One of the most exciting parts of the conference, from my point of view, will be a symposium in honour of my M.Sc. supervisor, Rolf Ludvigsen, titled Life and Times of Phanerozoic Seas. The session description states:

This symposium is to celebrate the work of Rolf Ludvigsen. Rolf has been a major force in invertebrate paleontology in Canada for nearly four decades, mainly specializing in trilobites. After leaving academia, his focus shifted toward the popularization of paleontology. This Special Session encourages a wide variety of presentations about organisms and their activities in ancient seas.

This description says a lot, but it also leaves out a lot. As my supervisor at the University of Toronto, Rolf was mercurial, confrontational, charming, demanding, maddening, entertaining, and tremendously intimidating. He challenged his students by expecting nothing but the best from us, and his approach got results. Several of his former students and postdocs have gone on to successful professional careers in paleontology, and his influence has been immense. The full-day session is organized by Rolf’s former students and colleagues; we are sorry that he cannot be physically present, but his presence will be felt.

Rolf Ludvigsen with students current and past at the 1986 Albany Canadian Paleontology and Biostratigraphy Seminar. L-R: me, Steve Westrop, Brian Pratt, and Rolf. Our cups undoubtedly hold coffee.

Whale Cove, Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick: a still morning, with a herring weir on the horizon

This morning I awoke from a dream. I was standing on a darkened shore, looking out toward the unbroken line of pale horizon. The sea was still and deep, immense and incomprehensible.

I got up and put water into the coffee pot. After breakfast, we drove downtown. The talk on the radio was of the risk of flooding in the Red River Valley, the result of deep snow that accumulated here through the winter. This land is flat, a surface of horizontal clay deposited at the bottom of what was, at the time, the world’s largest lake.

Over the bridge, we crossed the still ice-covered waters of the Assiniboine River, which constantly transports phosphorus and nitrogen that have washed from the fields and feedlots of Saskatchewan and western Manitoba. A little farther along we could see the Red River on our right, carrying those nutrients to Lake Winnipeg, where they will contribute to the ongoing problems of anoxia and cyanobacterial blooms. We passed numerous buildings faced with mottled limestone, every slab of it holding the skeletons of creatures that lived in the waters of a warm, tropical sea.

Water in all its physical forms at Airport Cove, Churchill, Manitoba

Arriving at the office, I turned on the computer, then scrolled through the e-mail listings of new results in marine biology and paleontology. In the lab, I poured the water to prepare a pot of lab-grade coffee and began unpacking and washing some of last summer’s collections, laying them out to dry by the sink. These fossils are the remains of animals and plants that lived and died in ancient lagoons and tidal ponds, strange things such as jellyfish, horseshoe crabs, and eurypterids.

Back at the computer I sorted through data, trying to better understand the ecology of ancient tidal flats during an interval of declining sea level. Looking at e-mail again, I discovered something I didn’t know: today was World Water Day. How appropriate it seemed that my day so far had involved virtually nothing in which water was not a major, central factor. World Water Day is focused most specifically on water as a resource, on the push for universal access to clean, fresh water, but it also considers the hydrological cycle, pollution, and climate change.

View from The Whistle, Grand Manan Island

Those of us who study anything to do with water are, of course, attuned to water-related phenomena as we pass through the world. But what of the rest of the populace? Water is essential to every aspect of our lives, yet day-to-day it seems that we hear far more about the diets and sartorial choices of the infinitely fascinating Kardashian family than we do about water issues.

Unless we are in flood season, or our well runs dry, or our favourite beach is threatened by green scum, water is seen as “worthy but dull.” It is taken for granted until something happens that affects us directly. This basic fact is used to advantage by some governments, and by others whose interests may benefit from wilful misdirection of public attention.

Near Whitehead Island, New Brunswick

Water is of critical importance, and freshwater and seawater can both be threatened by certain industrial activities. Yet in Canada we are apparently satisfied with a government that, by its actions, has decided that water is entirely dispensable, that aquatic ecosystems are a nuisance and get in the way of efficient industrial development. How else can we understand decisions to close down one of the world’s most important water research institutions, to support the foolhardy development of a bitumen pipeline across the Cordillera to a tanker terminal on a complex and sensitive coastline, and to essentially remove federal protection from the great majority of our inland waterways?

Those of us who study ancient seas can examine only little pieces of huge subjects, which are sporadically preserved and can therefore only be partly comprehended. Modern water is infinitely better studied and understood, but what help are all the studies in the world if we cannot save the things that all of us should hold dear?

