperial interest. “The first thing he told me,” Boas wrote, “was that my belongings would be locked up.”

Despite all the effort Boas had expended on masks—first to determine the meanings of the masks he had seen in Berlin, then to collect the second group of masks at Newitti, and finally to transport and secure them—his attempt to “cast a glimpse behind the veil” was a failure. 

The masks were not signs that could be lifted out of the Northwest Coast to generate principles. They were mediums, which their owners used to transmit messages. Even as Boas attempted to collect, and by collecting to categorize a culture, the people of the Northwest Coast attempted to communicate, and by communicating to transmit a history that defied categorization. As a result, Boas’s interest began to shift from masks to the mnemonic knowledge they encoded. It was in this context—the play between categorization and communication—that he met the Hunt family and, without realizing it, learned their family story.

Dinner with Stephen Allen Spencer, Harry Tennyson Cadwallader and Alexander Matthew Lyon

On his first night in Alert Bay, after dinner with Stephen Allen Spencer and his two brothers-in-law, each, like Spencer, was married to a sister of Hunt — Boas spent some hours in conversation with Annie Spencer (1856-1924), the younger sister to George (1864-1932) and William (1866-1952) Hunt, who regaled him with First Nation tales. 

“Mrs. Spencer was very gracious and told me many stories,” Boas wrote to Krackowizer, “which I recorded later in the evening.”

Four days later, Boas mentioned in a new note to his fiancée that he had visited Annie Spencer again and asked her to tell more tales. “She relates well and is very gracious,” he emphasized. “Unfortunately she is not well or I should really bother her.”

Nevertheless, Boas trod back to the Spencers’ home the same day. There he found Hunt’s sister either improved or doubly gracious, for she was “kind enough to tell me all I wanted to know. . . . The information I obtained from her was the most valuable I received in Alert Bay.”

The stories of Annie Hunt Spencer (1856-1924) daughter to Mrs. Mary Ebbits, Anisalaga, opened a vista on a narrative legacy linking all the peoples from Yakutat Bay to the Columbia River, who, though divided by physical and linguistic differences and by histories of conflict, held in common a heritage of thought. 

The Raven Cycle

A centrepiece of this heritage was the Raven Cycle, one of the oldest and largest bodies of oral literature in the Americas. In the bards who performed the Raven tales, and who daily altered them, were members not of a single school but of a living tradition whose members had innovated a stance toward the world in response to cycles of change from the Ice Age to the smallpox apocalypse. They had created a body of thought about people’s relationships to one another and to the cosmos, the beings within it, and the capacity of humans to right those relationships.

The star of the drama was Raven, scheming, ravenous, bumbling in his arrogance toward ever-greater disgrace, yet always surviving, evolving, and through his accidents and exploits establishing the present state of affairs.

Born before the earth had acquired its form, it was Raven—Old One, Great Inventor, Chief of the Ancients, Heaven Maker, Giving to the End, Going Around—who established the tools and forms of existence.

With the world veiled in darkness, Raven stole the box that held the sun and opened it, lighting the world by his ingenuity. 

He made man from grass and elderberry bushes, brought salmon to the people, fed the rivers with eulachon. He established the shapes and traits of his fellow animals and gave them their present powers and appearances. And though affairs could hardly change as radically in contemporary times as in the days of beginning, by his actions and infractions Raven pointed toward a way of being human. “So many stories are told about him,” Boas remarked during his first visit to the coast, “that they have a saying that human life is not long enough to tell all of them.”

Every First Nation of the Northwest Coast was woven into the fabric of the Raven Cycle through the warp and weft of a storytelling practice that linked speakers and listeners—messengers and mediums—within a pattern of call and response. There were no galleries around the fire, no lines dictating who paid and who performed. There were no observers, no outsiders, no Others. People did not merely listen to the Raven Cycle; they took part, asking questions, repeating refrains, goading the storyteller toward feats of ingenuity.

There was saltiness and sport in the Raven tales, sex and waste, greed and hate. The bards were like Raven: they begged, borrowed, stole, and in doing so created. They were origin poets who fostered possibilities by defying the rules of the system they had made.

The stories they told, often ending in just-so pronouncements—explaining, say, how wolves had come to behave so diffidently around humans (“they really became wolves after this,” one storyteller put it)—wove a fabric of thought that embraced every notable rock, tree, and stream in the neighbourhood, encompassing the human community within an animate cosmos. 

"I remember with the greatest pleasure many trips in colourful canoes with Indian guides who did not stop telling tales,” Boas wrote in one account of this storytelling culture for a German audience. 

“It was that mountain peak which alone reached above the waters during the great flood, and from this peak, the earth was populated again. Here, the battle took place in which the stone giants were outwitted and killed by the brave Indians. A dangerous rapid, formed in prehistoric times in a narrow strait, reminds us of the Son of God, who killed and sank a dangerous sea monster into the ocean at that place. Each strange place is woven into a legend.”

Origins of the World through Raven from the North

Yet, while the storytelling tradition of the Northwest Coast had survived long enough to envelop the landscape, the Raven Cycle had emerged from only a portion of it. As Boas’s first conversation with an elderly storyteller in Victoria revealed, only the northern peoples, including George Hunt’s mother’s people, related the origins of the world through the exploits of Raven.

Other peoples credited competing narratives, starring different figures.

Origins of the World through Mink in the South

Among the Kwakiutl people of Fort Rupert, the hero associated with light was not Raven but Mink, the son of the supernatural man who carried the sun across the sky. Much like Raven, Mink possessed an insatiable appetite, but not for food. A priapic scavenger after advantageous marriages, Mink lusted after women.

It was said of the mischievous Mink that he had sliced off a girl’s clitoris and attached it to a branch, wearing it on his forehead as a ludicrous headpiece. On another occasion, he convinced a flock of female ducks to enter the forest and there sit upon a rare type of elongated mushroom, which turned out to be Mink’s penis.

If Raven was Ego, Mink was Id. He pointed toward the urge within, the pre-socialized desire. The Kwakiutl went so far as to envision Mink as a child, given today dreams and pranks. When performing the role of Mink, they revelled in his youth by making the grammatical mistakes of a child.

But there was more than comedy in the Kwakiutl depiction of Mink’s youth, for the child had attained a precious status in a society that now possessed precious few children. 

Among the Kwakwaka’wakw, Mink—T' łisalagi’lakw, or “Born to Be the Sun”— was the most sympathetic of figures, the fatherless child. While the Tlingit tradition was to pass down rights through the matriline, the rights of the Kwakwaka’wakw were passed from father to son, meaning that Mink had to make his own way in the world.

The Kwakwaka’wakw traced the origins of modern times to Mink’s response to his fate. Teased by the other children because he had no father, Mink came home depressed, whereupon his mother related a wondrous tale. Mink did have a father, his mother assured him, and he was not just any father. He was the man who lit up the world by carrying the sun across the sky.

Hoping to meet his father, Mink shot an arrow into the sky, then a second arrow into the back of the first, and a third into the second, constructing a ladder of arrows that he ascended to the Upper World. Warmly greeted by his father, he was invited to try out his future occupation. Mink began well enough, walking calmly across the sky with the sun in his arms, but soon he grew impatient. He began to run, scorching the earth and bringing about a deluge. Disgraced, Mink was thrown to the earth by his father, fated to spend his life among men.

In the Kwakwa ka’wakw version of history, the origin of modern life was a great mistake, an ecological disaster that unleashed a scourge upon humankind.

The hero was a fallen child. His actions warned of the dangers of hubris, a trait ever-present in the avaricious fur trade. But the Kwakwaka’wakw storytellers who related the narrative were careful to show that the disaster did not befall an individual only; it impacted everybody. Mink tales epitomized the dark humour of the Northwest Coast, a tone infused with portentous irony. 

They had bravado, an acute awareness of human foibles, and epic warnings about the transitory nature of greatness—a style that had risen to prominence in a period of existential horror inhabited by many human Minks, many father-less children struggling for survival on a broken coast scorched by smallpox. Transformation—making change—not only created the world, it was what enabled people to make their way in it, negotiating a path through the currents of destruction. 

Mink’s essence as a transformer, as a hero, consisted not in his creation of the apocalypse but in his response to the apocalypse of everyday life. Smaller and weaker than the others, bearing no special talents, Mink survived by his wits—and it was his terrible wit, his deadeye for the jugular, that especially pleased the Kwakiutl of Fort Rupert. 

Tlowitsis First Nation Village of Kalugwis on Turnour Island
Mink, they said, had lived at nearby Turnour Island in Johnstone Strait, where the sons of the Wolf chief had terrorized him, stealing his salmon from his trap. 

