Coastal mangrove in the Florida Keys lives in an environment roughly comparable to that in which the rocks at William Lake were deposited, though of course mangrove had not yet evolved in the Ordovician. (this photo, and all the other scanned slides, are by the late Frank Beales or by students or colleagues from his Florida fieldtrips, taken between the 1960s and 1981)

Following my last post about remarkable juxtapositions of ancient and modern analogues, I realized last week that the converse or opposite is also more common than might be supposed. Appropriate modern analogues are often located an immense distance from the ancient deposits to which they are similar. Since some of us tend to study rocks that are near where we live, this means that we would need to travel thousands of kilometres to see similar modern examples.

For this, we can blame (or thank) the combined effects of time, plate tectonics, and climate change. If you are able to stand in one place for long enough – a few hundred million years should suffice – then eventually that place will be nowhere near where it was when you started standing. You have not moved, but the continents and seas have moved around you.

Collecting at the William Lake site in summer, 2010. L-R are me (foreground), Michael Cuggy, Sean Robson, Matt Demski, and Debbie Thompson. (photo © Dave Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)

I had this thought as I repetitively ground specimens in the lab. These were little bits of mudstone that had started off as fine carbonate sediment on an immense tropical tidal flat or mudbank some 445 million year ago. This shallow water environment was somewhere just south of the equator, in a large sea that covered the middle of the ancient continent of Laurentia. Over time the mud was buried under other sediment and became rock, and the sea went away to be replaced by land. Laurentia continued to move ever so slowly, bumping up against the other landmasses 300 million years ago to form the supercontinent of Pangaea. When Pangaea rifted apart 100 million years later, most of Laurentia became most of North America, moving northwestward and leaving a widening Atlantic Ocean in its wake.

After all those travels, part of that ancient coastal mudflat eventually became the William  Lake site, situated now in a boreal forest in the middle of a northern continent, where it is alternately frozen for six months of the year and infested with blackflies and mosquitoes for the other six months. We go to William Lake to collect the wonderful fossils of creatures that died on that mudflat, but there is nowhere nearby that we can see comparative examples, either for the creatures or for their environment.

A modern analogue for William Lake? The tranquil surface of Florida Bay is interrupted by an extensive mudbank.

Considering the creatures this is, perhaps, less of an issue. Some of them, such as the eurypterids (“sea scorpions”), have no close living relatives. For others, such as the jellyfish, I can study a great variety of preserved specimens for the price of an air ticket to the collections in Ottawa or Toronto.

Or, in some cases, I can simply order preserved specimens from a biological company that supplies schools and colleges. On several occasions I have buried dead jellyfish or other gelatinous zooplankton in wet lime mud, exhuming them for study after the mud had dried and hardened. This may appear comical or strange, but it has turned out to be critical – these creatures have so little tissue, relative to the water they contain, that their appearance changes dramatically as they are compressed and dried out. By carrying out these crude experiments, I have been able to make sense of some very odd fossils.

Air-breathing mangrove roots and a microbial crust, in the supratidal or upper intertidal zone of Florida Bay

But what of the rocks themselves? We have been collecting at William Lake for just about a decade, systematically peeling back the rocks bed by bed and layer by layer. Now that we have collected much of the succession of units, we are trying to understand how they relate to changing ancient environments. We have been polishing sections through each bed, looking at the fine details that show ancient ripple marks, channels, and mud pebbles.

As I examine these, I find that I am spending more and more time reading the scientific literature on similar environments in the modern day. But so often, I find that a paper will only give me a little bit of the information I seek. Just as publications on modern jellyfish don’t really tell me what I need to know about jellyfish fossils, the papers on modern sedimentation do not really answer my questions about William Lake. After all, the authors of those papers were doing research to answer their questions, not mine!

A microbial mat covers the sediment surface in the Florida Bay supratidal zone

A cut through the supratidal sediment reveals layering below the surficial microbial mat. We see very similar features in the rock at William Lake.

I suspect that the answers I need will only come from first-hand examination of modern carbonate tidal flats and mudbanks.  I last looked at such places on a wonderful Florida Keys fieldtrip from the University of Toronto, led by the inimitable* Dr. Frank Beales in 1981. Frank’s trip was one of the best experiences of my life, but it was long ago, I was an ignorant student, and my memories of it are as faded and washed out as the slides I have scanned to illustrate this piece.