© Graham Young, 2013

Wandering through the Earth galleries at the Natural History Museum a few years ago, I came upon this splendid marble table. The intricate inlay work highlights a range of mid-Paleozoic fossils: cephalopods, corals, algae, and stromatoporoid sponges, enclosed in variously coloured veined and brecciated limestones.

Although I took many photos of the table (far more than shown here), I foolishly did not look to see if there was any signage explaining it, and I have not been able to find any proper explanation online. The most I can glean is that the table may have been made relatively recently, and that the limestones may all be from the Devonian of south Devon.

If you know more about the source, please share this information with a comment!

The orthoconic cephalopods all have their apertures pointing toward the table’s axis.

An umbilicus is an origin, the place at the middle or beginning of something larger. For humans it is another word for our navel. The navel is the point of expansion for your body, where it gained sustenance as you grew in the womb. For coiled molluscs such as snails and Nautilus, the umbilicus is the hole at the centre of its shell whorls, the axis of its coils, effectively the place where the coiling growth began.

My origins are in an old place. In the middle of that old place, most appropriately, is this uniquely beautiful open spiral. The umbilicus of the town and the province.

The building was designed by J.C.P. Dumaresq, an architect who created many other important buildings in the nineteenth century Maritimes. Since he was a Nova Scotian born in Sydney, I am tempted to speculate that this staircase was inspired by the spiral that can be seen in an abraded snail shell on the beach, or maybe by a whelk’s egg case. I also suspect that some of the form of this coil may have come from the minds and hands of the highly-skilled carpenters, of whom there were many in New Brunswick at that time.

Perhaps the spiral was suggested by New Brunswick’s fiddleheads, which turn up in many other places as symbols of the province. On the front of the building, a series of fiddlehead-form brackets support the little balconies. Looking in detail, I realized that each of these has different decoration and depicts a different organism; I am particularly fond of the dragon bracket!

These fiddleheads are close to being logarithmic spirals, like Nautilus shells. The staircase (being a staircase) is not, but its complicated form is far beyond my extremely limited mathematical understanding. I can only contemplate and wonder. Umbilicus.

Overall, the exterior of the building is an elegant and coherent piece of Second Empire style, executed in fine sandstone. I will try to discuss its geology in a future post!

If you wish to learn about the man who designed this building, please read my sister’s fine article in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

© Graham Young, 2013

Cephalopods belonging to the genus Kinaschukoceras, spread across a bedding plane surface

When people discuss the extinction of dinosaurs and its possible cause by catastrophic events, one question that often comes up is, “if the last dinosaurs all died out at once, then where are the bodies”? Shouldn’t we find the carcasses, the Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops stretched out as if asleep, under the soft blanket of iridium-enriched dust that emanated from the Chicxulub impact site?

Let’s think about this for a minute or two. Any bedrock exposure that happens by chance to intersect the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary is just that: a chance happening. And we can thus apply the laws of statistics to the issue of dinosaur bodies. I am not going to challenge either of us to do the math, but think about how rarely you see vertebrates larger than, say, a house cat, as you walk, drive, or fly across the surface of this planet.

Sure, you can find large ponderous vertebrates everywhere if you are surrounded by an anomalous anthropogenic assemblage, such as on Manhattan Island or in the middle of a dairy herd. There are also plenty of large wild mammals in localized hotspots . . .  the centre of a caribou herd on the barrengrounds, or floating above the feeding belugas at the mouth of the Churchill River. But I can recall many days travelling across Canada where I might have been lucky to see one bear, or one coyote, or one moose in a drive of more than 1000 kilometres. If we take this distribution and average it out, you will appreciate that, on a randomly-selected two-dimensional outcrop that is much less than a kilometre across, your chances of finding a single dead dinosaur are infinitesimally minute. And that is even if dinosaurs were very abundant, right up to the time that the last of them were snuffed out by the Chicxulub event (which is also debatable).

A large specimen of Kinaschukoceras

Nevertheless, even if the bodies cannot be found at the end-Cretaceous horizon, there are places where we do see fossils concentrated into particular strata. These are generally the result of local conditions. A bone bed may record the mass death of a herd in a catastrophe such as a flood.  A bed packed with the skeletons of filter-feeding invertebrates such as oysters or brachiopods may simply be the result of their huge abundance on an ancient seafloor where the environment was favourable, or it may be because they were concentrated by the winnowing of waves and currents.

Those sorts of death horizons are not difficult to understand, even if the detailed analysis of the ancient environment can be painstaking and laborious. But what if we find a place where upper trophic carnivores are all concentrated, with little evidence of their presumed prey or food?  What does that mean?

