East of Halfway Point, Pete Fenton of the ROM keeps watch for bears.
Ponds on the quartzite, with the town of Churchill in the distance
Street scene in Churchill a few years ago
A cannon at the Cape Merry Battery, where the Hudson's Bay Company men waited, and watched, and waited for the French to come. But they weren't very happy when that finally happened.
Fossils of the Silurian brachiopod (lamp shell), Virgiana decussata, cover the surface of a block on the shore east of Halfway Point.
Sand on the shore east of Churchill shows fresh prints of gull, overlain by Homo sapiens, overlain by Ursus maritimus. Bears like to place things in such a way that you will know who really owns the territory.
Among the items I received for Christmas was the newly remastered CD of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. Listening through headphones the other evening, I began to think about the Beatles as a “type specimen” of group genius, and about the synergies that can allow groups of people to achieve feats far beyond the abilities of any individual group member.
People who study such things like to make comparisons between human groups and groups in the natural world. So we hear about corporations, youth gangs, or crews of Arctic explorers being compared to packs of wolves, bands of gorillas, or colonies of ants or naked mole rats. I don’t know enough about most kinds of human groups to comment on such analogies, but I have spent (or wasted?) enough time playing in bands that I think I can make a stab at considering how they work and develop.
As I listened, and the mediocre depths of Flying and Blue Jay Way gave way to the sublime heights of I am the Walrus and Strawberry Fields Forever, I wondered how the Beatles had managed to travel from Love Me Do to all of this in only five short years.
Then it struck me. There is a good natural analogue for the Beatles’ story, but it is not in within-species groups. Rather, the closest similarity I can see is in the development of communities and ecosystems, in particular in the burst of evolutionary activity about 530 million years ago known as the Cambrian Explosion, and the events that followed, culminating in the first mass extinction of complex life at the end of the Ordovician Period about 444 million years ago.
The diversification of life in the Cambrian included the origins of most major groups of animals we recognize today. It was geologically very rapid, and seems to have been driven in part by competition (an evolutionary arms race, if you will) and by synergies that pushed the emergence of new ecological niches.
If we look far into the geological past, we can see that microbial mats (stromatolites) have roots deep in the Precambrian, just as rock and roll had its roots deep in the blues of the 1930s. As life evolved and became more complex in the Ediacaran Period, 630 to 542 million years ago, the organisms that developed seem very weird to modern eyes. These are apparently based on a simple theme of repeated patterns, with little evidence of further innovation at the underlying structural level. Similarly, the music of Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and the 1950s Elvis, is essentially a series of variations on basic blues and other “traditional” structures, even if approaches and abilities were hugely varied. The Beatles may have also started off by riffing on those 50s themes, but they rapidly diverged from them. Even in their earliest recordings they were clearly pushing in new directions.
The Cambrian Explosion seemed to initially come almost out of nowhere, though there are inklings that something was going on. We see early evidence of small shelly fossils and development of seafloor burrows, but then the trilobites appeared fully formed. They must have come from somewhere, but the location of that somewhere is still not known, and it was perhaps the development of a hard skeleton on an already existing form that allowed them to begin to appear in the fossil record.
The crucible for the Beatles’ development, in clubs along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, was also cryptic, hidden from the eyes of the English-speaking entertainment business. They put in their time, evolved their craft, but their skeletonization event, the development of the distinct Beatles haircuts and suits, came only with their signing by Brian Epstein. Following that event, the Beatles became visible in the rock record, beginning with their conquest of the British market.
Early in the Beatles’ Explosion, events were often breathtaking in their rapidity. Most of the Please Please Me album was cranked out in a single day of studio time. The Beatles biota underwent early changes, as some taxa became extinct (Pete Best, Stu Sutcliffe) and were replaced by new, better adapted organisms (Ringo Starr, the bass-playing variant of Paul McCartney). The Beatles biota expanded its range, invading new environments: first the United States, then the rest of the world, then movies.
Much of the rapid evolution observed for the Beatles Explosion was the result of competition. The famous Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership often seems to have been more of a Lennon vs McCartney songwriting contest, and there can be little doubt that the Beatles’ songcraft evolved quickly as a result. The evolution of George Harrison’s songwriting may also have been an outcome of this competition, though data are lacking since very few early specimens are known.