So it is beginning to look as though I will have to travel to study somewhere warm, coastal, and muddy, preferably in the company of a sedimentologist as accomplished as Frank was. I should go either to South Florida, or (even better) the Bahamas, or maybe the Persian Gulf. But how can I possibly explain to a granting agency that I really need a few weeks in the Bahamas, without making it seem as though I just want a jolly jaunt to escape the Winnipeg winter?  Complications, complications.

This photo taken just after a hurricane (Hurricane Betsy of 1965?) shows how the surface of the supratidal zone can be flooded periodically.

The intrepid Professor Beales on the edge of one of the Florida Bay islands. During our trip, Frank appeared to undergo an amazing transformation, from an elderly tweed-wearing British professor to a dynamic, fit, energized, entertaining field scientist who needed no sleep. I’m sure this was his natural element, and of course though he seemed aged to the students, he wasn’t really old at all (just a few years older than I am now, actually!).

Our group of U of T students, hamming it up on the dry rocks off Key Largo in fall of 1981 (I am the lanky black-haired guy on the far left).

Since so much time has passed since these photos were taken, and since most of them were Frank’s and I don’t have a clue who took the others, I have not requested permission to reproduce these images. If any of them happen to be yours, I would be delighted to give you credit, or to add your name if you are one of the other students in the class photo!

* Actually, we did used to imitate Frank. He was a supremely knowledgeable sedimentologist, an excellent raconteur, and a wonderfully kind and patient teacher. In class, however, he tended to lose his train of thought, and his long pauses and drawn out open-mouthed “uhhhhhh”s were legendary (and perfect targets of imitation for the insensitive young students we were then).

Across the river, Christ Church Cathedral is framed by dead roots on the north side Green.

I started thinking about these things a couple of weeks ago, when I was visiting Fredericton. My brother and I were walking along the north side Green, and I got taken with photographing the abundant driftwood left along the shore by recent high water. The Saint John is a large river, and in full flow it can move substantial objects. In some places, there were even clumps of worn and abraded trees, still attached by their roots.

Turning from the shore, my attention was drawn by large blocks of stone that had been placed to separate the boat launch area from the lawns. Many of these consisted of relatively monotonous sandstone, but one of the boulders closest to the water appeared to have more varied features. Crouching to examine it closely, I could see large chunks of well-preserved ancient wood, much of it still consisting of organic material, surrounded by debris and rusty stains. The sandstone blocks appeared to be consistent with Carboniferous (Mississippian to Pennsylvanian) deposits that make up much of the bedrock in the Fredericton area, so this fossil wood was in the range of 320 million years old (see Whitehead, 2001, for an outline of Fredericton area geology; a pdf can be found here).

The boulder (above) and a detail of the wood (below). The brilliant white circle is a Canadian quarter (diameter 24 mm) reflecting the sun.

Then it struck me: here I was, surrounded by driftwood on the bank of a large river, and the rock sitting on the bank just happened to contain ancient driftwood that had been deposited under similar conditions hundreds of millions of years ago. The ancient and modern in immediate conjunction! Worlds in worlds, wheels in wheels!

Of course, if we compare them in more detail, there are significant differences. The Saint John at Fredericton flows out of gentle hills and meanders broadly; most sediment along its banks is well-weathered and silty. The Carboniferous sandstones, on the other hand, were apparently deposited in alluvial fan conditions and contain quartz grains mixed with rock fragments suggesting that the material had not been transported a huge distance. Still, as an illustration the comparison was striking.

The bank by the footbridge is covered with a thick layer of dead wood.

In this quarry at the top of the hill on the south side of Fredericton, cross-bedded rust-stained sandstones can be observed in place.

The sandstone is a mixture of quartz grains and darker minerals and rock fragments.

Such adjacent analogues must occur in many  places. There are huge areas where modern rivers cut through ancient floodplain sediments; excellent examples can be seen in various places in western Canada. Similarly, in the Churchill area of Manitoba the famous Ordovician rocky boulder shoreline occurs in conjunction with a modern rocky shore, and deposits representing an ancient tropical cove occur within a modern subarctic one.

