Exhibit Layouts

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

Last week, in our lab and in the small layout room next door, we were juggling specimens for two Earth History Gallery exhibits. We are developing a timeline that will lead the visitor from the formation of the Earth (4.5 billion years ago) right up to the Ordovician Period of our Ancient Seas exhibit (about 450 million years ago). This timeline will feature quite a number of unusual geological specimens and reconstructions, each of which will be placed in a little case. So there was a group meeting of the people involved: the designer, collections staff, conservators, and me. We contemplated each specimen, as I lifted them in turn to show how they should be oriented and placed. In the course of an hour or so, we contemplated a piece of the oldest rock in the world, a banded iron formed on an early seafloor, some beautiful Cambrian sponges, and many other pieces. I can hardly wait to see these installed in the exhibit, but that is still a couple of months off.  We are continuing to work together on the “look” of the exhibit; more of that in my next post.

Meanwhile, the final specimens for our Ancient Seas exhibit were being “staged,” along with their mounts, prior to being moved downstairs for final installation in the Earth History Gallery. The main part of this exhibit was opened early in the spring, but some of the specimen installation and lighting were delayed until now because mount-making and light installation are very laborious tasks and cannot be rushed.

At the end of last week and start of this week, we placed specimens into special “windows” that had been cut into the boxes of the Ancient Seas info rail, so that the visitors will be able to see at least one fossil for every kind of creature depicted in the video animation. As the job is complicated, we were only able to install a couple of specimens each day.

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

Last week, in the lab next to my office, we finished sorting and putting away the remainder of the gear from this summer’s field expedition. As you might expect, there were hammers, chisels, and field bags, the basic necessities for collecting fossils from hard limestone bedrock. But in addition to these, we washed multiple pry bars, shovels, geo-tools (mattocks), knee pads, and gloves. We sorted tool boxes, whisk brooms, insect repellent, bug jackets, camera equipment, permanent markers, pencils, tarpaulins, metal tags, wires, nails, coolers, and thermoses, and filed away long-life food items to await our next field season.

I often hear from people outside the “business” that it must be a lot of fun to do paleontological fieldwork. Of course it is, but many of those people probably don’t realize that a collecting trip carried out any distance from the Museum can be a very complex operation, one that may require almost military planning. When I started this sort of work, I certainly didn’t realize that I would have to become a “master of gear”. Depending on the type of fieldwork, we have had to become familiar with items as disparate as a firefighter’s backpack sprayer, a laser levelling survey device, and a Zodiac boat.

I am always fortunate that other people (Ed Dobrzanski in particular) take on a lot of the hard work of assembling field gear, but as I am often the leader of the field party, it is up to me to ensure that we have the requisite tools, food, and transportation. And woe betide me if I forget some of the more “subtle” essentials such as toilet paper!

Of course, all of the gear experience can have its practical advantages. I feel that I have nearly expert knowledge when it comes to selecting cold chisels or hammers. I know which types of tents are likely to stand up to heavy winds (and, more importantly, which ones aren’t!). I know how to enter and exit a helicopter or a float plane, and can shoot a cracker pistol to ward off bears. I can assemble a Zodiac boat from a few packages of unlikely looking parts. Not without bruising and bleeding, occasionally, but at least I am capable of practical and potentially useful tasks that may seem unlikely for someone in an academic discipline.

A mound of gear on the dock at McBeth Point awaits the arrival of a turbo Otter (below) for the return trip to civilization. As it turned out, winds prevented the Otter from tying to the dock, and we had to carry the hundreds of kilos of gear all the way around the harbour and load from the float!

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

At the Museum, events often take place in cycles. Of course we have the cycle of fieldwork and laboratory research, a cycle of exhibit preparation followed by installation, and, like many other workplaces, cycles in which there are periods with many meetings, followed by blessed intervals with very few meetings.

What you may not appreciate is that there are also cycles in our dealings with members of the public. There are quiet periods when I might handle about one inquiry a week, and then there are those other times when it feels like hardly a day passes without at least a couple of calls or e-mails asking me to identify fossils or explain geological phenomena. And invariably, when the inquiries heat up, so do the donations.

The past few weeks have been a very rich period for both inquiries and donations. I have identified some very interesting rocks and fossils, and we have received the three superb donations shown here. It is unusual to receive objects having this sort of quality and significance; to receive three within just a few weeks is quite wonderful!

Fossil starfish are about as rare as Archaeopteryx teeth!  Of course an Archaeopteryx had a lot of teeth, but very few specimens of those teeth have ever been found. It is the same with fossil starfish. I’m sure that there were large numbers of starfish in ancient seas, but starfish are broken up very easily after death, by waves, currents, and scavengers.