Getting back to the genuine fossil record, the Cambrian Period was followed by the Ordovician. Here, life continued to evolve and became substantially more diverse. In a sense, this is an interval of increasingly baroque forms, as coral and sponge reefs developed, organisms discovered how to burrow more deeply into seafloor sediments, and trilobites evolved marvellous adaptations such as monstrous wrap-around eyes. In the evolution of Beatles, this is paralleled by the rococo splendours of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The appearance of new organisms caused ecosystems to undergo massive change. In Ordovician seas, cephalopods became the new top predators. In Beatles world, the community change caused by the emergence of Yoko Ono cannot be understated, though other faunal elements such as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi should also not be ignored.
In both worlds, this period of diversification was followed by a huge mass extinction. A chilling of the climate caused ecosystem collapse on an unprecedented scale, and things would never be the same again. In the case of the Beatles, this was of course evidenced by a long interval dominated by hostility, lawyers, and litigation. End-Ordovician events, associated with a glaciation on what is now the Sahara Desert, seem almost tame by comparison.
With time, the extinctions were followed by post-extinction recovery. New forms evolved, but in some ways they were just a pale imitation of what had come before. Many of these endured for a very long time, but with less and less innovation. Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles career reminds me of the fossil coral Syringopora, which appeared after the Ordovician extinction. Although Syringopora can be found in rocks spanning more than 100 million years all the way up to the Permian, it never did anything really novel after its initial appearance as a distinct entity.
Such analogies are, of course, somewhat facile. And parallel events tell us nothing about underlying causes. But I am intrigued by the extent of these parallels. It may be that systems show a natural tendency toward increased variability over time, and that complex systems may be prone to disastrous collapse. This has certainly been the case for many ecosystems and many human group endeavours. I’m sure that one could find parallels in comparing, say, the evolution of a fetid bog to the history of Enron.
In contrast, some systems that refuse to become more complex may share the quality of resilience, an ability to avoid collapse. Both algal mats and AC/DC have shown remarkable stasis through geological time. It is no accident that AC/DC are still writing songs virtually identical to ones they were performing for Neanderthals back in the Pleistocene, and that they still attract much the same audience.
© Graham Young, 2010
If you visit this site periodically and are beginning to wonder about the absence of new posts, don’t worry. I am not ill, and rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I’m just busy.
I have been working on several new pieces for this page, but life keeps getting in the way. We are assembling the exhibits that will accompany the Ancient Seas video, and that has involved a lot of toil and pain. Not to mention blood.
Anyway, I will be back soon, and you will again wish that I didn’t post so much. Meanwhile, wander around, take a look at anything here that you haven’t read yet, or check out some of the links. I particularly recommend my friend and colleague Sean Robson’s new page, Lore Deposits.
See you.
As promised quite a while ago, here is a follow-up to my post about Eastend and the Cypress Hills. I travelled to that area in late September, 2008, with museum artists Betsy Thorsteinson and Debbie Thompson, and cameraman Bruce Claydon. We planned to collect a sample of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary for the Manitoba Museum. The K-Pg (formerly called the K-T) is the stratigraphic horizon that defines the end of the “age of dinosaurs,” and is characterized by a distinctive clay that was probably produced by the impact of a huge asteroid.
Saturday morning. Sunrise.
We arrived in Eastend at dusk on Friday. It is a longish run, and to make it in one day we left Winnipeg in the early morning light. Last night the light was dim and we couldn’t really appreciate Eastend’s setting, but we are able to drink it in this morning. I am immediately reminded that this is an utterly splendid piece of the world; quite the antithesis of the “boring flat prairie” that so many people seem to mention when the subject of Saskatchewan is brought up.
The Frenchman Valley
Tim Tokaryk of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum has kindly offered to show us the K-Pg boundary site. After breakfast we meet Tim at the T. rex Centre, then follow him cross-country to the site, which is on the wall of the Frenchman Valley south of Shaunavon. Travelling at speed on the loose gravel, raising our own clouds from the dust-dry section roads, it begins to feel-like an adventure, and more than once the pebbles flying from other vehicles’ tires make me fear for our windshield (which will, fortunately, survive the trip only slightly scathed). There is a very good reason why many trucks in rural Saskatchewan sport chrome running boards and sloganned mudflaps. Contrary to the opinions of trendy urbanites, these are not just unfathomable redneck fashion statements.
