Research Posters
As promised long ago, I have finally begun to add some more serious research content to complement this blog. There is now a Research Downloads page on this site. It currently holds a copy of the poster we produced for this year’s International Palaeontological Congress; over time I plan to add copies of older posters, and perhaps other research publications (copyright permitting).
In Between
If you are wondering why it has been so long between posts on this page, it may be because this is really the “in between” part of the summer. It is between vacation and fieldwork, between starting work on new exhibits and installing them, and between the beginning and the end of so many research projects. At the museum, I have been playing catch-up in between the steaming mounds of administrative backlog, leaving very few focused grey cells in between my ears.
There will be new material to post soon: I will be in the field later next week, and there are also trip photos from the past month that I want to edit and comment upon. In between, here are a few additional photos of last month’s Ontario fieldwork, courtesy of Dave Rudkin …
Action shots of me doing field research in south-central Ontario (or perhaps they should be termed "inaction shots"?). From left to right, assessing a fossil slab, preparing to shift another slab, and realizing I am jetlagged and need more coffee. If you want to gain an appreciation of this sort of fieldwork, imagine these images stitched together and animated in an infinite and very slow loop. (photos © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)
blob, blob, blob, …
Stacked on pallets, Peter's slabs await our inspection.
After vacation time enjoying the good life, there’s nothing like a little bit of manual labour to get the body and soul back on track.
Last week, on a stopover while returning from Europe, I spent a couple of days doing paleontological field collecting in south-central Ontario. As some of you know, I have been working for quite some time to understand fossil jellyfish that occur in various places, most notably in central Manitoba. Dave Rudkin of the Royal Ontario Museum had told me about some structures in Silurian rocks of Ontario that bear at least a passing resemblance to the Manitoba jellies, and a year ago he sent a few specimens to whet my appetite. Although the fossils he sent look not dissimilar to amorphous inorganic blobs, they had enough jellyfish character to make a visit to the site essential. There are no definite jellyfish fossils known so far from the Silurian (444 to 416 million years ago), so these could fill in a significant gap in the jellyfish record.
So last Thursday lunchtime, there I was in the hot Ontario sun, jetlagged and shifting rock. The site is one of several currently being studied by Peter von Bitter (of the ROM) and his colleagues, and Peter had kindly agreed to let me look at the fossils in conjunction with him, Dave, and Henry Choong (also from the ROM). The rock there is a finely laminated carbonate, and over the years Peter and his associates have mined out an almost infinite number of thin platey slabs, stacking them on pallets so that they can weather for further evaluation.
Dave and Henry are prepared for some quality fossil-hunting time.
In addition to the “amorphous blobs”, the rock holds a great variety of fossils both commonplace (brachiopods, trilobites) and unique (very unusual arthropods and possible conodont animals). The latter are, of course, the reason Peter has been studying this place. The blobs have been of minor interest to previous workers, other than for the fact that some of them contain what seems to be a great variety of different minerals: sulfides, calcite, and possibly fluorite.
At first glance, most of the blobs are featureless and unprepossessing. At second glance I begin to pick out some features, but they are still far from "possessing."
The procedure for examining these slabs can be described thus:
1. Lift heavy slab from layer low on pallet to a level where it can be considered;
2. Mash fingers with slab while attempting to stabilize it on top of stack of rock;
3. Curse, then blow dust from surface of slab, managing to get most of the dust into eyes and nose;
4.Wipe eyes, smearing sunscreen from forehead into eyeballs;
5. Repeat cursing;
6. Rotate slab surface carefully in the blinding light, trying to determine if it holds any interesting fossils;
7. Put nose close to rock to observe amorphous blob through hand lens, inhaling a whiff of sulfur from the bituminous material in the carbonate;
8. Turn slab over to examine other side;
9. Repeat steps 2 to 7;
10. Place slab on stack of examined slabs, mashing fingers once again;
11. Re-repeat cursing;
12. Repeat steps 1 to 11.
Viewed edge-on, the beds show a fine-scale alternation of light-coloured carbonate and darker bituminous layers.