Threatened with starvation, Mink grabbed his spear, lay in wait for Wolf’s sons, and slaughtered them. But this was only the beginning of his revenge, for it was the insult, not the injury, that offended Mink—and which he aimed, in turn, to deliver.

By decapitating the eldest son of the Wolf and converting his head into a mask, Mink managed to impersonate his persecutor. In this blood-drenched costume, he arrived at the Wolf chief’s winter ceremonies to perform the dances of his heir. Three times Mink circled the fire, displaying the Wolf’s winter dances. On the fourth circuit he revealed his true form, throwing off his mask to mock his host: “Yahai, yahai, Mink wears as his cap the face of the son of the Wolf!” 

This was genocide: Mink had assassinated the Wolf’s heirs, taken their dances, and arrived at the crucial moment to deliver the coup de grâce. When he raised the head of his enemy, Mink announced a new future for his descendants, the Kwakiutl. This, it was said, was the origin of the winter dances that Boas had come to see.

At the centre of the dances was a single mask: a mask that allowed Mink to assume the form and take the name of a Wolf. Only by wearing this mask could Mink cross a boundary, enter the realm of the Wolves, and claim his prize. Mink transformed not because he was born to do so, but because he possessed vision. He saw and seized his chance to act, writing for himself a new history. 

Although the Mink stories emerged from an ancient tradition, that tradition had altered as Indigenous people reshaped it into something new. Mink’s actions were an outgrowth of and an answer to the experience of modernity. The tales Boas studied as generalities, looking for ideas that defined social groups, were the product of personal genealogies, formulated by storytellers whose innovations shaped the intellectual material of the coast to their purposes. 

This was especially true of the Hunt family, possessed of numerous storytellers, including Annie Hunt Spencer. Among the tales she shared with Boas was one about Raven and Mink, which would come to be of such importance to Boas that the story is worth recounting in full.

The first part of the story relates an adventure of Raven and Mink, who met at the Nass River, made friends, and decided to wander the earth together. (This was where Robert Hunt and Mary Ebbets had met and married, and Mary's mother had drowned)

Because they had no means of getting across the ocean, they were forced to rely on their wits. Coming upon Whale, they mentioned their desire to cross the water. “Won’t you take us across?” they asked. Whale opened his mouth and Raven and Mink stepped in. They had not been inside the Whale for long when Raven pinched Mink, who let out a scream. “Why does the little one cry?” Whale asked. 

When Raven replied that Mink was hungry, Whale generously offered a piece of himself. “I have lots of meat,” he said. “Cut him off a piece.” Raven and Mink soon finished their meal, whereupon Raven pinched Mink again. “What’s happening now?” Whale asked. “The little one is hungry,” Raven said. “Take as much as you want,” Whale consented, “only don’t cut my throat, because that would kill me" — whereupon Raven cut Whale's throat.

Isaiah Lorado Wilner; Yale University Press; Chapter Title: Transformation Masks: Recollecting the Indigenous Origins of Global Consciousness; Chapter Author(s): Isaiah Lorado Wilner; Book Title: Indigenous Visions; Book Subtitle: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas; Book Editor(s): Ned Blackhawk, Isaiah Lorado Wilner; Published by: Yale University Press. (2018) 

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt22h6qn7.5 

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https://www.bgc.bard.edu/files/FB-BC_Studies_(2019.05.14).pdf

Alexander Mathew Lyon (1863-1950); Harry Tennyson Cadwallader (1874-1932)

Thursday 17 February 2022

AVES: LIVING DINOSAURS

Cassowary, Casuariiformes
Wherever you are in the world, it is likely that you know your local birds. True, you may call them des Oiseaux, pássaros or uccelli — but you'll know their common names by heart.

You will also likely know their sounds. The tweets, chirps, hoots and caws of the species living in your backyard.

Birds come in all shapes and sizes and their brethren blanket the globe. It is amazing to think that they all sprang from the same lineage given the sheer variety. 

If you picture them, we have such a variety on the planet — parrots, finches, wee hummingbirds, long-legged waterbirds, waddling penguins and showy toucans. 

But whether they are a gull, hawk, cuckoo, hornbill, potoo or albatross, they are all cousins in the warm-blooded vertebrate class Aves. The defining features of the Aves are feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweight skeleton. The best features, their ability to dance, bounce and sing, are not listed, but it is how I see them in the world.

These modern dinosaurs live worldwide and range in size from the 5 cm (2 in) bee hummingbird to the 2.75 m (9 ft) ostrich. 

There are about ten thousand living species, more than half of which are passerine, or "perching" birds. Birds have wings whose development varies according to species; the only known groups without wings are the extinct moa and elephant birds.

Wings evolved from forelimbs giving birds the ability to fly
Wings, which evolved from forelimbs, gave birds the ability to fly, although further evolution has led to the loss of flight in some birds, including ratites, penguins, and diverse endemic island species. 

The digestive and respiratory systems of birds are also uniquely adapted for flight. Some bird species of aquatic environments, particularly seabirds and some waterbirds, have further evolved for swimming.

Wee Feathered Theropod Dinosaurs

We now know from fossil and biological evidence that birds are a specialized subgroup of theropod dinosaurs, and more specifically, they are members of Maniraptora, a group of theropods that includes dromaeosaurs and oviraptorids, amongst others. As palaeontologists discover more theropods closely related to birds, the previously clear distinction between non-birds and birds has become a bit muddy.

Recent discoveries in the Liaoning Province of northeast China, which include many small theropod feathered dinosaurs — and some excellent arty reproductions — contribute to this ambiguity. 

Still, other fossil specimens found here shed a light on the evolution of Aves. Confuciusornis sanctus, an Early Cretaceous bird from the Yixian and Jiufotang Formations of China is the oldest known bird to have a beak.

Like modern birds, Confuciusornis had a toothless beak, but close relatives of modern birds such as Hesperornis and Ichthyornis were toothed, telling us that the loss of teeth occurred convergently in Confuciusornis and living birds.

The consensus view in contemporary palaeontology is that the flying theropods, or avialans, are the closest relatives of the deinonychosaurs, which include dromaeosaurids and troodontids.

Together, these form a group called Paraves. Some basal members of this group, such as Microraptor, have features that may have enabled them to glide or fly. 

The most basal deinonychosaurs were wee little things. This raises the possibility that the ancestor of all paravians may have been arboreal, have been able to glide, or both. Unlike Archaeopteryx and the non-avialan feathered dinosaurs, who primarily ate meat, tummy contents from recent avialan studies suggest that the first avialans were omnivores. Even more intriguing...

Avialae, which translates to bird wings, are a clade of flying dinosaurs containing the only living dinosaurs, the birds. It is usually defined as all theropod dinosaurs more closely related to modern birds — Aves — than to deinonychosaurs, though alternative definitions are occasionally bantered back and forth.

The Earliest Avialan: Archaeopteryx lithographica

Archaeopteryx, bird-like dinosaur from the Late Jurassic
Archaeopteryx lithographica, from the late Jurassic Period Solnhofen Formation of Germany, is the earliest known avialan that may have had the capability of powered flight. 

However, several older avialans are known from the Late Jurassic Tiaojishan Formation of China, dating to about 160 million years ago.

The Late Jurassic Archaeopteryx is well-known as one of the first transitional fossils to be found, and it provided support for the theory of evolution in the late 19th century. 

Archaeopteryx was the first fossil to clearly display both traditional reptilian characteristics — teeth, clawed fingers, and a long, lizard-like tail—as well as wings with flight feathers similar to those of modern birds. It is not considered a direct ancestor of birds, though it is possibly closely related to the true ancestor.

Unlikely yet true, the closest living relatives of birds are the crocodilians. Birds are descendants of the primitive avialans — whose members include Archaeopteryx — which first appeared about 160 million years ago in China.

DNA evidence tells us that modern birds — Neornithes — evolved in the Middle to Late Cretaceous, and diversified dramatically around the time of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 mya, which killed off the pterosaurs and all non-avian dinosaurs.

In birds, the brain, especially the telencephalon, is remarkably developed, both in relative volume and complexity. Unlike most early‐branching sauropsids, the adults of birds and other archosaurs have a well‐ossified neurocranium. In contrast to most of their reptilian relatives, but similar to what we see in mammals, bird brains fit closely to the endocranial cavity so that major external features are reflected in the endocasts. What you see on the inside is what you see on the outside.

This makes birds an excellent group for palaeoneurological investigations. The first observation of the brain in a long‐extinct bird was made in the first quarter of the 19th century. However, it was not until the 2000s and the application of modern imaging technologies that avian palaeoneurology really took off.

Understanding how the mode of life is reflected in the external morphology of the brains of birds is but one of several future directions in which avian palaeoneurological research may extend.