Layered Cretaceous rocks in the Frenchman Valley. (photo © The Manitoba Museum)
The site is much as I had remembered it. The advantage of this place is that the exposure is good, and there is little vegetation to get in the way. The disadvantage is that the hill is much bigger and steeper than I had recalled. It will turn out to be rather a challenge to move the 5 gallon water carriers and 50 lb bags of plaster to the boundary level, which is, of course, near the top of the slope. But it will be very easy to bring down a several hundred pound sample of the sediment layers. So perhaps it is for the better that the site is up slope from parking, rather than the other way around.
This is the slope as seen from road level. The white rectangle toward the top is our first field-jacketed sediment sample. (photo by Betsy Thorsteinson, © The Manitoba Museum)
Tim explains where we will find the boundary horizon if we dig down (yes, this will take quite a bit of digging), then we get back into the vehicles so that he can show us the area where they collected the T. rex nicknamed Scotty. We drive to a beautiful place a few kilometres away, up the Frenchman Valley, and Tim generously consents to let Bruce get some film footage of him explaining the T. rex excavation. We head back to the boundary site, thank Tim for his help, and settle down to work.
I am ready to start digging. The hat may look ridiculous, but it is essential. (photo by Betsy Thorsteinson, © The Manitoba Museum)
We haul our digging gear up the slope and start making test pits to try to determine where to extract our sample. Betsy and Debbie are both very hard workers, and I really have to apply myself so that I don’t appear to be a slacker. Bruce is always on the move, up to the top of the slope, down below us, hovering around us, always shooting, asking questions. I need to give him coherent answers and explain what we are doing, but in the heat of the work I find that I am tongue-tied and stumble over the words, or say “um” far too often. There’s a reason why, on the old Wild Kingdom TV show, Marlon Perkins did the talking while he sent Jim to capture the wildebeest or zebra. It wasn’t just that Marlon preferred to have Jim do the more dangerous job (although I certainly would, given the choice!). It is genuinely impossible to do hard focused work and clearly explain what you are doing at the same time.
The slope may not look steep from this perspective, but it is always a challenge for Bruce to film us! (photo © The Manitoba Museum)
We work until the sun begins to go down, clear a possible site, and begin to cut a vertical surface. I am not really satisfied, however, that we have found the part of the succession that we came to collect. I am not dispirited by this, just uncertain and questioning. I will have to sleep on it, and will reconsider in the morning.
The next morning, after breakfast, we go back to the T. rex Centre to look at a sediment sample that Tim had collected from the same site a few years ago. We examine it closely, imprinting a search image of the precise tones, textures, and layering of the various sediments, then drive to the site for another go.
Working laterally along the scarp, we start to clean back the overburden in a couple of new places, digging larger pits to examine the succession of sediments. By lunchtime we have decided to concentrate on one place where the boundary clay can be clearly seen (it is not a continuous layer). We begin to “develop” the surface into a pillar so that it can be extracted, then take a break. After lunch, up on the scarp, I have another look, compare the succession to the publications about this area, then decide that this still needs further confirmation.
This is one of those times when I realize that technology has changed fieldwork irrevocably. Pulling out my cellphone, I call Dr. Art Sweet at his home in Calgary (this is Sunday afternoon). Art is an expert on these rocks, and he has given me his number in case I need to “call a friend” for the answer. I carefully describe the succession of sediments to him, and its location on the slope. He assures me that all is good. So it is a go. Time to really settle down to work.
Pale-coloured Cretaceous sediments of the Frenchman Formation are overlain by the darker Paleogene coals and coaly shales of the Ravenscrag Formation (Photo © The Manitoba Museum)
The interval between lunchtime Sunday and lunchtime Tuesday includes so much backbreaking effort, so many setbacks and minor disasters, so many supplies to be found, and so many bags of plaster to be hauled up the slope, that the events merge into one seamless, slightly pulsating mass. You can be grateful that, since the sequence is far from clear in my mind, I won’t be describing it in detail or order.
We cut back around the sample with mattocks, switching to hammer and chisel where the sediment becomes harder. Every few minutes we have to take a break to rest weary muscles, then shovel the loosened sediment out of the way so that we can continue to cut the pillar. Once it is exposed on three sides we need to make a jacket, or rather, Betsy and Debbie will make the jacket. I will try to keep them supplied with materials; the jacket will be made of burlap and wood (which are light), glued together with plaster and water (which are far from light). I will be very weary by the end of each day here, but I will be feeling tremendously fit by the time we go home.
Betsy and Debbie assembling the field jacket. (photo © The Manitoba Museum)
While Betsy and Debbie are jacketing, Bruce and I can go and shoot additional video that will be needed for our gallery exhibits. First, we take the van and drive north toward Shaunavon, so that I can narrate an overview of the project while being filmed driving down the highway to the site. It is a very good thing that we don’t meet any other traffic, given my multitasking abilities.