Now, imagine doing this for two days solid (or more, if you like). If you, like some people, consider paleontological fieldwork to be “exciting” or “exotic” or “romantic,” just remember: the above description is really quite accurate. Except that we were in a relatively civilized location and had the luxury of not dealing with snow, or torrential rain, or high temperatures, or hail, or sleet, or mosquitoes, or bears. Add in any or all of those exciting variables if you want to get a feel for the true romance of fieldwork.
The first 10 or 15 minutes of a field collecting project can be quite exciting. The next 10 or 15 hours … less so. But if the work produces results, it is worth whatever effort is required.
By the end of the second day, I had examined many dozens of amorphous blobs. Most of them are just that: amorphous blobs. I suspect that they were originally jellyfish, but any recognizable features were long ago lost to the (evil) forces of taphonomy and diagenesis. Nevertheless, I was able to find 20 or 30 blobs that are at least somewhat morphous, and I have hopes that, when examined in exhaustive detail, they will reveal their true jellyfish nature. Stay tuned …
© Graham Young, 2010
Addendum (July 22) provided by Dave Rudkin:
“There’s a 12th stage that Henry documented quite nicely: Sit outside motel room – drink beer, ponder blobs while watching torrential rain.”
There are obviously some very good fossils hidden in southern Ontario ...
Hans
The science of paleontology is going through an interval of “great dying.” In the past month or so, we have lost three giants of 20th century paleontology: Harry Whittington, Thomas Dutro, and Hans Hofmann. I knew none of them well, but I was fortunate enough to have had several good conversations with Hans, at conferences and on field trips. I was particularly saddened by his sudden death at the age of 73 or so. Read more…
Neandertals and Their Mitochondria
At the International Palaeontological Congress this morning, I attended a wonderful presentation by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute. Pääbo is the leader of the team that is studying the genome of Neandertals, trying to understand how this extinct group is related to modern humans.
This research group has found evidence that Neandertals interbred with modern humans, and that some Neandertal inheritance can be found in people from Europe and Asia. I thought that the entire presentation was quite compelling, but Pääbo made one statement that really made me think: apparently there is no evidence for Neandertal genes in the mitochondrial DNA of modern humans.* Mitochondrial DNA is different from our other genetic material in that it passes to a child only from the mother, not from both parents.
I have a question for the geneticists and statisticians: if many humans carry Neandertal DNA in our genomes but lack it in our mitochondria, what is the cause of this distinction? What is the likelihood that this pattern arose as a result of Neandertal men breeding with Homo sapiens women, but not vice versa? And if that was the case, then what does that tell the anthropologists about the nature of ancient societies in both groups?
Please let us know when you have an answer.
* And if I misinterpreted Pääbo’s statement, please let me know so that I can re-phrase the question!
The Other Place
As of yesterday, there are now two of me. I guess I could say that I have electronically budded or been e-cloned. If I were a jellyfish, then I have strobilated in an online sense. In coral terms, I have undergone polyp fission, although that sounds as though it might be particularly unpleasant and painful. In blogging, a search suggests that the expression would be “bi-blogual,” but I don’t think we want to go there … I might prefer to call it blogomitosis.
Anyway, I now have an official curatorial blog at The Manitoba Museum. There’s not too much posted yet, but I am looking forward to it. I hope that some of you will take the time to occasionally visit both of me.
Dinosaur Provincial Park
View into the valley of the Red Deer River
May 14, 2010
I arrived at 8 am, travelling northeast from Brooks across the flat farmland of southern Alberta. Out past Patricia, past the horse farms and the last of the irrigation machines, the land begins to drop away. Over a rise, a lookout on your right presents the wonderful panorama across the valley badlands, with the Red Deer River at the bottom.
Stopping at the gravel parking lot, I walked across the edge of the valley, gauging the angles of morning light on the sandstones and ironstones of the upper slopes. Sadly, this was the moment that my long-serving and long-suffering camera chose to explode. The lens ring, which had apparently ruled the front of the camera like a band of iron — well, metallic plastic in this case — popped off. The spring-loaded doors, freed from a half-decade of thankless servitude while the lens ring got credit for their work, took advantage of their newfound freedom and immediately spring-unloaded, spewing metal and black plastic across the dry grass. I managed to retrieve most of the pieces, but there was no way that I would be able to re-assemble them under “field conditions.”