This was brought to mind by the place in these photos. In the Ordovician Stony Mountain Formation of the Grand Rapids Uplands, central Manitoba, we find a variety of fossils. In some beds, the ancient seafloor was inhabited by corals, which can even be resting in the places where they grew. Elsewhere there are abundant burrows and gastropods. But in this particular bed of clotted dolostone, the only obvious fossils are these nautiloid cephalopods that glory in the genus name Kinaschukoceras (they may belong to the species Kinaschukoceras shamattawaense; talk about a mouthful!).

How can it be that these large predators are spread across the bed, with no evidence of what they might have been predating upon? Cephalopods are rare elsewhere in these rocks, so this really is an anomalous occurrence.

Small patches of in-place outcrop occur across a large area of weathered dolostone

I suspect that, in this case, there were a few factors at play. First of all, these were probably free-swimming creatures that lived somewhere up in the water column, possibly some distance above these seafloor sediments. Nautiloid cephalopods are readily transported after death by waves and currents, and it is entirely likely that these animals did not live right here, and that they may have been transported to this place of deposition. Also, perhaps the nautiloids preyed on creatures that lacked mineralized hard parts, in which case the prey would be unlikely to be preserved as fossils.

The clotting and mottling of the sediment indicates that there was life on the seafloor, but the conditions might not have been particularly favourable for many forms, which may explain why we have not found seafloor body fossils here. Finally, a sedimentary stratum is not generally a snapshot of what was living in a place on a single day or year, and it could represent centuries or millennia. Beds commonly contain time-averaged assemblages, and we sometimes talk about Konzentrat-Lagerstätten, which represent intervals in which little sediment was deposited (in which case the fossils may appear much more abundant than the organisms were in life).

These factors and others could all be at play when we observe this sort of death horizon, but it is only after detailed, thorough detective work that the paleontologist may be able to determine the true story.

© Graham Young, 2013

Saint’s Rest Beach

What could possibly be more pleasant than a February afternoon by the Bay of Fundy? There may be some February days that possess a pleasantness exceeded by the average tonsillectomy or root canal, but Tuesday was not one of those. Under a warm and gentle sun the temperature was an unseasonal +6, the sea was a bright transparent blue, and the air was as clear and sweet as I have ever experienced.

Rocky shore at Sheldon Point

The Irving Nature Park is a tremendously diverse sample of shoreline within the City of Saint John. Rocky shore, cliff, shingle beach, sand beach, salt marsh, coastal mixed forest: all of these can be found between Taylors Island, Saint’s Rest Beach, and Sheldon Point. The geology is also of interest: Neoproterozoic or Cambrian bedrock (which looked like metavolcanics to me) is overlain by glacial sediment, and the beach contains a wonderful variety of boulders and cobbles. With such varied geology, it is little wonder that the Saint John area has become North America’s first Global Geopark.

The salt marsh boardwalk

Manawagonish Creek in the salt marsh (note to my prairie friends: those shiny surfaces are mud, not ice!)

The nature park is a fantastic resource to have within easy reach of a city; it is privately owned and maintained by the Irvings. On this beautiful day it was obviously popular as we passed a steady stream of runners, hikers, and dog-walkers. In the marsh the grasses look dead and the birds were rather sparse on the ground, but with days such as this, can spring really be far away?

A tidal channel in the salt marsh

An islet in the salt marsh channel

As is the case on Grand Manan, dead trees at the edge of the salt marsh suggest relative sea level change. Either the sea has risen enough that high tides have killed the trees, or the land has been sinking.

Vegetated bar between the beach and the salt marsh

Manawagonish Island, just offshore, is also a nature reserve.

Saint’s Rest Beach

A spectacular mudflow emanates from the bluff

The clasts in this breccia boulder are illustrative of Saint John’s varied geology (Canadian quarter for scale)

Yellow birch in the woods on Taylors Island

© Graham Young, 2013

Fossils from the Airport Cove site, part 1: spectacular examples of dasycladalean green algae on bedding plane surfaces (The Manitoba Museum, MM B-339, B-340).

Canada is remarkably rich in Konservat-Lagerstätten, sites at which unusual fossils are preserved. For the past while, Dave Rudkin and I have been co-editing a series for Geoscience Canada called Great Canadian Lagerstätten, which compiles reviews of these sites, covering many intervals from the geological record. The third paper in the series is based on our own research, describing the fossils from three unusual localities in central and northern Manitoba. Together with our co-authors, we have had a lot of fun putting this together: it was interesting to have the chance to assess the state of our “art”, to see where we really are with our research. We have learned a lot about these fossils, but still miles to go before we put this project to bed.