Back on foot, we do a slow traverse of the slope leading up to the site. This is much more pleasant. First we look at the beautiful river-channel sandstones of the Cretaceous Frenchman Formation, which are overlain by clayey floodplain deposits as we move up toward the boundary. The boundary clay above is not particularly thick, but it is very distinctive in colour and texture, particularly when it is damp in the bright sunlight.
I dig out the boundary clay, examine it closely, rub it between my fingers, and yes, taste it (so I am probably now an iridium anomaly). The clay is beautiful – very smooth, soft, soapy, cleaves conchoidally, and has a colour almost the same as that of the flesh-coloured crayons we used to use in Grade 5. Standing at that level on the scarp, I imagine a landscape covered with this stuff, all the last T. rex and Triceratops smothered by a pastel-coloured nightmare world.
We cannot, of course, see the iridium anomaly in the field, nor can we readily observe the fine-scale succession of sediments at the boundary that has been recognized by Art Sweet and others. But we will have to assume that what we are collecting contains all of those colourfully named intervals and features: the ejecta layer, the fireball layer, the fern-spore anomaly.
Above the boundary, the character of the sediment changes with the beginning of the Paleogene Epoch. First, dark coaly shales suggest a stagnant, swampy plain rich in tree growth. These are overlain by beds of true coal, and above those the modern plants and soil cover the upper part of the slope. Bruce and I continue upward, taking a break on the very top of the scarp.
The Frenchman Valley, as seen from the site.
High on the slope, this place feels a lot like an English moorland. Looking across the valley so far below, with the cold and remarkably clear breeze contrasting with the warm sun, hearing a few birds singing, I might be sitting on the Whin Sill west of Newcastle upon Tyne. Except that there are cacti here (so I had to be careful where I sat!) and I don’t think I have ever seen such a dry day on the Whin Sill.
Constructing the field jacket. (photo by Debbie Thompson, © The Manitoba Museum)
The front, sides, and top of the field jacket have been constructed, and the plaster has hardened. Now we have to cut down through the tough coal at the top of our pillar of sediment, while keeping in position the part we want to collect. Fortunately, I had been given some very good advice about this by Art Sweet. For the first time in my life, we have brought a handsaw on a geological field expedition. It is very odd to be sawing through a sediment layer, but the coal is really a pressure-toughened woody amalgam. You can’t extract it cleanly with hammer and chisel. The saw is very slow, but it does the job.
We try to finish chiselling through the clay at the bottom, but it is tenuous and resists our efforts. We eventually manage to lever out the package, but I fear that I have displaced the sediment layers with one of the final pushes. The back of the package is plastered on, and it is left to dry thoroughly before we can move it.
Though we work late, time passes very quickly since there is so much to be done, and we are so very weary when we make the final descent to the vehicles. The sun is setting, the valley is already dim, and some way off to the west we hear a coyote yipping. It is answered by another nearby. It is time to leave.
As we load the van, Betsy's appearance speaks volumes about the hard work that was done today. (photo © The Manitoba Museum)
Back at the cafe in Eastend, we settle into our now-customary booth, appreciating once more the enveloping primitivist historic mural that covers the walls. By this point I don’t really mind what I eat, and pizza sounds good. Betsy has a somewhat more difficult time; it is always “interesting” to travel around the rural west with a vegan. Fortunately, she is also not that particular about what she eats, as long as it is within her dietary requirements. But I suspect that she will be very tired of toast by the end of this trip.
It is a beautiful evening for the end of September. Betsy and Debbie have wisely headed for sleep, but Bruce and I decide to wander over to the hotel in the centre of town for a beer. The bar, a more modern addition to the old hotel, is graced by a display of the varied cattle brands of the ranches that surround Eastend. The Pilsner is cold. The world is a good place.
The jacket dries, awaiting extraction (photo © The Manitoba Museum)
On Tuesday morning the package is ready to move to the van, and Betsy is working on a small second package that can act as a back-up in case there are issues with the big sample. Lee Gilbert from the Eastend T. rex Centre has volunteered to assist us, as the big package is very heavy. We wrap the package in a tarp and attach ropes and straps.
The first part is very easy. We tug on the straps to get the weight shifted from the sediment platform on which it rests, but then it begins to plow down the hill of its own accord, gathering speed and floating boat-like toward the bottom. We have to restrain it, but only with modest force; the steepness and texture of the slope are quite perfect. Of course this condition will not persist all the way to the road.