Although the number of fossil specimens suitable for palaeoneurological explorations is considerably smaller in birds than in mammals and will very likely remain so, the coming years will certainly witness a momentous strengthening of this rapidly growing field of research at the overlap between ornithology, palaeontology, evolutionary biology and the neurosciences.

Reference: Cau, Andrea; Brougham, Tom; Naish, Darren (2015). "The phylogenetic affinities of the bizarre Late Cretaceous Romanian theropod Balaur bondoc (Dinosauria, Maniraptora): Dromaeosaurid or flightless bird?". PeerJ. 3: e1032. doi:10.7717/peerj.1032. PMC 4476167. PMID 26157616.

Reference: Ivanov, M., Hrdlickova, S. & Gregorova, R. (2001) The Complete Encyclopedia of Fossils. Rebo Publishers, Netherlands. p. 312

Wednesday 16 February 2022

THE MIGHTY MARINE REPTILES

This well-preserved partial ichthyosaur was found in the Blue Lias shales by Lewis Winchester-Ellis in 2018. The vertebrae you see are from the tail section of this marine reptile.

The find includes stomach contents that tell us a little about how this particular fellow liked to dine.

As with most of his brethren, he enjoyed fish and cephalopods. Lewis found fishbone and squid tentacle hooklets in his belly. Oh yes, these ancient cephies had grasping hooklets on their tentacles. I am picturing them wiggling all ominously. The hooklets were the only hard parts of the animal preserved in this case as the softer parts of this ancient calamari were fully or partially digested before this ichthyosaur met his end.

Ichthyosaurus was an extinct marine reptile first described from fossil fragments found in 1699 in Wales. Shortly thereafter, fossil vertebrae were published in 1708 from the Lower Jurassic and the first member of the order Ichthyosauria to be discovered.

To give that a bit of historical significance, this was the age of James Stuart, Jacobite hopeful to the British throne. While scientific journals of the day were publishing the first vertebrae ichthyosaur finds, he was avoiding the French fleet in the Firth of Forth off Scotland. This wasn’t Bonnie Prince Charlie, this was his Dad. Yes, that far back.

Though not often referenced in the literature, the very first well-articulated ichthyosaur skeleton was discovered in 1749 by the German physician, Albert Mohr. Mohr found the fossil specimen near Bad Boll in Upper Swabia, a municipality in the district of Göppingen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. But at the time, Mohr did not realize exactly what he had found. He thought the bones to be those of a fish — possibly a shark or ray. Georg Friedrich Jaeger wrote up a monograph in 1824 celebrating — and slightly inflating the interpretation of Mohr's work — though Jaeger's manuscript was produced in Latin so not often referenced in an ever Anglicized field of science.

Not long after Mohr's discovery, another fairly well-articulated skeleton was discovered by Mary Anning & her brother Joseph along the Dorset Jurassic Coast. Joseph had mistakenly, but quite reasonably, taken the find for an ancient crocodile. Mary excavated the specimen a year later and it was this and others that she found that would supply the research base others would publish on.

Mohr does not often get credited — those accolades usually go to Mary Anning. Mary's find was described by a British surgeon, Sir Everard Home, an elected Fellow of the Royal Society, in 1814. The specimen is now on display at the Natural History Museum in London bearing the name Temnodontosaurus platyodon, or “cutting-tooth lizard.”

In 1821, William Conybeare and Henry De La Beche, a friend of Mary's, published a paper describing three new species of unknown marine reptiles based on Anning's finds.

The Rev. William Buckland would go on to describe two small ichthyosaurs from the Lias of Lyme Regis, Ichthyosaurus communis and Ichthyosaurus intermedius, in 1837.

Lithography from William Buckland's 1824 Paper
Remarkable, you'll recall that he was a theologian, geologist, palaeontologist AND Dean of Westminster. It was Buckland who published the first full account of a dinosaur in 1824, coining the name, Megalosaurus

Here is an image from that 1824 publication showing a lithograph of the anterior extremity of the right lower jaw of the Megalosaurus from Stonesfield near Oxford. 

The Age of Dinosaurs and Era of the Mighty Marine Reptile had begun. Ichthyosaurs have been collected in the Blue Lias near Lyme Regis and the Black Ven Marls. More recently, specimens have been collected from the higher succession near Seatown. Paddy Howe, Lyme Regis Museum geologist, found a rather nice Ichthyosaurus breviceps skull a few years back. A landslip in 2008 unveiled some ribs poking out of the Church cliffs and a bit of digging revealed the ninth fossil skull ever found of a breviceps, with teeth and paddles to boot.

Specimens have since been found in Europe in Belgium, England, Germany, Switzerland and in Indonesia. Many tremendously well-preserved specimens come from the limestone quarries in Holzmaden, southern Germany.

Ichthyosaurs ranged from quite small, just a foot or two, to well over twenty-six metres in length and resembled both modern fish and dolphins.

Dean Lomax and Sven Sachs, both active — and delightful — vertebrate palaeontologists, have described a colossal beast, Shonisaurus sikanniensis from the Upper Triassic (Norian) Pardonet Formation of northeastern British Columbia, Canada, measuring 3-3.5 meters in length. The specimen is now on display in the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta, Canada. It was this discovery that tipped the balance in the vote, making it British Columbia's Official Fossil. 

Ichthyosaurs have been found at other sites in British Columbia, on Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii but Shonisaurus tipped the ballot. The first specimens of Shonisaurus were found in the 1990s by Peter Langham at Doniford Bay on the Somerset coast of England. 

Roy Chapman Andrews, AMNH 1928 Expedition to the Gobi Desert
Dr. Betsy Nicholls, Rolex Laureate Vertebrate Palaeontologist from the Royal Tyrrell Museum, excavated the type specimen of Shonisaurus sikanniensis over three field sessions in one of the most ambitious fossil excavations ever ventured. 

Her efforts from 1999 through 2001, both in the field and lobbying back at home, paid off. Betsy published on this new species in 2004, the culmination of her life’s work and her last paper as we lost her to cancer in the autumn of that year. 

I recently connected with the awesome John-Paul (JP) Zonneveld, Professor, Palaeontologist, Sedimentary Geologist and Field Scientist at the University of Alberta, who worked with Betsy on the original Shonisaurus sikanniensis site many years ago. "She was an awesome person, a dear friend and an outstanding field scientist." I could not agree more. Betsy was pure delight.

Charmingly, Betsy had a mail correspondence with Roy Chapman Andrews, former director of the American Museum of Natural History, going back to the late 1950s as she explored her potential career in palaeontology. Do you recall the AMNH’s sexy paleo photos of expeditions to the Gobi Desert in southern Mongolia in China in the early 20th century? You would remember if you had seen them. Roy Chapman Andrews was the lead on that trip. His photos are what fueled the flames of my own interest in palaeontology.

Shonisaurus popularise
We have found at least 37 specimens of Shonisaurus in Triassic outcrops of the Luning Formation in the Shoshone Mountains in northwestern Nye County of Nevada, USA. The finds go back to the 1920s. They were later brought back into the spotlight by the collecting efforts of Margaret Wheat of Fallon and Dr C. L. Camp, UCMP, in the 1950s.  

The aptly named Shonisaurus popularis became the Nevada State Fossil in 1977. Our Shoni got around. Isolated remains have been found in a section of sandstone in Belluno, in the Eastern Dolomites, Veneto region of northeastern Italy. The specimens were published by Vecchia et al. in 2002. And for a time, Shonisaurus was the largest ichthyosaurus known.

Move over, Shoni, as a new marine reptile find competes with the Green Anaconda, Eunectes murinus, and the Blue Whale, Balaenoptera musculus, for size at a whopping twenty-six (26) metres. The find is the prize of fossil collector turned co-author, Paul de la Salle, who — you guessed it — found it in the lower part of the intertidal area that outcrops strata from the latest Triassic Westbury Mudstone Formation of Lilstock on the Somerset coast. He contacted Dean Lomax and Judy Massare who became co-authors on the paper.

The find and conclusions from their paper put the dinosaur bones from the historic Westbury Mudstone Formation of Aust Cliff, Gloucestershire, UK site into full reinterpretation.

And remember the Ichthyosaur communis the good Reverend Buckland described back in 1837? Dean Lomax was the first to describe a wee baby. A wee baby ichthyosaur! Awe. I know, right? He and palaeontologist Nigel Larkin published this adorable first in the journal of Historical Biology in 2017.

They had teamed up previously on another first back in 2014 when they completed the reconstruction of an entire large marine reptile skull and mandible in 3D, then graciously making it available to fellow researchers and the public. The skull and braincase in question were from an Early Jurassic, and relatively rare, Protoichthyosaurus prostaxalis. The specimen had been unearthed in Warwickshire back in the 1950s. Unlike most ichthyosaur finds of this age, it was not compressed and allowed the team to look at a 3D specimen through the lens of computerized tomography (CT) scanning. 