Perhaps one of the strangest examples I can think of readily is at Kuppen in Gotland, Sweden, where Silurian sea stacks and other rocky shore features occur close to sea stacks along a modern shore (see Fig. 3 in this pdf; note that it is a large file).

My brother’s cellphone photo suggests that I may appear a bit eccentric when I get interested in looking at rocks. Note the huge quantity of driftwood beside the boulder. (photo by Chris Young)

The scientists working at such field locations cannot help but be inspired by the modern environments that surround them. Of course we must be cautious in applying modern observations to long-gone paleoenvironments, but they can certainly provide us with valuable insights and give us ideas that we might never have if we only saw the two in separate places and at separate times.

Adjacent analogues also serve as wonderful examples for field trips by students, professionals, and interested amateurs. It would be great to compile a list of such places; if you know of other good examples, please send them to me and I will try to do another post on this topic!

Willows surrounded by receding floodwater

© Graham Young, 2012

Meeting a delayed plane this evening, I discovered I had an extra 15 minutes to kill. Almost anywhere else I would have wandered around the airport, maybe bought a coffee, but I am in Fredericton and there are other options here. Five minutes from the airport, the river was gorgeous and there remained enough vestiges of light that I could hope for photographs. A set of fortunate coincidences!

The valley is very grand; this is really the beginning of the lower Saint John floodplain, with its flat treed islands, back swamps, and yazoo tributaries. The broad river in semi-flood produces serene reflections of the late evening clouds. Just up the road, the century-old Wilmot Bluff lighthouse now nestles semi-hidden in the trees, looking more than a bit pagoda-like.  Long retired from active use, perhaps it saw enough of the river during its working life.

As I snap my last crooked photo, I hear the roar of the inbound turboprop as it slows on the runway a kilometre or two away. A signal that it is time, sadly, to head back to the modern world.

© Graham Young, 2012

There are places where decay of both natural and man-made materials seems to be concentrated in great variety. The coast of the island of Saaremaa is one such place. I find that decay often makes for beautiful forms; I only wish that I had thought to take more photographs!

The rusted remnants of a ruined ship create abstract shapes on the shore (top, above, and below).

A strew of rotting jellyfish (Aurelia sp.)

Its useful life over, this boat had been gently placed on the wall.

In a quiet bay, a dried mat of seaweed on the shore is accompanied, below sea level, by a rim of repulsive purple sulfur bacteria. The mat is cracked polygonally, and the seaweeds have been compacted and rendered into a dense amorphous material.

A crumbling coastal defence bunker

© Graham Young, 2012

Hand-labelled nineteenth century specimen boxes record early scientific expeditions to the Lake Winnipeg area.

I just heard this week that a friend is very ill. This friend has not been “in robust health” for a quite some time, but still had been managing in an “I’m alright, really” sort of way. Now it seems that there has been a sudden turn for the worse, and I am fearful about my friend’s future. We have not heard anything about it being terminal, but still, the prognosis is far from favourable.

This news has made me think about our relationship; I guess I have tended to take this friend too much for granted. But we have had such conversations in the many happy hours we have spent together … such wonderful conversations! For you see, my friend is very old, quite remarkably old. My friend has memories going all the way back to the 1840s, back to a time before there was even a country of Canada. And since those memories started, my friend has been everywhere across the northern half of this continent. Literally everywhere, to many places I have not even heard of. And every place holds some special precise recollection of our nation’s distant and historic pasts. I have listened carefully while my friend has told me about the life forms of ancient tropical seas, and about the almost superhuman scientists who traversed this country before the days of paved roads and airplanes.

Long before we visited Inmost Island, the GSC's intrepid T.C. Weston had been there! This is an Ordovician alga (seaweed).

I’m sure you are more than aware by now that the friend I write of is not human. This friend is a collection, the National Type Fossil Collection and the bulk fossil collections of the Geological Survey of Canada. This collection is one of the most remarkable and little-known institutions of this country: a huge assemblage of fossils that has been built up through the work of many superb scientists over the past 170 years or so!  It not only represents a physical record of geological field research in this country and a reference for those wishing to understand past work; it is also a fantastic resource for scientists, both at present and in the future. This collection forms an immense body of raw material for scientific study, painstakingly assembled at what would be, cumulatively, a tremendous cost.