The lower slope is rutted and cobbled down to the ditch, which rises to the road. We lash the package to a hand cart, but it is still tough going, and Bruce has to place his camera on a tripod so that he can assist Lee, Debbie, and me. With considerable toil, sweat, and swearing, the package is dragged to the road surface behind the van. Lee has brought straw bales from the farm, and we manage to raise the package in stages and slide it into the back of the van. In hindsight the process has been remarkably smooth. Still, I don’t plan to move anything that is about the same weight as a dead grizzly bear again in the near future. A live grizzly, perhaps, as it would be easier to move, if harder to direct.
After the big package, the little one seems like nothing, and all that is left is to somehow wedge the gear back into the vehicles, then start on the eastward road home. But it is still just mid afternoon, and we have not yet driven west from Eastend to take a good look at the hills. There is still time …
© Graham Young & The Manitoba Museum, 2009
One of the policies I have for this page is that I generate my own content; I don’t follow a lot of other science blogs in re-posting whatever is appearing in the news or on other web pages. However, I will make an exception for a story that appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press today, since it is about some of the work we are doing:
“THE proliferation of jellyfish blooms around the world has ocean scientists worried, as massive numbers of very simple creatures are floating around what used to be more complex ecosystems.
But a discovery in northern Manitoba suggests jellyfish blooms may not be just a recent phenomenon. A team of paleontologists has found the fossil remains of large numbers of jellies at a dig site that date back 445 million years, to a time when a shallow sea known as the Williston Basin covered what’s now boreal forest north of Grand Rapids. …
… As fish and seafood species continue to disappear from the oceans at the hands of overfishing, human beings may be returning the oceans to a state that existed before the evolution of bony fishes: a world where simple creatures like jellyfish dominate the seas.
“We’re getting rid of the top of the food chain,” Young said. “We’re making conditions better for jellyfish.” “
You can read the entire story here.
One of the functions of museums is to serve as treasure houses, showing the visitors fabulous objects that they cannot view anywhere else. Sometimes those treasures are known globally, such as the Elgin Marbles or Tyrannosaurus Sue. Other treasures are obscure, and may be well-known only to a few professionals. In the latter instances, it is gratifying when a museum takes the trouble to exhibit its best material, when perhaps less valuable and sensitive “pretty good” pieces might suffice for 99% of the visitors.
This fossil cubozoan (box jellyfish) in the Mazon Creek exhibits of the Chicago Field Museum’s splendid Evolving Planet gallery is just such a treasure. I have studied the fossil jellyfish collections at various museums, and I think that this exhibited specimen is not only the best Mazon Creek cubozoan, but that it may actually be the best fossil cubozoan “in captivity.”
Mazon Creek fossils occur in iron carbonate concretions in the Carboniferous Francis Creek Shale Formation of Illinois; for many years they have been collected in large numbers from the spoil heaps of open-pit coal mines. Many were studied scientifically and published in the 1960s to 1990s and several hundred species are known. The Field Museum has one of the finest collections of these fossils. In a windowless storeroom, secreted in the space formerly occupied by a fresh air shaft, row upon row of cabinets hold many thousands of Mazon Creek fossils that have been assigned to hundreds of species: worms, plants, jellyfish, shrimps, centipedes, scorpions, and many other groups including the wonderfully named and enigmatic Tully monsters (Tullimonstrum).
The cubozoan Anthracomedusa turnbulli is relatively rare in comparison with some of the other Mazon Creek jellyfish, but to my eye it is the most beautiful and interesting species. Mazon Creek jellies are preserved as external impressions in the siderite concretions: you can see the shape of the animal, the tentacles and the bell (“umbrella”), but there is usually almost no evidence of internal features. What makes this particular specimen unusual is that it not only has superb external preservation (or superb for a dead, squashed jellyfish, anyway), but it also shows a pyritized (“fool’s gold”) structure in each corner of the body. I have never seen pyritic structures in other Mazon Creek jellies, and I have looked at hundreds of them. I am not an expert on cubozoans, so I am not absolutely certain what these structures are, but they could possibly be evidence of the fleshy pads called pedalia.