Another superb three-dimensional ichthyosaur skull was found near Lyme Regis by fossil hunter-turned-entrepreneur-local David Sole and prepped by the late David Costain. I am rather hoping it went into a museum collection as it would be wonderful to see the specimen studied, imaged, scanned and 3D printed for all to share. 

Lomax and Sven Sachs also published on an embryo from one of the largest ichthyosaurs known, a new species named Ichthyosaurus somersetensis. Their paper in the ACTA Palaeontologica Polonica from 2017, describes the third embryo known for Ichthyosaurus and the first to be positively identified to species level. The specimen was collected from the Lower Jurassic strata (lower Hettangian, Blue Lias Formation) of Doniford Bay, Somerset, UK and is housed in the collection of the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum (Lower Saxony State Museum) in Hannover, Germany.

We have learned a lot about them in the time we've been studying them. We now have thousands of specimens, some whole, some as bits and pieces. Many specimens that have been collected are only just now being studied and the tools we are using to study them are getting better and better.

While they resembled fish and dolphins, Ichthyosaurs were large marine reptiles belonging to the order known as Ichthyosauria or Ichthyopterygia. In 2018, Benjamin Kear and his team were able to study ichthyosaur remains at the molecular level, Their findings suggest ichthyosaurs had skin and blubber quite similar to our modern dolphins.

While ichthyosaurs evolved from land-dwelling, lung-breathing reptiles, they returned to our ancient seas and evolved into the fish-shaped creatures we find in the fossil record today.

Their limbs fully transformed into flippers, sometimes containing a very large number of digits and phalanges. Their flippers tell us they were entirely aquatic as they were not well-designed for use on land. And it was their flippers that first gave us the clue that they gave birth to live young; a find later confirmed by fossil embryo and wee baby ichy finds.

They thrived during much of the Mesozoic era; based on fossil evidence, they first appeared around 250 million years ago (Ma) and at least one species survived until about 90 million years ago into the Late Cretaceous.

During the early Triassic period, ichthyosaurs evolved from a group of unidentified land reptiles that returned to the sea. They were particularly abundant in the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic before being replaced as a premier aquatic predator by another marine reptilian group, the Plesiosauria, in the later Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

In the Late Cretaceous, ichthyosaurs were hard hit by the Cenomanian-Turonian anoxic event. As the deepest benthos layers of the seas became anoxic, poisoned by hydrogen sulphide, deep water marine life died off. This caused a cascade that wreaked havoc all the way up the food chain. At the end of that chain were our mighty predaceous marine reptiles. Bounty turned to scarcity and a race for survival began. The ichthyosaurs lost that race as the last lineage became extinct. It may have been their conservative evolution as a genus when faced with a need for adaptation to the world in which they found themselves and/or being outcompeted by early mosasaurs.

There are promising discoveries coming out of strata from the Cretaceous epeiric seas of Texas, USA from Nathan E. Van Vranken. His published paper from 2017, "An overview of ichthyosaurian remains from the Cretaceous of Texas, USA," looks at ichthyosaurian taxa from the mid-Cretaceous (Albian–Cenomanian) time interval in North America with an eye to ichthyosaurian distribution and demise.

Image One: The find and photos are all credited to Lewis Winchester-Ellis. Thank you for sharing your tremendous specimen with us. Lewis did much of the preparation of the specimen, removing the majority of the matrix. The spectacular final prep is credited to Lizzie Hingley, Stonebarrow Fossils, Oxfordshire. Her skill with an air scribe is unparalleled.

Link to Lomax Paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article…

Link to Nathan's Paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/…/10.1080/03115518.2018.1523462…

Nicholls Paper: E. L. Nicholls and M. Manabe. 2004. Giant ichthyosaurs of the Triassic - a new species of Shonisaurus from the Pardonet Formation (Norian: Late Triassic) of British Columbia. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 24(4):838-849 [M. Carrano/H. Street]

Image Two: Lithography from William Buckland's "Notice on the Megalosaurus or great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield", 1824. Anterior extremity of the right lower jaw of the Megalosaurus from Stonesfield near Oxford. Mary Morland (later Buckland; 1797–1857) - Plate 40 (XL) of William Buckland: Notice on the Megalosaurus or great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield. Transactions of the Geological Society of London. Series 2, vol. 1, no. 2, 1824, S. 390–396 (digital copy at geolsoc.org.uk).

HOME, E. (1814) Some Account of the Fossil Remains of an Animal more nearly allied to Fishes than any of the Other Classes of Animals. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 104, 571- 577.

JAEGER, G.F. (1824) De Ichthyosauri sive Proteosauri fossils speciminibus in Agro Bollensi in Wurtembergia repertis. Stuttgart.

LHUYD, E. (1699) Lithophylacii Britannici Ichnographia. London.


Monday 14 February 2022

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUBLISHED

In 1987, Wesley Wehr, a paleobotanist (and dear friend) who specialized in the fossil plants of the Okanagan Highlands of British Columbia and Republic, Washington published a paper with Jack Wolfe on Middle Eocene dicotyledonous plants from Republic. 

In it, they named a new species of early Eocene fossil linden leaf for Kirk Johnson, now Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, but then a young man with a keen eye for fossils. 

The species is Tilia johnsoni and it lives now at the Burke Museum in Seattle, Washington.

Kirk had found the leaf at the corner lot fossil site in Republic, Washington and generously given it to Wehr and Wolfe. 

The duo named the specimen for Kirk both because of his generosity and because he was someone they much admired. Me, too!

Palaeontological Lecture Series:  

Kirk Johnson is one of the speakers we will be hosting via Zoom later this year. Visit www.fossiltalksandfieldtrips.com

In the early 2000s, Wes Wehr was working on his last book, The Accidental Collector: Art, Fossils, and Friendship. In it, he weaves together all of the polite mentions briefly noted in his published papers into their larger stories and contexts. His tale in meeting Kirk is included. 

Wes was an extraordinary human being and delightful orator who knew how to tell a good story. Ours were over dinner and in the field, cherished because they are now lost in time. He could thrill you with a tale or tidbit about art, history, music or fossils.  

Photo: A single leaf from the extinct Tilia johnsoni. 49 million years old, Klondike Mountain Formation, Republic, Washington. Stonerose Interpretive Center Collections; Kevmin.

Sunday 13 February 2022

2022 PALAEONTOLOGY LECTURE SERIES — DANNA STAAF — CEPHALOPODS ARE THE NEW DINOSAURS

Join us this afternoon to hear from Danna Staaf, the Cephalopodiatrist to hear her lecture, Cephalopods are the New Dinosaurs.

Cephalopods, Earth's first truly substantial animals, are still among us. Their fascinating family tree is a whose-who of squid, octopus, cuttlefish, nautilus, ammonites and their brethren. They number more than 800 species with new species still being found.

As the inventors of swimming, cephalopods presided over the sea for millions of years. When fish eventually evolved jaws, a marine superpower, the cephalopods had to up their game.  

​Some cephalopods evolved defensive spikes. Others abandoned their shells entirely, opening the floodgates for a tidal wave of innovation — masterful camouflage, fin-supplemented jet propulsion, ink-spraying and intelligence we have yet to fully understand. 

How did this Apex Predator of our ancient seas become the world's tastiest snack? We'll talk through the science of these wonderful adaptations then open up the floor to questions.

Danna is a wealth of knowledge with a strong sense of curiosity and play. If you have a pressing question on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, what was going on with the heteromorphs or if squid originated from space (gosh, are they aliens?) then this is your chance to satisfy your curiosity.

Danna's talk will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube for all to re-watch at their leisure. We are super excited to kick-off the 2022 Palaeontological Lecture Series with Danna. Her talk is sure to delight. 

Join us this afternoon, Sunday, February 13, 2022, at 2PM PST. Visit www.fossiltalksandfieldtrips.com to see the full 2022 Lecture Season and access the free Zoom link to her talk.

ABOUT DANNA STAAF

For her PhD, Danna studied baby squid at Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University. She is a delightful science educator who writes about science, with a particular penchant for marine biology. She also writes science fiction and fantasy. Sometimes writes for grown-ups and sometimes for kids. 

She is a talented artist who draws comics, technical illustrations, calligraphy, and origami. She lives in San Jose, California, with her husband, kids, cats, plants and likely a lot of art supplies. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. I have added all her social links and links to her books and newsletter on the Fossil Talks & Field Trips site. Enjoy!

Saturday 12 February 2022

MEGATHERIUM: SLOTH

In 1788, this magnificent specimen of a Megatherium sloth was sent to the Royal Cabinet of Natural History from the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata.