A drawer of splendid Ordovician gastropods from Manitoba

Small globose cephalopods collected in 1889 from Swampy Island by the great J.B. Tyrrell

I worry about this collection because news has just come down that the Federal Government’s current round of budget cuts will be affecting its curatorial staffing. And that is a serious concern. Certainly much of the collection is in good shape, so perhaps it may look to some managers as though they should be able to just close the door, opening it occasionally to allow access to trusted scientists. But a collection is a living, breathing organism that requires constant care and feeding; you cannot simply assume that it will be fine on its own for a while. It will deteriorate: specimens will become separated from their labels, boxes will fall apart, entries in the catalogue may no longer have corresponding fossils in the drawers. Without care over a longer term it might become useless, a candidate for the Ottawa landfills.

An Ordovician crinoid stem from Stony Mountain (north of Winnipeg), collected by T.C. Weston

The label on a cabinet door is almost a "who's who" of historic collectors in western Canada.

This collection has been built on trust, with each generation’s new collections being added to the existing body, and all of it passed down to the future. At a time when our government is focused on the discovery of new resources, and when biostratigraphy (the time -significance of fossils) is useful for finding really practical things like sediment-hosted base metal deposits, it would be extremely sad to see this wonderful reference library of geological objects fall slow victim to entropy, dermestids, and decay.

These beautiful little boxes hold brachiopods collected by Weston from Stony Mountain.

The sea is rising. Around the world, people check tide gauges, monitor the shore, watch the waves. And we observe that the water is higher than it was. Sure, in a few places the land is moving upward even more rapidly, such the Hudson Bay Lowlands, so recently released from their glacial burden. But globally there is no question: the sea is rising.

People are building dikes. Engineers are designing tidal barriers, planning new sea walls. We humans are an optimistic species; our can-do attitude has made us what we are today. We can solve this problem! We have done this sort of thing before. After all, the Acadians drained and diked the Tantramar hundreds of years ago. Early last century the Dutch dammed the Zuiderzee and reclaimed land in the polders, and just a few decades ago the English built the Thames Barrier. We can defeat the sea. We have the ability.

New York City from Staten Island

But the sea will watch. Its sun-dappled waves may wash gently on the shore, but they are like a flicking watery tail, and just over the horizon a monstrous salty cat is plotting its next move. The sea will wait.

Maybe we will not be able to save low-lying Third World islands like those of Tuvalu. What hope do we have that funds will be found to prevent the Bay of Bengal from sweeping across the low coast of Bangladesh? What hope is there that millions of people on west African deltas will not be displaced?

But here in the West it is different, surely! After all, New Orleans is being rebuilt, isn’t it? And America has the resources to relocate people from the low-lying land of South Florida! And Venice might be sinking, but I’m sure that the Italian government will block the sea!

We can save those treasures now, we can save them next year. But what will the world be like in 50 years? 500 years? 5000 years?

The coast of East Greenland: ice sheet and calving icebergs

The sea will always wait. It will wait with anticipation while ice sheets calve into the great northern and southern oceans. It will wait comfortably while its waters warm and expand. It will watch patiently for its chance, and that chance will come. It is steadfast and resolved, while we are mercurial and easily distracted. Sooner or later we will be transfixed by war, or plague, or recession. We will let down our defences and the sea will come in. Maybe in some places this will be an all-out assault, a tsunami or hurricane-driven wall of water that will suddenly roar across a low-lying coast. But elsewhere it will be a gentle lapping trickle creeping from the estuary up the back streets, while no-one notices from the windows of half-darkened houses.

Paldiski, Estonia

Footprints and waves at the eastern end of Prince Edward Island.

Have you ever been looking at the sea from far out on a tidal flat, and suddenly come to the horrible realization that the water is already behind you, threatening to cut you off completely from the land? The tide moved so quickly, and yet you probably didn’t perceive it until it was almost too late. Did you have to dash to make it to shore before you were soaked? The sea has the capacity to do that to coastal humanity. More slowly, but on a tremendous scale. And we are largely a coastal species. The effects will be immense, greater than any of the catastrophes that affected us in the last eventful century.