This is the first proper starfish we have ever seen from Stony Mountain, even though fossil collectors working in that area have found many thousands of (non-starfish) specimens representing about 100 species (Young et al., 2008). The Museum’s collections also have a Stony Mountain ophiuroid (brittle star) and several crinoids, so this find nicely rounds out the echinoderms from that site.

Tyndall Stone is, of course, one of Canada’s favourite building stones. Trilobites have been found in this rock in the past, but examples that have not disarticulated (gone to pieces) are surprisingly rare (Westrop and Ludvigsen, 1983; Young et al., 2008). The example above is not complete, but the tortuous curve between the cephalon (head) and thorax suggests that the body underwent unusual twisting during or after death. Although trilobites, like other arthropods, grew by moulting, I don’t think this is a moult because the free cheeks (outer parts of the cephalon) are still attached, and they tended to be lost when a trilobite moulted.

Image: Pleistocene mammoth tusk from southeastern Manitoba (tens of thousands of years old).

LEITH, EI. 1949. Fossil elephants of Manitoba. Canadian Field-Naturalist, 63: 135-137.

WESTROP, S.R. AND R. LUDVIGSEN. 1983. Systematics and paleoecology of Upper Ordovician trilobites from the Selkirk Member of the Red River Formation, southern Manitoba. Manitoba Energy and Mines, Geological Report GR 82-2, 51 p.

YOUNG, G.A., R.J. ELIAS, S. WONG, AND E.P. DOBRZANSKI. 2008. Upper Ordovician Rocks and Fossils in Southern Manitoba. Canadian Paleontology Conference, Field Trip Guidebook No. 13, CPC-2008 Winnipeg, The Manitoba Museum, 19-21 September 2008, 97 p.

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

This week I have been working on an exhibit about the early history of life on Earth. We have selected several specimens for this exhibit, including examples of stromatolites, mat-like structures formed by bacteria and Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). Some of the Precambrian specimens in our collection had been cut and polished, so I have been putting them on my flatbed scanner to produce images.

Modern scanners are very sophisticated digital imaging devices. Most people don’t seem to consider using them for anything other than photos and documents, but I know many paleontologists who scan flat fossils and microscope slides.

I have been doing this for years; I used to put a sheet of mylar on the glass to protect it from scratching, but I found that produced weird light effects (or “artifacts”). So nowadays I am just very careful, and place the fossil on the end of the scanner bed opposite the part usually used for photos.

Scanners are generally better than cameras when you want to photograph items that are flat or nearly flat; any imperfections in these images come from the way in which the rocks were polished.

The Gunflint Formation (or “Gunflint chert”) is a succession of iron-rich sedimentary rocks exposed in northwest Ontario and northern Minnesota. This unit, dating from about 1.9 billion years ago in the Proterozoic Eon of the Precambrian, yielded some of the first-known well-preserved Precambrian microfossils.

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

Some time ago, it was suggested that The Manitoba Museum would be adding curatorial blogs to our website, as a feature that would take visitors “behind the scenes.” This seemed like a fantastic idea, but I also wondered how I would approach this; I already have a blog in which I talk about paleontology, geology, and landscape, and it attracts a reasonable and steady following. It is a lot of fun to have personal blog in which I am free to muse about what I see as I wander around the world. Certainly Ancientshore is relevant to my work, but it also is not limited to my work or to this region of the world, and it is largely a collection of pieces about my personal travels.

So how could I develop another blog that would complement the existing one without conflicting with it? I was sitting at my desk, here in the perennially chaotic curatorial office, when I realized that the answer lay all around me.

We are living in an age where we are constantly encouraged to recognize our local environment, and our commitment to it, by eating locally, shopping locally, thinking locally. So why not blog locally? And in this particular instance, I am thinking very locally. I sit in an office where I am surrounded by strange and remarkable things: corals from the south Pacific, fossils from the Grand Rapids Uplands, antiquarian paleontology books, and ancient lamp shells that I pulled out of a ditch in England. Next door is the Geology Lab, filled to the brim with an endless variety of rocks and fossils, and right across the hall, in the Natural History Collections Room, I can open drawers to examine many thousands of objects, everything from mammoth tusks to meteorites to marcasite.

Every one of these objects has at least one story, and many of them hold remarkable tales: tales of Arctic exploration, heroism, bizarre field events, exhibits, even politics. By limiting myself to writing about things that are within 20 metres of this computer, I am forcing myself to consider and develop those wonderful stories. But I do not consider this to be at all limiting, since so many will reach outward to explanations of fieldwork and other travels. It would not be at all difficult to write for a year just about items that I can reach from this comfortable chair, so extending the reach to 20 metres, or about 60 feet, could permit a lifetime of writing!

This Museum is a fascinating place. I hope you will revisit this page to see some of the stories behind our collections and exhibits.