In modern seas and oceans, cubozoans are a widespread, fascinating, and somewhat bizarre group of animals. They include some of the most poisonous creatures on the planet, such as the Australian box jellyfish Chironex fleckeri, and show some unusual adaptations such as highly evolved eyes. For many years, Anthracomedusa was the only known fossil cubozoan, but in recent years much younger ones have turned up in the Jurassic of France, and possibly in the Cambrian of Utah. Still, this Field Museum fossil stands out as a remarkable piece: a specimen worthy of detailed study, and a wonderful exhibit to share with the museum-visiting public.
Addendum (Nov. 18): After I posted this last night, the link to this new paper on cubozoan evolution showed up in my inbox this morning. If you are interested in this subject, there is a lot of good research going on.
These days, we often hear from museum theory people that we need to “take our museums outside,” to find ways of showing parts of the museum on its exterior. If we can actually place some exhibits and programs outside the building’s walls, we can better share our museums with the community.
As this charming relief on the Sedgwick Museum shows, these sorts of ideas are far from new. The Sedgwick, which is the geological museum of Cambridge University, was opened in 1904.
OK, so it probably isn’t really a frieze, but how could I resist?
Leaf ghosts in the Vancouver morning rain
I was in Portland, Oregon earlier this week, presenting a paper at the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation meeting. This big conference attracted people who study all aspects of modern coasts, with a particular focus on human-caused environmental change. Even though it was very different from the paleontology-oriented meetings I usually attend, I decided to go to the CERF meeting because there was a special session on jellyfish blooms.
I have been studying fossil jellyfish for a few years, so this seemed like a great opportunity to meet some of the people who really know about modern jellies. It turned out to be a really interesting session, they were wonderful people, and we all went out for dinner afterward (at a Thai place and no, we didn’t eat any jellyfish). In the course of the evening’s conversation, there was one comment that really stuck with me.
One of the biologists said that she had enjoyed my talk, and that, ”It really put all that we are doing into perspective. Here we are talking about jellyfish blooms in the past 10 years, and you are talking about jellyfish blooms half a billion years ago. When I hear paleontologists or astronomers I realize that what we are looking at is really just a little blip.”
Moon jellyfish (Aurelia) at the Vancouver Aquarium
When we compare ourselves to scientists examining present-day issues, it is obvious that paleontologists have to work on an incredibly broad scale. We don’t generally know what colour our creatures were, we cannot observe most of their behaviours, and we can’t see how their populations varied year-to-year, or even century-to-century. We also cannot generally apply some of the modern biological approaches involving genetics or biochemistry. But what we can bring is an understanding of how organisms have changed over long periods of time. We can see what creatures were present hundreds of millions of years ago, and determine what has been lost as the Earth has changed. Time is a powerful tool for the study of evolution, a tool that needs to be accepted, grasped, and used by biologists.
Time is also an under-used tool in our ongoing discussions with those who oppose a scientific understanding of the universe. They can argue all they like that Evolution by Natural Selection is “just a theory” (even though there irrefutable evidence that evolution itself is an undeniable fact). But the evidence for deep time is all around us.
This is why the creationists don’t spend much time talking about time; they don’t really want their audience to start examining the evidence. If people begin to recognize how much time has obviously passed, then of course it also becomes much easier for them to accept that the world and life have evolved.
Passing seasons: the Portland Classical Chinese Garden
Using our own senses, the time we perceive is measured in the passing of the seasons, the passing of years, and our own aging. We do not tend to be aware of time much beyond our own lifetimes, or perhaps the lifetimes of our parents or children. Educational systems, by and large, do a very poor job of teaching children about the existence of deep time. History classes are usually focused on the past few hundred years, and more and more the teaching of history seems to emphasize things that happened in the past century, or even the past few decades.
If we go outside and open our eyes to it, evidence of deep time is almost everywhere. It is in the landscape, the rocks, the oceans, the stars, even the gases that make up our atmosphere, but those who are not taught to read will get no benefit from sitting in an entire library of fabulous books.
Young landscape: a volcanic cone south of Mount St. Helens, with Mount Adams in the background
After I left Portland, I went to Vancouver, BC, for a day. Leaving Vancouver, I took the new Canada Line train to the airport. Standing in that packed car between the working mothers, uniformed flight crew heading to the airport, and pierced hipsters carrying skateboards, I realized that the train itself was a good metaphor for humanity’s relationship with time. And that relationship is also a partial explanation for why we treat the Earth’s precious resources in such a cavalier manner.