This roadcut in the Grand Rapids Uplands of Manitoba exposes a section through the Stonewall Formation, of Late Ordovician age (about 445 million years old). These sedimentary beds were deposited in a tropical sea. The grey marker bed toward the top apparently represents an interval in which the sea left the area for a period of time, before returning to deposit the beds above. (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)

I stand at a roadcut, by a highway in the centre of North America. All around me are layers of sediment, laid down over millennia by ancient seas that came and left, came and left. How could we possibly think that the waters will never  come here again?

The sea will always wait. Its patience is infinite. It has all the time in the world.

Airport Cove, Churchill, Manitoba

The St. Lawrence estuary as seen from St. Joseph de la Rive, Québec

© Graham Young, 2012

Nick Butterfield (L) and I labour across the loose cobbles that make the walk toward Cat Head such a great workout (someone should design gym machines based on this principle!). Note the snow that still remains in June under the shadow of the cliff. (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)

Last week, after posting that piece about fieldwork in the McBeth Point – Cat Head area of Lake Winnipeg’s North Basin, I decided that I needed to go through my slides to find more photos of the memorable 1997 expedition. Even better, Dave Rudkin has also sorted through and scanned some of his excellent images, so here is a further sampling from our hunt for Ordovician fossils in that beautiful place.

Since it is such a struggle to walk along that beach, it was wonderful to have a boat to retrieve our fossil "booty." Here, Dave Wright takes a morning fossil-pickup run in the Zodiac. (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)

The dolostone at the tip of McBeth Point is full of beautiful white chert.

The pelicans love to haunt a spot just north of the tip of McBeth Point.

Most of McBeth Point consists of a narrow spit that extends far into the lake. Here, with a north wind, waves pile up on the north side of the bar, while it is calm and blue to the south.

In the evening light, the Goldfield arrives in McBeth Point harbour.

An evening bonfire by the old "mink ranch": (L-R) Nick Butterfield, Christine Kaszycki, Ed Dobrzanski, Dave Wright, and me. (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)

Our tents sit on the concrete pad that remained from a burned building.

The sun sets into the North Basin.

Christine and Ed by the fire. (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)

How are we going to fit all the people, gear, and fossils into two small floatplanes? (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)

In the Beaver, I fill in the logsheet. These planes have such wonderful instrument panels, like the dashboards of 1950s automobiles! (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)

As we fly out, we bank past Inmost Island (that is the Beaver's float in the foreground). Just yesterday we walked all the way around this little island, picking up trilobites and fossil algae as we went.

© Graham Young, 2012

McBeth Point from the air, June 12th, 1997. There are large waves on the north side, and relatively quiet water to the south.

We sit in the sunshine on the edge of the concrete pad, looking hopefully southward. Behind us the wind is rising, pushing combers and grinders against the other side of the bar. The pebbles and cobbles complain and grumble as they are pushed up the beach and slide back down with a deep percussive sigh.

This morning we took down tents and packed gear. We folded the Zodiac into its bags, and loaded most of the rocks into pails. Lunchtime is past now, and the other half of our group has already flown out, headed south to Pine Dock and civilization. We hope the north-south bearing of that intense wind holds, because if it moves just a few more compass degrees to the east it will be coming around the point and the plane will be unable to land. The others took most of the camping gear with them in the Cessna, while we held the rocks to put into the Beaver with its far greater load capacity. If we can’t get out of here, it may be an uncomfortable night without tents and stoves!

The southern tip of McBeth Point

The pad we camped on was all that remained of a burned building. The fire must have been brilliant, because strewn across the white concrete were dozens of nails and chunks of melted aluminum; nothing else was left. Just along the shore, at the base of McBeth Point, the tumble-down remnants of another small group of buildings can be seen through the trees.  I think of these as a mink ranch, but why I am not sure.  After all, why on Earth would anyone want to build a mink ranch out here? I walked over there last evening, discovering that the only inhabitants were rabbits hopping through the wreckage; it doesn’t take long for nature to take back what is hers, especially in this harsh place.