The megaterios were large terrestrial sloths belonging to the group, Xenarthra. These herbivores inhabited large areas of land on the American continent. Their powerful skeleton enabled them to stand on their hind legs to reach leaves high in the trees, a huge advantage given the calories needed to be consumed each day to maintain their large size.

Avocados were one of the food preferences of our dear Giant ground sloths. They ate then pooped them out, spreading the pits far and wide. The next time you enjoy avocado toast, thank this large beastie. One of his ancestors may have had a hand (or butt) in your meal.

In 1788, Bru assembled the skeleton as you see it here. It is exhibited at the Museo Nacional De Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, Spain, in its original configuration for historic value. If you look closely, you can see it is not anatomically correct. But all good palaeontology is teamwork. Based upon the drawings of Juan Bautista Bru, George Cuvier used this specimen to describe the species for the very first time.

Friday 11 February 2022

BUMBLEBEE: HAMDZALAT'SI

This fuzzy yellow and black striped fellow is a bumblebee in the genus Bombus sp., family Apidae. We know him from our gardens where we see them busily lapping up nectar and pollen from flowers with their long hairy tongues.

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, bumblebees are known as ha̱mdzalat̕si — though I wonder if this is actually the word for a honey bee, Apis mellifera, as ha̱mdzat̕si is the word for beehive.

I have a special fondness for all bees and look for them both in the garden and in First Nation art.

Bumblebees habit of rolling around in flowers gives us a sense that these industrious insects are also playful. In First Nation art they provide levity — comic relief along with their cousins the mosquitoes and wasps — as First Nation dancers wear masks made to mimic their round faces, big round eyes and pointy stingers. A bit of artistic license is taken with their forms as each mask may have up to six stingers. The dancers weave amongst the watchful audience and swoop down to playfully give many of the guests a good, albeit gentle, poke. 

Honey bees actually do a little dance when they get back to the nest with news of an exciting new place to forage — truly they do. Bumblebees do not do a wee bee dance when they come home pleased with themselves from a successful foraging mission, but they do rush around excitedly, running to and fro to share their excitement. They are social learners, so this behaviour can also signal those heading out to join them as they head back to the particularly good patch of wildflowers. 

Bumblebees are quite passive and usually sting in defence of their nest or if they feel threatened. Female bumblebees can sting several times and live on afterwards — unlike honeybees who hold back on their single sting as its barbs hook in once used and their exit shears it off, marking their demise.

They are important buzz pollinators both for our food crops and our wildflowers. Their wings beat at 130 times or more per second, literally shaking the pollen off the flowers with their vibration. 

And they truly are busy bees, spending their days fully focussed on their work. Bumblebees collect and carry pollen and nectar back to the nest that may be as much as 25% to 75% of their body weight. 

And they are courteous — as they harvest each flower, they mark them with a particular scent to help others of their group know that the nectar is gone. 

The food they bring back to the nest is eaten to keep the hive healthy but is not used to make honey as each new season's queen bees hibernate over the winter and emerge reinvigorated to seek a new hive each Spring. She will choose a new site, primarily underground depending on the bumblebee species, and then set to work building wax cells for each of her fertilised eggs. 

Bumblebees are quite hardy. The plentiful hairs on their bodies are coated in oils that provide them with natural waterproofing. They can also generate more heat than their smaller, slender honey bee cousins, so they remain productive workers in cooler weather.    

We see the first bumblebees arise in the fossil record 100 million years ago and diversify alongside the earliest flowering plants. Their evolution is an entangled dance with the pollen and varied array of flowers that colour our world. 

We have found many wonderful examples within the fossil record, including a rather famous Eocene fossil bee found by a dear friend and naturalist who has left this Earth, Rene Savenye.

His namesake, H. Savenyei, is a lovely fossil halictine bee from Early Eocene deposits near Quilchena, British Columbia — and the first bee body-fossil known from the Okanagan Highlands — and indeed from Canada. 

It is a fitting homage, as bees symbolize honesty, playfulness and willingness to serve the community in our local First Nation lore and around the world — something Rene did his whole life.

Wednesday 9 February 2022

VANCOUVER ISLAND'S FOSSIL TREASURES: TRENT RIVER PALAEONTOLOGY

Dan Bowen, Chair, VIPS, Trent River
The rocks that make up the Trent River on Vancouver Island were laid down south of the equator as small, tropical islands. They rode across the Pacific heading north and slightly east over the past 85 million years to where we find them today.

The Pacific Plate is an oceanic tectonic plate that lies beneath the Pacific Ocean. And it is massive. At 103 million km2 (40 million sq mi), it is the largest tectonic plate and continues to grow fed by volcanic eruptions that piggyback onto its trailing edge.

This relentless expansion pushes the Pacific Plate into the North American Plate. The pressure subducts it beneath our continent where it then melts back into the earth. Plate tectonics are slow but powerful forces. 

The island chains that rode the plates across the Pacific smashed into our coastline and slowly built the province of British Columbia. And because each of those islands had a different origin, they create pockets of interesting and diverse geology.

It is these islands that make up the Insular Belt — a physio-geological region on the northwestern North American coast. It consists of three major island groups — and many smaller islands — that stretches from southern British Columbia up into Alaska and the Yukon. These bits of islands on the move arrived from the Late Cretaceous through the Eocene — and continues to this day.

The rocks that form the Insular Superterrane are allochthonous, meaning they are not related to the rest of the North American continent. The rocks we walk over along the Trent River are distinct from those we find throughout the rest of Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii, the rest of the province of British Columbia and completely foreign to those we find next door in Alberta.

To discover what we do find on the Trent takes only a wee stroll, a bit of digging and time to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. The first geological forays to Vancouver Island were to look for coal deposits, the profitable remains of ancient forests that could be burned to the power industry.

Jim Monger and Charlie Ross of the Geological Survey of Canada both worked to further our knowledge of the complex geology of the Comox Basin. They were at the cutting edge of west coast geology in the 1970s. It was their work that helped tease out how and where the rocks we see along the Trent today were formed and made their way north.

We know from their work that by 85 million years ago, the Insular Superterrane had made its way to what is now British Columbia. 

The lands were forested much as they are now but by extinct genera and families. The fossil remains of trees similar to oak, poplar, maple and ash can be found along the Trent and Vancouver Island. We also see the lovely remains of flowering plants such as Cupanities crenularis, figs and breadfruit.

Heading up the river, you come to a delineation zone that clearly marks 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 is less abundant in the Comox sandstones but still contains some interesting specimens. Here you begin to see fossilized wood and identifiable fossil plant material.

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

Walking west from the Trent River Falls at the bottom, you pass the infamous Ammonite Alley, where you can find Mesopuzosia sp. and Kitchinites sp. of the Upper Cretaceous (Santonian), Haslam Formation. Minding the slippery green algae covering some of the river rocks, you can see the first of the Polytychoceras vancouverense zone.

Continuing west, you reach the first of two fossil turtle sites on the river — amazingly, one terrestrial and one marine. If you continue, you come to the Inland Island Highway.

The Trent River has yielded some very interesting marine specimens, and significant terrestrial finds. We have found a wonderful terrestrial helochelydrid turtle, Naomichelys speciosa, and the caudal vertebrae of a Hadrosauroid dinosaur. Walking down from the Hadrosaur site you come to the site of the fossil ratfish find — one of the ocean's oddest fish.

Ratfish, Hydrolagus Collie, are chimaera found in the north-eastern Pacific Ocean today. The fossil specimen from the Trent would be considered large by modern standards as it is a bruiser in comparison to his modern counterparts. 

This robust fellow had exceptionally large eyes and sex organs that dangled enticingly between them. You mock, but there are many ratfish who would differ. While inherently sexy by ratfish standards, this fellow was not particularly tasty to their ancient marine brethren (or humans today) — so not hugely sought after as a food source or prey.

A little further again from the ratfish site we reach the contact of the two Formations. The rocks here have travelled a long way to their current location. With them, we peel away the layers of the geologic history of both the Comox Valley and the province of British Columbia.

The Trent River is not far from the Puntledge, a river whose banks have also revealed many wonderful fossil specimens. The Puntledge is also the name used by the K'ómoks First Nation to describe themselves. They have lived here since time immemorial. Along with Puntledge, they refer to themselves as Sahtloot, Sasitla and Ieeksun.

References: Note on the occurrence of the marine turtle Desmatochelys (Reptilia: Chelonioidea) from the Upper Cretaceous of Vancouver Island Elizabeth L. Nicholls Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences (1992) 29 (2): 377–380. https://doi.org/10.1139/e92-033; References: Chimaeras - The Neglected Chondrichthyans". Elasmo-research.org. Retrieved 2017-07-01.

Directions: If you're keen to explore the area, park on the side of Highway 19 about three kilometres south of Courtenay and hike up to the Trent River. Begin to look for parking about three kilometres south of the Cumberland Interchange. There is a trail that leads from the highway down beneath the bridge which will bring you to the Trent River's north side.