Fossils from the Airport Cove site, part 2: (c) Articulated scolecodont apparatus (jaws of a polychaete worm)(MM I-4062). (d) Large phosphatic or chitinophosphatic tubes of uncertain affinity (MM I-4061). (e) Finely preserved organic eurypterid cuticle (MM I-4063).

The abstract of the paper follows below. If you are interested in downloading a pdf of the entire paper, it can be found here.

Konservat-Lagerstätten, deposits in which soft-bodied or lightly sclerotized fossils are preserved, are very rare in Ordovician strata. Three significant sites are known from Upper Ordovician rocks in Manitoba: at Cat Head – McBeth Point, William Lake, and Airport Cove. These sites are in two distinct sedimentary basins: the former two are in the Williston Basin, while the latter is in the Hudson Bay Basin. All three sites contain marine fossils, but each has a different assemblage that contributes a distinct piece of the diversity picture. Important groups represented at one or more of the sites include seaweeds (algae), sponges, cnidarian medusae (jellyfish), conulariids, trilobites, eurypterids, xiphosurids (horseshoe crabs), and pycnogonids (‘sea spiders’). The different biotas reflect depositional conditions at each site. Many of the fossils are unknown elsewhere in the Ordovician at the family level or higher. The province of Manitoba therefore makes a significant contribution to knowledge of Late Ordovician biodiversity.

Fossils from the Airport Cove site, part 3: (f) Partial eurypterid abdomen (MM I-4586). g. ‘Head’ region of eurypterid-like arthropod (MM I-4064A). (h) The holotype specimen of the xiphosurid (horseshoe crab) Lunataspis aurora; note the preserved eye and dark-stained areas (MM I-4000). (i) This degraded example of L. aurora is surrounded by a halo of dark staining, possibly the result of postmortem decomposition of soft tissue and leakage of body fluids (MM I-4585).

South of Greenland in the middle of the day  (this image and those below are from http://flightaware.com/live/)

In late morning the huge birds take flight. One after another they lumber into the air like pelicans, and like pelicans they spiral upward, forming long lines as they soar across the water. As a flock they fly westward over the ocean through the middle of the day, headed for the next large land. At night they return, following trackless courses through the blind dark, sensing one another’s presence even though they cannot hear or smell.

Evening near Newfoundland

Like chimney swifts they are drawn back to their nests amid the cities, warehouses, and factories. Like starlings they whirl in an endless murmuration as they move toward their roosts in the golden light of dawn. But they will not rest long. Soon they will take to the skies again in their ceaseless quest.

Daytime flights around London Heathrow

In winter, many among their number migrate like shorebirds. They scuttle to and fro between the mainland and warm islands, seeking subsistence among the tropical beaches and palm trees. Sometimes they travel like schooling fish along the edge of a coral reef, the groups passing one another in continuous gyre, ever-changing and yet with never a collision between opposing members.

Evening between Hawaii and California

Elsewhere they move like foraging sparrows, taking off and setting down in seemingly chaotic motion. Voracious and noisy, their clamour fills the air as they gather sustenance, transporting it to their homes among the towers of New York and Shanghai. They become busier and more numerous, flying farther and more frequently as they compete for resources.

Flights over China

Far from this cacaphony, the largest birds are in their true element somewhere out in the blue, out over the open sea. Like the albatross they can soar for hours with never a flap of their huge wings. Unlike the albatross, though, they are a rare sight around the great southern ocean where food is scarce. Instead, they follow their traditional migration paths, chasing the rich schools of tourists and traders between  LAX and PAR, SAO and SEL.

A lone flight south of South America

Although these birds seem so successful today, as a paleontologist taking the long view I have to wonder about their continued survival. Their success may be their own greatest enemy. Like goats living on an oceanic island or jellyfish dying in a tropical lagoon, their numbers may actually be changing the environment in which they exist. In the not too distant future, environmental impacts may force their behaviour to change. Will they still be as abundant fifty years from now?

Comparison of carbon emissions (New York Times, January 27th, 2013)

This week, I started looking at these pages that show where all scheduled flights in the world are located. I was shocked by the sheer numbers along the main flyways, and intrigued at how much they look like flocks of birds or schools of fish. I wonder: has anyone ever applied the modelling of swarming organisms to the flight organization of aircraft?

© Graham Young, 2013

The interior of the Legislature’s dome

This winter I am heavily involved in preparations for the Geological Association of Canada – Mineralogical Association of Canada Annual Meeting (GAC-MAC), which will take place in Winnipeg this May. One of the more agreeable tasks has been collaborating on the preparation of guidebooks for two fieldtrips: one to examine the Ordovician-Silurian boundary at various sites in south-central Manitoba, the other a relatively simple afternoon walking tour of the Manitoba Legislative Building.