The cliffs near Cat Head

And we really have no idea what our concrete pad might have been for. It was fine to camp on (if a bit hard), but that was in mild weather, and now that it is starting to blow up a bit we realize that there is very little shelter here. The bar is tall but very narrow, and there is a sparse band of vegetation between us and the north part of the North Basin. The cobbles on the other side of the bar are beautifully smoothed, rounded, and sorted; the wave-grinding we hear now gives a clear illustration of the reasons why.

The Beaver at Pine Dock, loading for the flight to McBeth Point

Scrambling up to the top of the bar to watch the weather, we can see the waves breaking along the shore below the fractured cliffs that loom between here and Cat Head.  We have been along there on each of the past couple of days. Most of the rockfalls seem to be old and lichen-covered; nevertheless, they are not cliffs to be trusted. There were times yesterday, even with light wind, when we could hear the patter of stones falling to the beach behind us. We mostly looked for fossils in loose blocks along the shore, but an examination of the cliff in its safer parts indicated that the fossils occur as concentrations in sporadic layers, and that they are absent from most of this rock.

The rounded and sorted cobbles made for hard walking; Ed greatly regretted the soft boots he had worn the first day, because they made his feet too sore to make the full trek yesterday, though of course there was still plenty for him to find close to the camp.

A slab covered with the brachiopod Tetraphalerella, collected between McBeth Point and Cat Head (The Manitoba Museum, MM I-3616)

As we wait here, there is time to contemplate the larger blocks we have collected; can they be fitted into the floats of the Beaver? Dave and Nick get to work with their geological hammers, expertly bashing off corners and reducing weight as much as possible (nevertheless, the Beaver will be riding low on its floats when we finally get out of here!). We have to smack our finest Winnipegia slab into two pieces, as it is simply too large to fit anywhere in the plane as it is.

Looking across Kinwow Bay, we see Inmost Island as a pale streak between us and the low dark land on the horizon. We were out there yesterday, dropped off by the kind fisherman Irwin. It took us two and a half hours to go around the little island, picking up every fossil we could find in the warm sunshine. The trilobites and algae were well worth the trip, but thank God that Irwin came back!  It would have been an awful, desolate place to be abandoned; the prospect of getting stuck here today seems comparatively pleasant.

The beautiful beach at the base of McBeth Point

Irwin has a 16 foot open boat with a 90 horsepower motor. That sounds like a lot of power for such a boat, but it is critical; all the boats on Lake Winnipeg seem to rely on immense power to push them over and through the waves that can become so steep on this shallow body of water. Irwin’s daughter is his assistant; she has her own fishing licence and will eventually take over his business. Most people at the McBeth Point fishing station are from Fisher River, but Irwin is from Jackhead. He has had much misfortune – his wife died of illness and his house burned down – but he says he is happy, and he appears genuinely cheerful. He seems like a man who has his niche.

Yesterday evening, in the golden light, we were surprised when the Goldfield glided into the harbour at McBeth Point. We were not even aware that there were such vessels on the lake, and yet here it was, this ghost from a time long past, looking huge and solid beside the modern fishing boats. But of course it only makes sense that a ship would be needed to service the active fishing stations on the lake. The McBeth Point station has 50 licences, and each licence allows a catch of 3800 kilograms; how could all those fish possibly get to market without a ship of this size?

Along the cliff toward Cat Head, Nick Butterfield stands at the Winnipegia horizon.

Now a small fishing boat passes us, hugging the southern shore of the point. Pelicans glide over, mostly in groups of two to four. A bit farther off, too far to tell what they are, is a large flock of ducks with white flashes on their wings – mergansers, perhaps? Mergansers have been around in pairs for the past couple of days, but I had not seen a large flock before.

The sun continues to move across the sky, the wind blows a bit harder, and we while away the time by telling stories and attempting to flint-knap the abundant chert cobbles. But we are constantly listening, listening intently for the deep rotary-engine buzz of the Beaver. We hear nothing beyond the wind in the trees and the waves on the shore. Surely the plane must arrive soon. Surely.

The probable alga Dowlingia, collected during the 1997 trip (The Manitoba Museum, MM B-224)

A dendroid graptolite from McBeth Point (The Manitoba Museum, MM I-4345)

Moon, birds, and the harbour at McBeth Point

© Graham Young, 2012

Fishing boats at anchor, and fisherman at rest, at the Basin Head Fisheries Museum.