Tuesday 8 February 2022

ETHELDRED BENETT: ENGLISH GEOLOGIST & CITIZEN SCIENTIST

Hoplites (Hoplites) bennettiana (Sowerby, 1826)
A beautiful example of the ammonite, Hoplites (Hoplites) bennettiana (Sowerby, 1826), from Early Albian localities in the Carrière de Courcelles Villemoyenne, Région de Troyes, near Champagne in northeastern France.

The species name is a homage to Etheldred Benett, an early English geologist often credited with being the first female geologist — a fossil collector par excellence.

She was also credited with being a man  —  the Natural History Society of Moscow awarding her membership as Master Etheldredus Benett in 1836. 

The confusion over her name (it did sound masculine) came again with the bestowing of a Doctorate of Civil Law from Tsar Nicholas I.

The Tsar had read Sowerby's Mineral Conchology, a major fossil reference work that contained the second-highest number of contributed fossils of the day, many of them with the best preservation seen at that time. Forty-one of those specimens were credited to Benett. Between her name and this wonderous contribution to a growing science, the Russian Tsar awarded the Doctorate to what he believed was a young male scientist on the rise. 

He believed in education, founding Kyiv University in 1834, just not for women. He was an autocratic military man frozen in time — the thought that this work could have been done by a female unthinkable. Doubly charming is that the honour from the University of St Petersburg was granted at a time when women were not allowed to attend St. Pete's or any higher institutions. That privilege arrived in 1878, twenty years after Nicholas I's death.

Benett took these honours (and social blunders) with grace. She devoted her life to collecting and studying fossils from the southwest of England, amassing an impressive personal collection she openly shared with geologist friends, colleagues and visitors to her home. Her speciality was fossils from the Middle Cretaceous, Upper Greensand in the Vale of Wardour — a valley in the county of Wiltshire near the River Nadder.

Etheldred was a local Wiltshire girl. Born Etheldred Benett on 22 July 1775 at Pyt House, Tisbury, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of the local squire Thomas Benett. Etheldred's interest was cultivated by the botanist Aylmer Bourke Lambert (1761-1842), a founding member of the Linnean Society. Benett's brother had married Lucy Lambert, Aylmer's half-sister. Aylmer was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Society of the Arts. He was also an avid fossil collector and member of the Geological Society of London. The two met and got on famously.

Aylmer kindled an interest in natural history in both of Benett's daughters. Etheldred had a great fondness for geology, stratigraphy and all things paleo, whilst her sister concentrated on botany. Etheldred had a distinct advantage over her near contemporary, the working-class Mary Anning (1799-1847), in that Benett was a woman of independent wealth who never married — and didn't need to — who could pursue the acquisition and study of fossils for her own interest.

While Anning was the marine reptile darling of the age, she was also greatly hindered by her finances. "She sells, seashells by the seashore..." while chanted in a playful spirit today, was not meant kindly at the time. Aylmer's encouragement emboldened Etheldred to go into the field to collect for herself — and collect she did. Profusely.

Benett’s contribution to the early history of Wiltshire geology is significant. She corresponded extensively with the coterie of gentlemen scientists of the day —  Gideon Mantell, William Buckland, James Sowerby, George Bellas Greenough and, Samuel Woodward. She also consorted with the lay folk and had an ongoing correspondence with William Smith, whose stratigraphy work had made a favourable impression on her brother-in-law, Aylmer.

Her collections and collaboration with geologists of the day were instrumental in helping to form the field of geology as a science. One colleague and friend, Gideon Mantell, British physician, geologist and palaeontologist, who discovered four of the five genera of dinosaurs and Iguanadon, was so inspired by Benett's work he named this Cretaceous ammonite after her — Hoplites bennettiana.

Benett's fossil assemblage was a valuable resource for her contemporaries and remains so today. It contains thousands of Jurassic and Cretaceous fossil specimens from the Wiltshire area and the Dorset Coast, including a myriad of first recorded finds. The scientific name of every taxon is usually based on one particular specimen, or in some cases multiple specimens. Many of the specimens she collected serve as the Type Specimen for new species.

Fossil Sponge, Polypothecia quadriloba, Warminster, Wiltshire
Her particular interest was the collection and study of fossil sponges. Alcyonia caught her eye early on. 

She collected and recorded her findings with the hope that one of her colleagues might share her enthusiasm and publish her work as a contribution to their own.

Alas, no one took up the helm — those interested were busy with other pursuits (or passed away) and others were less than enthusiastic or never seemed to get around to it.

To ensure the knowledge was shared in a timely fashion, she finally wrote them up and published them herself. You can read her findings in her publication, ‘A Catalogue of Organic Remains of the County of Wiltshire’ (1831), where she shares observations on the fossil sponge specimens and other invert goodies from the outcrops west of town.

She shared her ideas freely and donated many specimens to local museums. It was through her exchange of observations, new ideas and open sharing of fossils with Gideon Mantell and others that a clearer understanding of the Lower Cretaceous sedimentary rocks of Southern England was gained.

In many ways, Mantell was drawn to Benett as his ideas went against the majority opinion. At a time when marine reptiles were dominating scientific discoveries and discussions, he pushed the view that dinosaurs were terrestrial, not amphibious, and sometimes bipedal. Mantell's life's work established the now-familiar idea that the Age of Reptiles preceded the Age of Mammals. Mantell kept a journal from 1819-1852, that remained unpublished until 1940 when E. Cecil Curwen published an abridged version. (Oxford University Press 1940). John A. Cooper, Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove, published the work in its entirety in 2010.

I was elated to get a copy, both to untangle the history of the time and to better learn about the relationship between Mantell and Benett. So much of our geologic past has been revealed since Mantell's first entry two hundred years ago. The first encounter we share with the two of them is a short note from March 8, 1819. "This morning I received a letter from Miss Bennett of Norton House near Warminster Wilts, informing me of her having sent a packet of fossils for me, to the Waggon Office..." The diary records his life, but also the social interactions of the day and the small connected community of the scientific social elite. It is a delight!

Though a woman in a newly evolving field, her work, dedication and ideas were recognized and appreciated by her colleagues. Gideon Mantell described her as, "a lady of great talent and indefatigable research," whilst the Sowerbys noted her, "labours in the pursuit of geological information have been as useful as they have been incessant."

Benett produced the first measured sections of the Upper Chicksgrove quarry near Tisbury in 1819, published and shared with local colleagues as, "the measure of different beds of stone in Chicksgrove Quarry in the Parish of Tisbury.” The stratigraphic section was later published by naturalist James Sowerby without her knowledge. Her research contradicted many of Sowerby’s conclusions.

She wrote and privately published a monograph in 1831, containing many of her drawings and sketches of molluscs and sponges. Her work included sketches of fossil Alcyonia (1816) from the Green Sand Formation at Warminster Common and the immediate vicinity of Warminster in Wiltshire.

Echinoids and Bivalves. Collection of Etheldred Benett (1775-1845)
The Society holds two copies, one was given to George Bellas Greenough, and another copy was given to her friend Gideon Mantell. This work established her as a true, pioneering biostratigrapher following but not always agreeing with the work of William Smith.

If you'd like to read a lovely tale on William's work, check out the Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester. It narrates the intellectual context of the time, the development of Smith's ideas and how they contributed to the theory of evolution and more generally to a dawning realization of the true age of the earth.

The book describes the social, economic or industrial context for Smith's insights and work, such as the importance of coal mining and the transport of coal by means of canals, both of which were a stimulus to the study of geology and the means whereby Smith supported his research. Benett debated many of the ideas Smith put forward. She was luckier than Smith financially, coming from a wealthy family, a financial perk that allowed her the freedom to add fossils to her curiosity cabinet at will.

Most of her impressive collection was assumed lost in the early 20th century. It was later found and purchased by an American, Thomas Bellerby Wilson, who donated it to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Small parts of it made their way into British museums, including the Leeds City Museum, London, Bristol and the University of St. Petersburg. These collections contain many of the Type specimens and some of the very first fossils found — some with the soft tissues preserved. When Benett died in 1845, it was Mantell who penned her obituary for the London Geological Journal.

In 1989, almost a hundred and fifty years after her death, a review of her collection had Arthur Bogen and Hugh Torrens remark that her work has significantly impacted our modern understanding of Porifera, Coelenterata, Echinodermata, and the molluscan classes, Cephalopoda, Gastropoda, and Bivalvia. A worthy legacy, indeed.

Her renown lives on through her collections, her collaborations and through the beautiful 110 million-year-old ammonite you see here, Hoplites bennettiana. The lovely example you see here is in the collection of the deeply awesome Christophe Marot.