Sage
Anyway, the rest of the camera looked OK to me, and it still seemed to be taking reasonable photos. It was only later that I would discover that any image taken under angled light would suffer from interesting (and not necessarily “good interesting”) effects. I shot many photos while I was in the park. Only a few would turn out to be presentable for general consumption.
Down the slope there were vehicles at the visitor centre and campground, but once I got out into the park proper I found it abandoned. It is wonderfully strange to be absolutely solitary on the trails at a major tourist site, on a perfect morning under the bright sun. When I am alone, I tend to move quickly without realizing it. Time slows when there is no one to discuss things as they appear, and observations that actually take a split second appear to crawl past in slow motion.
One of an almost infinite number of hoodoos
Philip Currie is omnipresent at DPP. I found these listening stations particularly entertaining because we had just had Phil give an excellent presentation at our Great Canadian Lagerstätten conference session two days earlier.
I walked the well-tended gravel path of the “Trail of the Dinosaur Hunters”, a gentle stroll to a fossil quarry of Barnum Brown’s, dating from the early days of dinosaur excavation in this area. The Dinosaur Park Formation and other Cretaceous units of southern Alberta are incredibly rich in dinosaurs and a great variety of other fossils; this place is the epicentre of Alberta’s dinosaur abundance and diversity.
Sign at the entrance to Barnum Brown's excavation site
Barnum Brown's site
Many years ago I spent some happy weeks collecting dinosaurs northeast of here, so my eye is reasonably attuned to finding dinosaur fossils. Since the park is so rich in fossil material, my objective was to not see fossils, but to simply observe the rocks and the landscape. Collecting is forbidden, and I didn’t want to have to fight the natural reflex to pick up any piece of bone that I might happen to come across!
By 9 am I had already completed a second trail. This was a lovely meandering wander through the cottonwoods and sages down by the river. The sign at the beginning indicated that it could take an hour to complete, but this would clearly have been an hour with speed set at “slow amble,” maybe punctuated by breaks for lunch, a nap, and a quick game of blackjack.
Gnarled old cottonwood trees rise from a sea of sage along the banks of the Red Deer River
Heading up to the visitor centre, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the exhibits had been completely refurbished since my last visit. I was given a tour by the manager, who explained how the development had taken place. The front end, which was put together by the park in collaboration with a design firm, includes some excellent visual explanations of badlands phenomena. At the back of the centre are the dinosaur exhibits, developed by the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller. These are really Tyrrell exhibits in miniature, and include some superb specimens such as a skull of Styracosaurus. My only quibble was that there now seem to be fewer fossils than there were before. The previous exhibits had some wonderful examples of how specific bones vary between dinosaurs, but of course a design team can never fit every possible feature into a limited space.
The visitor centre has some lovely exhibits. This case dramatically demonstrates the erosion of soft sandstones by flowing water.
Small theropods (Saurornitholestes?) attack a hadrosaur in this exhibit at the visitor centre. The mounts are very good, but I find it psychologically troubling to contemplate several skeletons attacking another skeleton. This exhibit has a horror movie just waiting to get out!
Behind the visitor centre, a sign indicates the presence of the Coulee Viewpoint walking trail. I noted that the sign warned of “steep slopes,” but I was still surprised just how precipitous some of them turned out to be, after the gentle paths elsewhere. This route was only sporadically marked with little signs, which demonstrated that you would have to scramble up and down across sandstone, ironstone, and popcorn shale. Having done badlands fieldwork before, I found that I adapted quickly, but I did wonder whether having this trail directly behind the visitor centre might tempt those clad in loafers or stilettos into places where they could really regret their choice of footwear. It was a dry day when I was there, so navigating the rills and gullies was relatively straightforward. My recollection of wet popcorn shale slopes elsewhere is that they are far more challenging, since they are about as easy to scramble up as a tilted board coated with lukewarm lithium grease (they are, however, remarkably easy to descend, as long as you don’t care where and how you stop).
Over the top of the slope, a pair of Canada Geese on either side of a coulee warned me in no uncertain terms that they were nesting nearly. If that was true, I did wonder about their sanity, since this seemed the most ill-thought goose nesting site I had ever seen (on consideration of this sentence, however, I realize that this may be redundant: Canada Geese probably never do anything that could be described as “well-thought” or “planned”).
