I Miss the Mammoths

By Dr. Graham Young, past Curator of Palaeontology & Geology

Recently, there seem to have been a lot of stories in the media about the remarkable intelligence of elephants. Scarcely a week goes by without a new science story about how elephants are among the few non-human creatures that are self-aware, about their superb communication skills, about the ways in which they care for one another, or about their wonderful memories (it is true: an elephant never forgets). Whenever I see these stories I feel wistful, contemplating the elephants that used to live around here. I imagine how they wandered across the landscape, using their big brains as they communicated about food and predators.

If you are here in still-snowy Winnipeg, you might wonder if I am feeling OK, or you would at least think “what does this have to do with our local situation?” After all, wild elephants live a very long way away, in warm parts of Africa and Asia. Our lack of living elephants is, however, a disparity of time rather than one of geography. Geologically speaking, it is just the blink of an eye since the time when this area was regularly visited by herds of elephants.

I am speaking, of course, about mammoths. Although woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) are better-known from Ice Age (Pleistocene) deposits in Siberia, Alaska, and the Yukon, many examples have been found across the Canadian Prairies. Quite a few mammoth bones and teeth have been collected in Manitoba, along with the occasional tooth belonging to their distant cousin the American mastodon (Mammut americanum).

Some of our mammoth bones are from sites where associated wood material has been dated to about 40,000 years old, so they date from well before the end of the Ice Age. The last mammoths in North America, however, became extinct about 10,000 years ago, and the very last ones in the world lived on Wrangel Island, Siberia, until just 4,000 years ago (by which time the Egyptians had already constructed some of their pyramids!). We don’t really know why mammoths became extinct, but there seem to have been several factors involved: climate change at the end of the Ice Age and increased hunting by human populations may have been the major causes.

Many of the new things we are learning about elephant behaviour seem to apply to both Asian and African elephants. Given what we now know about evolutionary relationships, it must be assumed that mammoths would have had the same sort of intelligence and behavioural traits, and it is possible that even mastodons were somewhat similar. The new information on elephant intelligence is allowing mammoths to be well understood as “living” creatures, even if the attempts to clone them are unsuccessful.

It is saddening that we came so very close, geologically, to seeing those herds of mammoths. Whenever I look at those fossils, whenever I contemplate the tusk of a huge adult or the jaw of a baby mammoth, I miss the animals.

By Dr. Graham Young, past Curator of Palaeontology & Geology

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation at McNally Robinson in Winnipeg, as part of our Museum lecture course Into the Vault. I was planning to talk about the ancient island shoreline deposits we have been studying in the Churchill area, and as I thought about history and pre-history, I was reminded of an observation I had made during an earlier trip to southwestern Manitoba. In most parts of a relatively flat landscape, the ground surface is the result of processes in the present day and the recent past; it is only where some of that surface is peeled away that we can really see evidence of a deeper past.

Where the earth is split open, along riverbanks and shorelines, and at roadcuts and quarries, we can see its older layers. While the surface usually represents the present, recent past, and relatively recent prehistory, the layers below that surface may be extremely old. Southwestern Manitoba and the Hudson Bay Lowland are both in the part of North America known geologically as the Platform, which has been free for a very long time from disruptive forces such as earthquakes and volcanoes. As a result, the layers are relatively orderly; the sediment was laid down almost horizontally, layer upon layer. Slicing through them vertically looks quite similar to slicing an onion with a knife.*

As we dig down into the upper surface of the land, below the historic remnants we can see evidence of prehistoric occupation of this region. Almost everyone is familiar with widespread artifacts such as arrowheads, but in some places in southern Manitoba we can see ancient burial mounds or traces of long-past hunting sites.

Elsewhere, the cuts in the Earth extend into older layers. Some of these layers are still made of sediment that has not been turned to rock, but they date from the late part of the Ice Age, before people are known to have lived in this part of the world.

The geological time gaps in the Manitoba record (such as between the Mississippian and Jurassic rocks, where we might have expected deposits from the Pennsylvanian, Permian, and Triassic periods) simply represent intervals in which sediment was not being deposited in this region, and was perhaps being eroded.  Most of our sedimentary rocks were deposited under seawater; the intervals of deposition occurred at times when the sea invaded the middle of the continent, and the gaps in deposition represent times when the sea left this region. We are in the latter sort of situation nowadays, though of course sediment IS still being deposited in one part of the middle of North America: in Hudson Bay.

The layers in the diagram below look to be strongly tilted, but this is because the diagram has a 200x exaggeration of the vertical scale, relative to the horizontal. In reality, they are tilted just a few degrees. The tilt is related to their having been deposited on a seafloor that sloped gently toward the centre of the ancient sedimentary basin, which was located to the southwest.

This slight tilt is, however, very important when we consider where we might find particular layers on the surface. Geologists often talk about the rocks of the Platform as having “layer cake stratigraphy.” Like the onion, the layer cake is a useful metaphor. If we imagine a cake plate being tilted, and then the cake being cut parallel to the tabletop, it is obvious that the lower layers of the cake would be visible from above as you move away from the direction of tilting.

The Shield rocks are geologically complex, having been formed as mountains were growing, volcanoes erupting, and continents crashing together in this region about 1.8-3.5 billion years ago. Since they were formed by such active processes, they are often folded, faulted, and overturned; as a result we can no longer apply our simple onion/cake metaphors once we reach those rocks. But those comparisons work wonderfully in any of Manitoba’s younger strata!

* The growth of onions is apparently quite different from this age-layering of sediment on the Platform, but it is still a handy visual metaphor.