In a corner of the Grand Staircase Hall, the walls are of Tyndall Stone, baseboards are Botticino marble, and the floor is grey-pink and pink-red Tennessee marble and Ordovician black marble.

The Legislative Building (or “The Leg” as it is often called*) is such a common sight to commuting Winnipeggers that most of us probably barely think of it, but it is a gem, both architecturally and geologically. Opened in 1920, the Legislative Building is commonly described as a neoclassical structure, but its detailing betrays a bit of Beaux-Arts exuberance, and the statuary is a strange melange of Canadian history and classical, Egyptian, and prairie mythology.

A floor in the Rotunda is composed of grey-pink Tennessee marble, Ordovician black marble, and green Vermont Verde Antique marble. Note how the stylolites (pressure solution features) in the Tennessee marble have been carefully aligned with the arc of the curve.

Geologically, the building’s interior combines acres of cut Manitoba Tyndall Stone with a carefully-selected suite of imported dimension stones: pink and red Tennessee marble, cream-coloured Italian Botticino marble, Ordovician Vermont black marble, Indiana Bedford limestone, Vermont Verde Antique marble, Québec Missisquoi marble, and a red marble breccia of unknown provenance.** Through the combined skills of architects and stonemasons, these stones have been blended into a remarkably coherent structure; there is harmony in the Legislature even when there is dissonance among the politicians within its chamber!

An unusual view of the Grand Staircase

I visited this place many times when we were working on our publication about its geology***, but I have never tired of it because there is always something new to see, some previously unobserved feature to discover. The images here are a few of the more “architectural” photos that will appear in our field guidebook, which should be available as a download later in the year.

The Grand Staircase Hall, viewed from beside/beneath the Grand Staircase (the foliage is part of Christmas decorations)

Hand-painted sign on the door to one of the committee rooms

On the Grand Staircase, the steps and railings are of Italian Botticino marble, while the wall behind is Manitoba Tyndall Stone

The quality of the Botticino marble permitted very fine carving work.

*  ”Leg” is pronounced like a windowsill, not like a limb.

** To the stonemason, a marble is any limestone or related rock that is massive and can be readily cut and polished. Many of the “marbles” are, in geological terms, not marbles at all, but they all have fascinating geological histories.

*** If you wish to read the details of the Legislature’s geology, a pdf of the full article by Brisbin et al. can be downloaded here.

© Graham Young, 2013

But what about blog posts? What can they be turned into? Last week, I carried out an interesting experiment on the conversion of a blog post, or more properly a few blog posts, into the live lecture medium. Translation to a different platform, indeed.

A while back, my friends at the Mineral Society of Manitoba asked me if I would give a lecture at one of their monthly meetings. In the past I have often made presentations about my research, on topics such as collecting the giant trilobite, or the fossil record of jellyfish. This time I thought I would do something different, so I said, “why don’t I just tell you about the history of one or two of the exhibits we have at the Museum?”

What I was thinking about mostly was the 19th Century Ward’s replica of a ground sloth skeleton, the subject of a blog post on my Museum page a while back. The sloth’s tale is a fascinating one; it is really a story within a story within a story, as it links the 18th Century discovery of the giant sloth Megatherium americanum, the invention of the skeleton replica business by the scientist/entrepreneur Henry Augustus Ward, the development of pioneering Canadian natural history museums such as Montreal’s Redpath Museum and the original Manitoba Museum of the 1930s, and finally the creation of our beloved modern Manitoba Museum (née Man and Nature). As I thought about this topic more, I pulled in bits from other blog posts about the Paris Galerie de paléontologie et d’anatomie comparée and the Redpath Museum. And of course the images had already been assembled for the blogs, so putting them into PowerPoint slides was very simple.

The Megatherium (mid background) and the Manitoba Museum’s Glyptodon (foreground), back when they were resident at the Redpath Museum, Montreal, 1925 (photo: McCord Museum)

And how did all this recycling turn out? It worked a charm, actually. I don’t think I have ever had a presentation that was easier or more fun to deliver, and my enjoyment of it may have also made it more pleasurable for the audience. After I finished speaking, they just seemed to want to keep talking about the Megatherium, the old museum, museum collections, other museums, other exhibits. The presentation merged gently and seamlessly into a general group discussion of shared topics and passions.

It wasn’t because my presentation technique is particularly brilliant, but more that the  right topic and story can carry almost any speaker. Giving this talk was like driving one of those unusually good cars that do so much of the work for you. Just point it down the road and push the accelerator!