We had waited on the station platform, and for us the train did not exist until we saw its lights reflected from the advertisements on the tunnel wall. We got onto the train and rode along with the rest of humanity. Periodically, some of them would get off and new ones would get on, as we continued on our journey. The view outside changed as we travelled, from tunnel walls to malls and suburbs, but most passengers took little notice of this. When we arrived at our destination, we waited for the doors to open, got off, and left the train behind. Once we walked onto the platform, we gave the train no further thought (and those of us arriving at the airport were, of course, leaving the train so that we could ascend in another plane).
MAX Light Rail, Portland
Unlike most of the rest of humanity, paleontologists, geologists, and astronomers are concerned about the history of our train. We want to know how it came to be, what stations it passed through before it arrived at our platform, and what will happen to it after we disembark. This work could well be important to all of us. If this train’s wheels fall off, do you think that another one will come along any time soon?
Portland Classical Chinese Garden
© Graham Young, 2009
(photo © The Manitoba Museum, 2009)
At the end of last week, we opened the second part of our renovated Cretaceous exhibits at the Manitoba Museum. I am delighted with all of these exhibits. I’m sure I am biased, but I think they are among the best things our museum has done, and it was hard to decide what to write about first. I am starting with this case since it contains so many beautiful and unusual fossils.
When a museum curator is beginning to formulate an exhibit on any given topic, he or she is usually confronted with one of two scenarios. Either the collections have a shortage of high-quality material on that topic, or there is such an abundance of wonderful material that tough decisions have to be made. I had to deal with the latter circumstance in trying to select material for a case of Cretaceous marine fossils. Manitoba, like other parts of western North America, is rich in Cretaceous fossils, and our collections room includes many cabinets of Cretaceous vertebrates and invertebrates.
This turtle arm was in the gallery before, but it has been remounted in a completely different way. I like that it now looks as though it is signalling a left turn! There was a conscious effort made to display the fossils a bit more like works of art. The cluster of fish vertebrae on the right has been a favourite specimen of some Natural History staff for years; it was wonderful to finally get it into the gallery. (photo © The Manitoba Museum, 2009)
In a way, the selection process was a bit like a tryout for a sports team or arts performance. We would pull out batches of specimens, consider what would fit and how it would work, and eventually choose the stars that would be shared with our visitors. The remaining specimens would be sent back to the minor leagues of the collections room, perhaps to await their future chance to appear before the public.
Our designer, Stephanie Whitehouse, did a great job with planning these exhibits, but she had to be tough with me when it came to choosing specimens. Curators are notorious for wanting to put out far more pieces than can reasonably be fitted into the space. As the design progressed, and the spatial relationships became clearer, Stephanie would periodically have to come back to me and say, “You’re going to have to cut something from this area.” I would hem and haw, because I really did want to include the lot of them, but I would eventually have to admit that she was right. And the case “works” as a result.
This giant inoceramid clam is encrusted by many smaller bivalves. The specimen was collected in western Manitoba by Kevin Conlin. (photo © The Manitoba Museum, 2009)
One of the problems with showing Cretaceous marine fossils is that the remains of cephalopods (ammonoids and belemnites) look quite different from the living animals. We needed some way of illustrating how they really were, and early in the conceptualization of this exhibit Betsy Thorsteinson suggested that she could make wax models of some selected forms. Betsy approaches every project with remarkable rigour and attention to detail, and her resulting ammonoids and belemnite add wonderful life and colour to the fossils they depict.
Each of Betsy's spookily real cephalopod replicas is located beside or above the fossil it represents. (photo © The Manitoba Museum, 2009)
Yes, I know that Monday Museum was posted on a Wednesday this week. I am still at the conference in Oregon, and the first part of the week was rather busy as I was presenting in a session on jellyfish blooms. More on that later …
Yesterday I flew across western North America, on my way to a conference in Oregon. I was able to once again see portions of the grand landscapes that overwhelm human-made features across so much of the west: the undulating surfaces of the great sand hills, the badlands incised into the high prairies, and of course the mountains and Pacific coast. And this reminded me that I had been meaning to finish some pieces about doing fieldwork around Saskatchewan’s Cypress Hills. But perhaps I might also stick in a completely unrelated photo from yesterday at the end of this piece …
The Cypress Hills
For the past few weeks we have been working at the Manitoba Museum to complete the second and final set of exhibits for our revised Cretaceous Life area. I am very excited about one of the pieces: a sample of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (formerly called the Cretaceous-Tertiary, or K-T). It was particularly rewarding to see this exhibit installed, because this completes a process that has been long, involved, exhausting, and occasionally painful.