By Dr. Graham Young, past Curator of Palaeontology & Geology

When I started to work at the Museum just over 20 years ago, my job title said that I was the “Assistant Curator of Geology and Paleontology.” Quite a mouthful, to be sure, and one for which the meaning was not entirely clear. Certainly people could understand the “assistant” part, except that I wasn’t actually the assistant to anyone, since I was also the only staff member in geology and paleontology. Rather, the “assistant” in my title was like that for an assistant professor at the university. It meant that I was on the first rung of progress through a professional career, and if I worked hard then I could look forward to being associate curator, and then full curator.

But what about the “curator” part of the title? What did that mean?

In the early 1990s, curator was not a commonly-used word, to the extent that it seemed like a lot of people had never heard it. I would tell them that I was responsible for the rock, mineral, and fossil collections, and that I created exhibits and answered inquiries. Those were really the things that were emphasized in my job description, and to be honest I didn’t look further than that into what a curator might be.

But where does the word come from, and how does it lend itself to so many different purposes?

Curator is derived from the Latin curare, to care for, so a curator is a person who takes care of something. In fact, in Scottish legal terms a curator is someone who is the guardian of a minor or mentally ill person. Several other nouns that come from the same root have religious connotations, such as the English curate (an assistant priest), the French curé (a parish priest), and the Curia (the central administration of the Catholic Church). It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the name for our profession gives some evidence of the reverence with which we hold the objects given to our care.

Even if you hear that someone is a curator at a museum, as opposed to all those other types of curators, that still doesn’t necessarily give you a clear idea of what that person might do. I know of English museums where the people called curators are what we would call Collections Specialists at The Manitoba Museum, people who are responsible for the care of collections but not their interpretation. Elsewhere, the curator may be the administrative lead for an entire institution, a position more equivalent to that of our Executive Director. In museums of art, curators may have no responsibility for long-term care of collections; rather, they may be specialists hired as consultants to select and interpret the works for a particular exhibition.

Writing about my job in this way, it seems like an awful lot. I guess it is. Manitoba is a very big place, and the Museum has a modest number of dedicated curators whose job it is to cover and represent that territory. Like all the other curators at the Museum I absolutely love this job; the diversity of work is just one of the things that makes it possibly the best job in the world.

By Dr. Graham Young, past Curator of Palaeontology & Geology

I have often been told by members of the public that, “it must be so exciting to do paleontological fieldwork.” This is true, it can be very exciting to visit new places, to discover and collect fossils that were previously unknown to science. But often the conditions are such that the fieldwork is more of a necessary evil. It is a step that must be passed to acquire essential specimens, rather than a pleasure in itself.

Last week was a case in point. I had planned to travel to the Grand Rapids Uplands of central Manitoba with Dave Rudkin (Royal Ontario Museum) and Michael Cuggy (University of Saskatchewan) to carry out a bit of additional collecting at some unusual fossil sites. We had chosen late September because (1) the weather is often dry and clear, and (2) the mosquitoes and blackflies have generally been depleted by this time of year.

It turned out that we were only partly right on just one of these assumptions: I don’t think I saw a single mosquito. Their absence was, however, compensated by the swarms of blackflies that descended whenever the wind died down. And that merciful wind was a chill, damp one, associated with rains that were at times heavy.

We first arrived at the main site on Wednesday afternoon. Under a relatively pleasant overcast sky, we spent several hours splitting rock, but found little in the way of specimens worth taking back to the Museum. By Thursday morning the torrential downpours had begun. These died off by the time we arrived at the site, but we discovered that the gently sloping limestone had been replaced by a “water garden” that combined both pond and waterfall features.

By Friday the rain had ceased, but much of its moisture seemed to have attached itself to any clay that remained on and adjacent to the bedrock, resulting in large patches of wonderfully glutinous mud. Our crawling in this mud was at least worthwhile, as we came upon an area of rock that was very rich in fossils. We hauled out nine partial eurypterids (“sea scorpions”), along with other associated bits and pieces. By the end of the day Michael and I looked rather disgusting, encrusted with mud as we were. We were also disgusted with Dave, because he somehow managed to avoid getting mud on himself!

Saturday we had planned to do quick stops at several sites, prior to returning to Winnipeg in the afternoon. Of course, by now the weather had improved and we were greeted by a sunny, mild day with patchy cloud. Nevertheless, we were not unhappy that we had finished heavy collecting on the main site, as the blackflies had returned in profusion.

So if paleontologists tell you they are off to do fieldwork, you should not immediately imagine a romantic, exciting “dig”, in a setting reminiscent of that at the start of Jurassic Park. The specimens are often worth the pain, but the pain is often genuine!

By Dr. Graham Young, past Curator of Palaeontology & Geology

Following on from my recent post about the geology of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, it seems entirely appropriate timing that another piece of architectural geology work has just been published. Last week, a guidebook to the geology of the Manitoba Legislative Building, by Jeff Young, Bill Brisbin, and me, finally appeared in downloadable form. The entire file (20 megabytes) can be found here.

This book was published as part of a series of field trip guides for the Geological Association of Canada – Mineralogical Association of Canada annual meeting, which took place in Winnipeg in May. Jeff Young (University of Manitoba) and I had the pleasure of leading an afternoon tour of the Legislative Building; it is such an interesting and beautiful structure, and it is always a pleasure to see people’s reactions to its geological features. The guidebook is based on research Jeff and I did with Bill Brisbin (also of U of M) almost a decade ago.

In addition to the Legislature guidebook, I also enjoyed assisting with a field trip on the Ordovician to Silurian geology of southern Manitoba. The guidebook for that trip (26 megabytes), by Bob Elias et al., can be downloaded here.