Toward the end of the trail, perhaps under the influence of my erstwhile companions, my movements must have also been ill-thought. I took an unplanned turn and found myself descending a slope behind the campground, rather than returning to the visitor centre. Even though it was a mild day in May, the rocks were already getting hot at 10:30 am; the memories of badlands field conditions came flooding back! This place is very beautiful, but I was glad that I needed to head south and resume my long drive homeward. Still, there must be enough time to take a quick look at a few of the hoodoos along the Badlands trail …
© Graham Young, 2010
Spring flowers at the top of the valley
Currie Mountain: April 30th, 2010
Basaltic outcrop near the top of Currie Mountain
Old forest cloaks the lower slopes of Currie Mountain.
A solitary red trillium rises through the leaf litter.
These white pines are old-timers. They may have lost their tops, but the branches don't even begin until fifty feet above the ground.
Chris stands on top of the "mountain."
The St. John River at Fredericton in the February dusk. Currie Mountain is the dark mound on the horizon.
Blogostratigraphy
This week, I was thinking about how to get back into the flow of blogging, after a long hiatus in which my time and energy were sapped by other projects. First, I considered writing a piece about the exhibit work largely responsible for the hiatus. (I will. Later.) But then I began thinking about that word, hiatus, which is also often used in geological conversations. And I realized that any blog is similar to a sedimentary succession, to such an extent that a new term may be required: blogostratigraphy.
Colourful Paleozoic strata at Valaste waterfall, the highest waterfall in Estonia
Stratigraphy is the study of the arrangement and succession of strata. All sedimentary successions follow a few basic rules, our understanding of which has been gradually refined over the past four hundred years. According to the principle of original horizontality, sedimentary layers were originally horizontal, while the law of superposition states that “sedimentary layers are deposited in a time sequence, with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest on the top.” Similarly, the great majority of blogs are composed of horizontal posts, each of which is accreted above the previous one. This current post is like sediment being deposited on the Earth’s surface; if you drill down you will see that the layer below is dated February, underneath that are posts extending back into late 2009, and if you go to the very beginning of this blog you may find yourself somewhere in the Younger Dryas.
Ordovician carbonates in northern Kentucky
Strata are typically laid down in sedimentary basins, low areas in the Earth’s crust (such as Hudson Bay) where sediment is able to accumulate. For sediment to accumulate, it has to be generated, and some geologists like to talk about the “sediment factory.” Large amounts of sediment are typically produced under specific conditions, such as when corals and other organisms are growing great volumes of carbonate skeleton, or when actively-rising mountains are shedding vast quantities of freshly-eroded sand and silt.
When the sediment factory is switched off (as it is, for example, during some sea level changes), then sediments stop accreting in the basin. This hiatus may last years, decades, or millennia. The net effect is that the sedimentary record is not continuous: the record of time provided by sedimentary rocks is of fits and starts, feast or famine. In any one region the rocks may give a wonderful documentation for one period of geological time, but then for the next period there is no evidence whatsoever (we get a much more complete story when we compare several regions). Much modern stratigraphy is focused on recognizing and analyzing the hiatuses, because these can tell us so much about the geological history of basins and continents.
A simple-minded interpretation of the law of superposition might suggest that Steve Kershaw (Brunel University) is older than the Silurian carbonates he has burrowed beneath on the island of Saaremaa, Estonia. Some people will go to extreme lengths to find stromatoporoids!
Blogs are also produced in discrete intervals. No human being is capable of mechanically producing a volume of readable text every day, and a blog is thus a stratigraphic record of the individual’s life. Each post could be considered as a single depositional event. These blogging events are of interest, of course (at least to a few readers), but future blogostratigraphers may well be as interested in the relationship between event and hiatus. How was the blogger able to produce a continuous stream of quality pieces during this interval? What was responsible for this smattering of drivel? Was this gap related to a a traumatic event in the individual’s life, or did he just wander off and immerse himself in Facebook applications? I imagine a cadre of academic blogostratigraphers, each applying sequence stratigraphic methods to studying the bloglives of the obscure but interesting.
OK, now my idea factory has dried up. Time to think about something else.
© Graham Young, 2010
Next time, maybe I will tell you about my other new blog …
Forest Fire
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.
___________
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