Spamer, Earle E.; Bogan, Arthur E.; Torrens, Hugh S. (1989). "Recovery of the Etheldred Benett Collection of fossils mostly from Jurassic-Cretaceous strata of Wiltshire, England, analysis of the taxonomic nomenclature of Benett (1831), and notes and figures of type specimens contained in the collection". Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. 141. pp. 115–180. JSTOR 4064955.

Torrens, H. S.; Benamy, Elana; Daeschler, E.; Spamer, E.; Bogan, A. (2000). "Etheldred Benett of Wiltshire, England, the First Lady Geologist: Her Fossil Collection in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and the Rediscovery of "Lost" Specimens of Jurassic Trigoniidae (Mollusca: Bivalvia) with Their Soft Anatomy Preserved.". Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. 150. pp. 59–123. JSTOR 4064955.

Photo credit: Fossils from Wiltshire.  In the foreground are three examples of the echinoid, Cidaris crenularis, from Calne, a town in Wiltshire, southwestern England, with bivalves behind. Caroline Lam, Archivist at the Geological Society, London, UK. http://britgeodata.blogspot.com/2016/03/etheldred-benett-first-female-geologist_30.html

Photo credit: Fossil sponges Polypothecia quadriloba, from Warminster, Wiltshire. The genus labels are Benett’s, as is the handwriting indicating the species. The small number, 20812, is the Society’s original accession label from which we can tell that the specimen was received in April 1824. The tablet onto which the fossils were glued is from the Society’s old Museum.

Monday 7 February 2022

VISITING FERNIE'S GIANT AMMONITE

Titanites occidentalis, Fernie Ammonite
The Fernie ammonite, Titanites occidentalis, from outcrops on Coal Mountain near Fernie, British Columbia, Canada. 

This beauty is the remains of a carnivorous cephalopod within the family Dorsoplanitidae that lived and died in a shallow sea some 150 million years ago.

If you would like to get off the beaten track and hike up to see this ancient beauty, you will want to head to the town of Fernie in British Columbia close to the Alberta border. 

This is the traditional territory of the the Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi ‘it First Nation who have lived here since time immemorial. There was some active logging along the hillside in 2021, so if you are looking at older directions on how to get to the site be mindful that many of the trailheads have been altered and a fair bit of bushwhacking will be necessary to get to the fossil site proper. That being said, the loggers from CanWel may have clear-cut large sections of the hillside but they did give the ammonite a wide berth and have left it intact.

Wildsight, a non-profit environmental group out of the Kimberly Cranbrook area has been trying to gain grant funding to open up the site as an educational hike with educational signage for folks visiting the Fernie area. It is likely the province of British Columbia would top up those funds if they are able to place the ammonite under the Heritage Conservation Act. CanWel would remain the owners of the land but the province could assume the liability for those visiting this iconic piece of British Columbia's palaeontological history. 

Driving to the trail base is along an easy access road just east of town along Fernie Coal Road. There are some nice exposures of Cretaceous plant material on the north side (left-hand side) of the road as you head from Fernie towards Coal Creek. I recently drove up to Fernie to look at Cretaceous plant material and locate the access point to the now infamous Late Jurassic (Tithonian) Titanites (S.S. Buckman, 1921) site. While the drive out of town is on an easy, well-maintained road, the slog up to the ammonite site is often a wet, steep push.

Fernie, British Columbia, Canada
The first Titanites occidentalis was about one-third the size and was incorrectly identified as Lytoceras, a fast-moving nektonic carnivore. The specimen you see here is significantly larger at 1.4 metres (about four and a half feet) and rare in North America. 

Titanites occidentalis, the Western Giant, is the second known specimen of this extinct fossil species. 

The first was discovered in 1947 in nearby Coal Creek by a British Columbia Geophysical Society mapping team. When they first discovered this marine fossil high up on the hillside, they could not believe their eyes — both because it is clearly marine at the top of a mountain and the sheer size of this ancient beauty.

In the summer of 1947, a field crew was mapping coal outcrops for the BC Geological Survey east of Fernie. One of the students reported finding “a fossil truck tire.” Fair enough. The similarity of size and optics are pretty close to your average Goodridge. 

A few years later, GSC Paleontologist Hans Frebold described and named the fossil Titanites occidentalis after the large Jurassic ammonites from Dorset, England. The name comes from Greek mythology. Tithonus, as you may recall, was the Prince of Troy. He fell in love with Eos, the Greek Goddess of the Dawn. Eos begged Zeus to make her mortal lover immortal. Zeus granted her wish but did not grant Tithonus eternal youth. He did indeed live forever — ageing hideously. Ah, Zeus, you old trickster. It is a clever play on time placement. Dawn is the beginning of the day and the Tithonian being the latest age of the Late Jurassic. Clever Hans!

HIKING TO THE FERNIE AMMONITE

From the town of Fernie, British Columbia, head east along Coal Creek Road towards Coal Creek. The site is 3.81 km from the base of Coal Creek Road to the trailhead as the crow flies. I have mapped it here for you in yellow and added the wee purple GPS marker for the ammonite site proper. There is a nice, dark grey to black roadcut exposure of Cretaceous plants on the north side of the dirt road that is your cue to pull over and park.  

You access what is left of the trailhead on the south side of the road. You will need to cross the creek to begin your ascent. There is no easy way across the creek and you'll want to tackle this one with a friend when the water level is low. 

The beginning of the trail is not clear but a bit of searching will reveal the trailhead with its telltale signs of previous hikers. This is a moderate 6.3-kilometre hike up & back bushwhacking through scrub and fallen trees. Heading up, you will make about a 246-metre elevation gain. You will likely not have a cellular signal up here but if you download the Google Map to your mobile, you will have GPS to guide you. The area has been recently logged so much of the original trail has been destroyed. There may now be easier vehicle access up the logging roads but I have not driven them since the logging and new road construction.

If you are coming in from out of town, the closest airport is Cranbrook. Then it is about an hour and change to Fernie and another 15-minutes or so to park near the site.

You will want to leave your hammers with your vehicle (no need to carry the weight and this lovely should never be struck with anything more than a raindrop) as this site is best enjoyed with a camera. 

This is a site you will want to wear hiking boots to access. Know that these will get wet as you cross the creek. 

If you would like to see the ammonite but are not keen on the hike, a cast has been made by fossil preparator Rod Bartlett is on display at the Courtenay Museum in Courtenay, Vancouver Island, Canada. 

Respect for the Land / Leave No Trace

As your feet move up the hillside, you can imagine this land 10,000 years ago, rising above great glaciers. Where footfalls trace the steps of those that came before you. This land has been home to the Yaq̓it ʔa·knuqⱡi ‘it First Nation and Ktunaxa or Kukin ʔamakis First Nations whose oral history have them living here since time immemorial. Like them, take only what you need and no more than the land offers — packing out anything that you packed in. 

Fernie Ammonite Palaeo Coordinates: 49°29'04"N 115°00'49"W


Saturday 5 February 2022

THERIZINOSAURUS: CRETACEOUS SCYTHE LIZARD

The Scythe Lizard Therizinosaurus
The slow-moving but massive fellow you see here is Therizinosaurus. He belonged to a genus of sizable therizinosaurid that lived during the Late Cretaceous, 70 million years ago. 

These big beasties reached up to 10 metres in length and likely weighed over 3,000 kg. They lumbered along with their unusually long arms pulling down and munching on vegetation in what is now the Nemegt Formation in the Nemegt Valley of Asia. 

While there are several species of Therizinosauridae, including several from North America, the massive Asian therizinosaurids are known from a single type species Therizinosaurus cheloniformis or scythe lizard found in the Gobi Desert.

In 1918, a very fortuitous Palaeontological Field Expedition to the Mongolian Gobi Desert by the USSR Academy of Sciences found the remains of a giant, turtle-like reptile near the remains of a large carnivorous dinosaur. 

Later, In 1948, another expedition was launched to retrace the work of the USSR expedition. More of the fossil bones were collected and together with those originally collected in 1918, were written up as the type specimen of Therizinosaurus described by Soviet palaeontologist Evgeny Aleksandrovich Maleev in 1954.  You may recall that Maleeve was the fellow who described the ankylosaur Talarurus and the theropod Tarbosaurus.

The genus is best known for its gigantic manual unguals or claw bones, from which it gets its name. 

Therizinosaurus was a colossal therizinosaur that could grow up to 9–10 m (30–33 ft) long and weigh possibly over 3 t (3,000 kg). Like other therizinosaurs, it would have been a slow-moving, long-necked high browser equipped with a rhamphotheca (horny beak) and a wide torso for food processing. 

The forelimbs were particularly robust and had three fingers that bore unguals which, unlike other relatives, were very stiffened, elongated, and only had significant curvatures at the tips.

