May, 2008
It was an unusually dry spring in the Grand Rapids Uplands, 400-500 kilometres north of Winnipeg. As we crested the Pas Moraine and began our gentle descent toward Grand Rapids, we were surprised to see small cumulus clouds floating low in an otherwise clear sky. Driving closer, the cause became obvious: a huge forest fire was generating water vapour along with its smoke, and the vapour condensed as it rose.
Each day we drove past the burning area. Some mornings it smouldered gently with just a hint of smoke. Some afternoons the brown smoke billowed upward, yet the fire did not really appear to be migrating. Nevertheless, we were very lucky to finish our work when we did, as the fire monsters had awoken and were on the march. The smoke became so dense that the road was closed, and if we had been going south just an hour or two later our trip would have required a four- or five-hour detour (roads are far apart in the north)!
At dinner time, the restaurants in Grand Rapids were busy. Firefighting crews arrived for supplies, purchasing large quantities of burgers, sandwiches, french fries, bottled water, and all the other necessities of firefighting. There is little lumbering done in that part of the north, but forests are treasured, not least as the home of wild game, so fighting fires (or at least controlling them) is a serious business.
Other than the fires, it was a typical northern spring. The flowers and the blackflies had returned in profusion. On Saturday the breeze died down and the blackflies became unbearable; it is very hard to concentrate on work when you are inhaling flies, swallowing flies, feeling tiny flies crawling in your ears and eyes and, yes, occasionally being bitten.
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July, 2008
Toward Grand Rapids the sky is now behaving itself. No rogue clouds confuse our vista of high summer blue and heat haze. The fire was exciting and mercurial, and I have to say that I enjoyed the frisson created by its presence. This sky seems very dull and predictable, but it bodes well for our ability to get work done. And, I guess, that is why we are here.
Driving north from Grand Rapids on the first day, for a considerable distance we can see the dark signature of fire-burned trees out on the horizon, where the pale haze must reach its tendrils toward Moose Lake and Cormorant. Now the skeletal trees begin to approach Highway 6. Here are the remains of contorted jack pines and stark black spruce, with green grass already springing up beneath.
There are places where the fire had leapt across the road, where it torched aspen shrubs below the steel power towers. Did it damage the lines themselves? I don’t recall any issues with power in the south, but the sight generates talk of the fragility of our far-reaching hydro system. Civilization is a thin cloak that fits poorly on this land. We are just a wire’s width from feral, though most of the time we choose to forget this.
We can’t stop today for a close look at the awful beauty the fire has made. It is past lunchtime and there is rock to split, eurypterids sending us messages that they are there for the finding. We must rush onward to liberate them from their cool, stony resting places. But we will stop this week. Really. And we will try to get some photos that capture this strange place.
© Graham Young, 2010
Mistaken Point, Newfoundland (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
In mid May, the huge GeoCanada 2010 conference will take place in Calgary. This is a once-every-decade meeting, and since Canada is home to some of the world’s most exciting fossil sites, it seemed like a very good opportunity to explain the sites and the research that is allowing us to better understand them.
Ediacaran fossils at Mistaken Point: Fractofusus misrai and Bradgatia on the famous E surface (Guy Narbonne's index finger points to F. misrai). (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
Dave Rudkin and I have been organizing the Special Session Great Canadian Lagerstätten, which will explore the theme of exceptional fossil preservation in Canada. A lagerstätte is a deposit in which fossils are either exceptionally preserved or unusually abundant. Canada’s remarkable fossil record includes many recognized lagerstätten, each providing unique evidence of past life. Our most famous lagerstätten include the Ediacaran fossils at Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, the Cambrian wonders of the Burgess Shale, British Columbia, and the Cretaceous dinosaur bone beds of Alberta, but there are many other less well-known lagerstätten, in almost every province and territory.
The Cambrian Burgess Shale: Walcott's Quarry (Greater Phyllopod Bed section), Fossil Ridge, Yoho National Park, BC (Wapta Mountain in background) (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
The Burgess Shale soft-bodied fossil Wiwaxia corrugata in reflected light (ROM 56950) (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
This session will provide a survey of these wonderful Canadian sites, with a focus on recent fossil discoveries. The tentative session schedule includes both lecture and poster presentations:
A. Lectures (20 minutes each; speaker indicated with a *)
1. Guy Narbonne* (Queen’s University)
When Life Got Big: The Mistaken Point Assemblage of Newfoundland (Ediacaran, 579-560 Ma)
2. Jean-Bernard Caron* (Royal Ontario Museum)
Discovery and significance of the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale
3. David Rudkin* (Royal Ontario Museum)
Eurypterids and More – The Eramosa and Bertie Lagerstätten (Silurian), Southern Ontario
4. Richard Cloutier* (Université du Québec à Rimouski)
The Late Devonian biota of the Miguasha National Park UNESCO World Heritage Site
5. John Calder* (Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources)
The Joggins Fossil Cliffs World Heritage Site: Coal Age Galápagos
6. Andrew Neuman* (Royal Tyrrell Museum) and Raoul Mutter
Wapiti Lake (BC): A Great Triassic Canadian Fossillagerstätte
7. Philip Currie* (University of Alberta)
Dinosaur Provincial Park, One Of The Greatest Outdoor Laboratories For Understanding Late Cretaceous Ecosystems
8. Mark Wilson* (University of Alberta)
Three Views of Eocene Life in British Columbia
B. Poster Presentations (presenter indicated with a *)
1. Thomas Harvey and Nicholas Butterfield* (Cambridge University)
An arthropod Lagerstätte from the early Cambrian Mount Cap Formation (Northwest Territories, Canada)
2. Nicholas Butterfield* (Cambridge University) and Maria Velez
A Burgess Shale-type micro-Lagerstätte from subsurface of SW Saskatchewan
3. Graham Young* (The Manitoba Museum), David Rudkin, Edward Dobrzanski, Sean Robson, Michael Cuggy, and Deborah Thompson
Late Ordovician Lagerstätten in Manitoba, Canada
4. Michael Cuggy* (University of Saskatchewan), David Rudkin, and Graham Young
A New Late Ordovician (Richmondian) Eurypterid from the William Lake Lagerstätte, Manitoba
5. S. Bruce Archibald* (Simon Fraser University), Rolf Mathewes, David Greenwood, Robin Smith, and James F. Basinger
Lagerstätten of the Okanagan Highlands (British Columbia and Washington): emergent communities in Early Eocene climates
Ordovician dolostone cliffs of the Red River Formation at Cat Head, Manitoba contain remarkable fossils.
Superbly preserved Ordovician eurypterid cuticle from Airport Cove, Manitoba; scale is in millimetres (specimen I-4063, © The Manitoba Museum)
If you are planning to attend the GeoCanada meeting, we strongly encourage you to take in this session. Or if you live in the Calgary area and are interested in unusual fossils, you might want to consider paying a one-day registration! We don’t yet know the date and time for this session; please check back here or on the conference website if you are interested.
The Silurian eurypterid Eurypterus remipes, from the Bertie Formation near Ridgemount, Ontario (ROM 56889) (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
This session is sponsored by the Paleontology Division of the Geological Association of Canada.
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