When we were discussing an exhibit to depict the end-Cretaceous extinction, one possibility that came up consistently was the idea of displaying a sample of the sedimentary succession across the boundary. Ideally we would have shown people what the boundary looks like in Manitoba, but unfortunately it is only known in the subsurface here, in the Turtle Mountain area. To collect the sort of large sample that would work in an exhibit, we would need to travel westward.
Mule deer in the Cypress Hills
Some years ago I had visited one of the classic K-T sites in the Frenchman Valley near Eastend and Shaunavon in Saskatchewan, so I suggested to the museum that we could consider sending a crew out to collect from this site. Thus it happened that just over a year ago, I drove to southwest Saskatchewan with museum artists Betsy Thorsteinson and Debbie Thompson, and cameraman Bruce Claydon. The plan was that I would locate the appropriate horizons for our sample, and would then assist Betsy and Debbie as they packaged it for removal from the ground. Bruce would film our work. It all sounds so simple, doesn’t it?
As I will explain in the next piece, it was not simple, of course. New types of field projects never are. But right now I just want to talk a little bit about Eastend.
Eastend, with the hills behind
Most human settlements are “one ofs.” When I visit a small town on the prairies, I am usually able to say that it is “one of” many prairie towns, all of which share similar characteristics (stores along a straight main street, curling rink, diner, Co-op …). They may not be identical, but they are certainly familiar, members of a recognizable group. The same could be said of villages in the Maritimes, or industrial cities in the US Midwest, or villages in central Scotland. I’m sure you know what I mean.
Eastend is not a “one of.” Instead, it is a “one off.” It is one of those rare locations where, when you are there, you have the feeling that you could not replicate that experience anywhere else. Of course world cities like London and Beijing are “one offs” – it would only be natural when you are at one of the crossroads of history that you would be in a unique location. But for a small place to be a “one off,” it has to be really special. And very often it has to be the end of the road, a jumping off point, the last place before you enter terra incognita. Churchill, Manitoba is like that, and so is Eastend.
Early morning just outside Eastend
Eastend was apparently named because it is at the eastern end of the Cypress Hills. And the hills, which I think are among the most beautiful anywhere on this planet, give to the town their wondrous colour, light, and form. Maybe without them Eastend would be an ordinary prairie town, but I don’t think there is any way you could separate the town from the hills. The hills bring to Eastend a modest number of tourists, but they have also brought many unusual individuals: artists, writers, and craftspeople. Eastend is a centre for ranching and farming, but with a twist. It does not have the typical tourist town’s affectation of brushed-on faux sophistication. Rather, it gives subtle hints of hidden complexity. Hints that, if you hang around for a while, maybe it will let you in on some of the secrets.
Some of the secrets are under the hills, and they have brought the town much of its modern-day fame. In this dry country, a hill that is steep enough will have its surface crumble and erode, exposing the layered sediment that is hidden so close beneath. Along the river and creek valleys, these crumbling surfaces form badlands, and the badlands radiate outward beyond the hills themselves. The bones of dinosaurs and other long-dead creatures poke out of the exposed sediment in places, and these have attracted fossil-hunters, both amateur and professional.
Dinosaurs are not “thick in the ground” here the way they are in some parts of Alberta, but when they are found they can be quite unusual. Most unusual of all is Scotty, a near-complete Tyrannosaurus rex that was collected near the Frenchman Valley a few years ago. And Scotty has, in its own way, given the town a special gift. Eastend is now home to a beautiful little dinosaur museum, an interpretive centre that houses exhibits about the T. rex and other fossils in this area, and a substantial facility in which the bones are prepared and housed. I realize that this was not a pure and simple gift, since people from this region and other parts of Saskatchewan had to do an immense amount of work to ensure that the museum came to be. But now that it is done, surely that just makes the gift even more special?
If you follow T-Rex drive, you will of course arrive at ...
... the beautiful T. rex Discovery Centre, built into the side of a hill. Inside the centre you will find ...
... exhibits including these dinosaur heads and skulls.
© Graham Young & The Manitoba Museum, 2009
I would like to thank Tim Tokaryk of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, and Sean Bell and the other folks at the T. rex Centre, for their very kind hospitality and assistance during our stay in Eastend.
As I promised (or threatened) at the start of the piece, I couldn’t resist posting one completely unrelated landscape image from my trip yesterday:
Lit by the setting sun, the top of Mount St. Helens looks like an iceberg floating in a sea of cloud.