Therizinosaurus had the longest known manual unguals of any land animal, reaching above 50 cm (500 mm) in length. Its hindlimbs ended in four functionally weight-bearing toes differing from other theropod groups in which the first toe was reduced to a dewclaw and also resembling the unrelated sauropodomorphs.

It was one of the last and the largest representative of its unique group, the Therizinosauria (formerly known as Segnosauria; the segnosaurs). During and after its original description in 1954, Therizinosaurus had rather complex relationships due to the lack of complete specimens and relatives at the time. 

Maleev thought the remains of Therizinosaurus to belong to a large turtle-like reptile, and also named a separate family for the genus: Therizinosauridae. Later on, with the discovery of more complete relatives, Therizinosaurus and kin were thought to represent some kind of Late Cretaceous sauropodomorphs or transitional ornithischians, even though at some point it was suggested that it may have been a theropod. 

After years of taxonomic debate, nevertheless, they are now placed in one of the major dinosaur clades, Theropoda, specifically as maniraptorans. Therizinosaurus is widely recovered within Therizinosauridae by most analyses and with more recent specimens found in Utah and New Mexico.

The unusual arms and body anatomy (extrapolated after relatives) of Therizinosaurus have been cited as an example of convergent evolution with chalicotheriines and other primarily herbivorous mammals, suggesting similar feeding habits. 

Their elongated hand claws were more useful when pulling vegetation within reach rather than being used for active attack or defence because of their fragility, however, they may have had some role for intimidation. Its arms also were particularly resistant to stress, which suggests a robust use of these limbs. Therizinosaurus was a very tall animal, likely having reduced competition over the foliage in its habitat and outmatching predators like Tarbosaurus.

Thursday 3 February 2022

EAGER FORMATION: TUZOIA

This specimen of the arthropod Tuzoia sp. is from the Lower Cambrian Eager Formation of British Columbia. 

Tuzoia is an extinct genus of large bivalved arthropod known from Early to Middle Cambrian marine environments in what is now the Burgess Shale, Emu Bay Shale, Kaili, the Rockslide Formation, the Spence Shale, Wheeler Formation, and Marjum Formation, and the Kinzers Formation. 

As you can see here, they are also found in the Lower Cambrian Eager Formation near Cranbrook British Columbia. 

This particular specimen is from the Rifle Range outcrop near Cranbrook where you can also find numerous fragments and complete specimens of the olenellid trilobites Ollenellus sp. and the larger, more robust Wanneria dunnae, along with Mesonacis eagerensis (Best, 1952).

The site outcrops at a few locations as you head east out of Cranbrook towards Fort Steele. The first trilobites were discovered with the building of the Kootenay Highway connecting Cranbrook to Fort Steele and beyond. Several other localities, including the outcrops at the Silhouette Rife Range — which is literally on a Rifle Range where folks go to shoot at things — is a shade older than the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale but the fauna here is much less varied. 

The site has been known and collected since the 1920s. Back in the day, fossil collecting was a family affair with folks heading out in their lightly coloured finery to picnic and surface collect the eroding exposures. Cranbrook local, Clement Hungerford Pollen was an engineer and avocational palaeontologist. He promoted collecting the exposures of the Eager Formation around 1921. As a pedigreed Englishman of considerable means, he had invested in the Kootenay Central Railway, revitalizing the town by opening up railway access within the region.

Wednesday 2 February 2022

BARNACLES: K'WIT'A' A

One of the most interesting and enigmatic little critters we find at the seashore are barnacles. They cling to rocks deep in the sea and at the waters' edge, closed to our curiosity, their domed mounds like little closed beaks shut to the water and the world.

They choose their permanent homes as larvae, sticking to hard substrates that will become their permanent homes for the rest of their lives. It has taken us a long time to find how they actually stick or what kind of "glue" they were using.

Remarkably, the barnacle glue sticks to rocks in a similar way to how red cells bind together. Red blood cells bind and clot with a little help from some enzymes. 

These work to create long protein fibres that first blind, clot then form a scab. The mechanism barnacles use, right down to the enzyme, is very similar. That's especially interesting as about a billion years separate our evolutionary path from theirs.

So, with the help of their clever enzymes, they can affix to most anything – ship hulls, rocks, and even the skin of whales. If you find them in tidepools, you begin to see their true nature as they open up, their delicate feathery finger-like projections flowing back and forth in the surf.

One of my earliest memories is of playing with them in the tidepools on the north end of Vancouver Island. It was here that I learned their many names. In the Kwak'wala language of the Kwakiutl First Nations of the Pacific Northwest, the word for barnacles is k̕wit̕a̱'a — and if it is a very small barnacle it is called t̕sot̕soma — and the Kwak'wala word for glue is ḵ̕wa̱dayu.

Tuesday 1 February 2022

DARWIN: A TASTE FOR STUDIES

Chelonia. Schildkröten by Ernst Haeckel, 1904
Care for some tarantula with that walrus? No? how about some Woolly mammoth?

While eating study specimens is not de rigueur today, it was once common practice for researchers in the 1700-1880s. 

The English naturalist, Charles Darwin belonged to an elite men's club dedicated to tasting exotic meats. In his first book, Darwin wrote almost three times as much about dishes like armadillo and tortoise urine as he did on the biogeography of his Galapagos finches. 

From his great love of gastronomy, I am surprised any of his tasty specimens made it back from his historic voyage on the HMS Beagle — particularly the turtles.

One of the most famous scientific meals occurred one Saturday evening on the 13th of January, 1951. This was at the 47th Explorers Club Annual Dinner (ECAD) when members purportedly dined on a frozen woolly mammoth. 

Commander Wendell Phillips Dodge was the promotor of the banquet. He sent out press notices proclaiming the event's signature dish would be a selection of prehistoric meat. Whether Dodge did this simply to gain attendees or play a joke remains a mystery. 

The prehistoric meat was supposedly found at Woolly Cove on Akutan in the Aleutians Islands of Alaska, USA, by the eminent polar explorers' Father Bernard Rosecrans Hubbard, American geologist, explorer sometimes called the Glacier Priest, and polar explorer Captain George Francis Kosco of the United States Navy.

Fried Tarantula & Goat Eyeballs

This much-publicized meal captured the public’s imagination and became an enduring legend and source of pride for the Club, popularizing an annual menu of exotics that continues today. The Club is well-known for its notorious hors d’oeuvres like fried tarantulas and goat eyeballs as it is for its veritable whose who of notable members — Teddy Roosevelt, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Roy Chapman Andrews, Thor Heyerdahl, James Cameron.

The Yale Peabody Museum holds a sample of meat preserved from the 1951 meal, interestingly labelled as a South American Giant Ground Sloth, Megatherium, not Mammoth. The specimen of meat from that famous meal was originally designated BRCM 16925 before a transfer in 2001 from the Bruce Museum to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History (New Haven, CT, USA) where it gained the number YPM MAM 14399.

The specimen is now permanently deposited in the Yale Peabody Museum with the designation YPM HERR 19475 and is accessible to outside researchers. The meat was never fixed in formalin and was initially stored in isopropyl alcohol before being transferred to ethanol when it arrived at the Peabody Museum. DNA extraction occurred at Yale University in a clean room with equipment reserved exclusively for aDNA analyses.

In 2016, Jessica Glass and her colleagues sequenced a fragment of the mitochondrial cytochrome-b gene and studied archival material to verify its identity, which if genuine, would extend the range of Megatherium over 600% and alter views on ground sloth evolution. 

Mammoth, Megatherium — Green Sea Turtle

Their results showed that the meat was not Mammoth or Megatherium, but a bit of Green Sea Turtle, Chelonia mydas. So much for elaborate legends. The prehistoric dinner was likely meant as a publicity stunt. 

Glass's study emphasizes the value of museums collecting and curating voucher specimens, particularly those used for evidence of extraordinary claims. Not so long before Glass et al. did their experiment, a friend's mother (and my kayaking partners) served up a venison steak from her freezer to dinner guests in Castlegar that hailed from 1978. Tough? Inedible? I have it on good report that the meat was surprisingly divine.

Reference: Glass, J. R., Davis, M., Walsh, T. J., Sargis, E. J., & Caccone, A. (2016). Was Frozen Mammoth or Giant Ground Sloth Served for Dinner at The Explorers Club?. PloS one, 11(2), e0146825. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0146825

Image: Chelonia. Schildkröten by Ernst Haeckel, 1904, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-07619.

Join the Explorer's Club

Fancy yourself an explorer who should join the club? Here is a link to their membership application. The monied days of old are still inherent, but you will be well pleased to learn you can now join for as little as $50 US.

Link: https://www.explorers.org/wp-content/uploads/Membership-Application_2021-11-19.pdf