Working at the Manitoba Museum, I have been fortunate to work with some superb artists, and to observe them closely as they prepare dioramas and other artistic exhibit materials. I recognize that dioramas such as ours require extremely advanced artistic skills combined with thousands of hours of research, preparation, and execution.

Those of us who develop exhibits of course tend to view the work shown at other institutions with a critical eye. Some dioramas in other museums are not really quite “there,” while others, such as those at the American Museum of Natural History have justly earned their reputation as lasting pieces of art.

This beautiful mill at Basin Head might have almost stepped out of a Maud Lewis painting.

Knowing what it takes to produce professional dioramas, I am often surprised and sometimes impressed by the work of those who leap into it from the other end of the artistic spectrum: the self-trained artists who are determined to produce three-dimensional representations of life. As these mini-dioramas from the Basin Head Fisheries Museum show, such work can be beautiful, charming, and artistically successful.

The main objective of many of these dioramas is to depict work life as it is or was. This detailed ice-fishing model shows activity both above and below the water.

These dioramas succeed, not in spite of their blithe disregard for some of the standard rules of diorama composition, but perhaps because of this disregard. They substitute exuberance for the laws of perspective and first-hand knowledge for detailed academic research; a desire to represent every aspect of coastal life overwhelms any attempts to trim or edit. In each detail they demonstrate their maker’s love for and understanding of the subject being presented.

As this sealing scene shows, the dioramas pull few punches when it comes to showing the details of life!

These dioramas are really works of folk art, three-dimensional equivalents to the paintings of Maud Lewis or Grandma Moses. In some instances they depict aspects of life gone by, in other places they show life on the land and sea as it still is. In each case they pull few punches: seals are slaughtered with axes, schooners are sunk, and fishermen relax by … going fishing, of course!

Two schooners, one above and one below the water.

The Basin Head Fisheries Museum

Milne-Edwards and Haime, 1852, Plate XXXIX. Rugose corals from the Mountain Limestone (Carboniferous) include Lithostrotion aranea (1, 1a), Lithostrotion affine (2, 2a, 2b), and Lithostrotion phillipsi (3, 3a).

Leafing through some of the old books lying around here, I have been contemplating the wonders of the illustrator’s art, and how it can translate across the centuries. There is little question that artistic paleontological illustration reaching its apogee in the mid 19th century, prior to the widespread application of photography as a means of depicting fossils.

In Europe in particular there were many first-rate illustrators, and the lithography was often of remarkable quality. This seems to have begun about the 1820s, and continued as late as the first decades of the 20th century in some countries (such as Sweden) but not in others (the United States, as far as I can tell).

Milne-Edwards and Haime, 1852, Plate XXXII. The rugose coral Cyathophyllum regium from the Mountain Limestone (Carboniferous).

Possibly the best lithographic work I have seen is in British Fossil Corals, by the French scientists Henri Milne-Edwards and Jules Haime.  I have all of the volumes of this substantial series in modern facsimile edition, but I did not appreciate the true quality of the illustrations when I was lucky enough to be given an original of the volume on Corals from the Permian Formation and the Mountain Limestone.*

The plates are  beautiful in the facsimile, but in the original they possess remarkable depth, tone, and crispness.  The wonderfully shaded images seem to have an inner glow, the corals floating as if suspended above their deep black background. I apologize that my photographs here do them as little justice as the versions in the printed facsimile editions!

Milne-Edwards and Haime, 1852, Plate XXXI. The rugose coral Cyathophyllum stutchburyi from the Mountain Limestone (Carboniferous).

Not only was the 19th century illustration work remarkable, but the lithography was superb and societies such as the Palaeontographical Society apparently spared no expense on printing, resulting in work superior to anything seen in modern scientific publications.  Similarly, some 19th century specimen photography was comparable to or better than the best work we see published today; more on this in part 2, perhaps?

* H. Milne-Edwards and J. Haime, 1852. British fossil corals, part 3, corals from the Permian Formation and the Mountain Limestone. Palaeontographical Society Monographs, Volume 6, p. 147-210, pls. 31-46.