The Fossils Surround Us

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

Those of us who live in Winnipeg know that fossils are never far away. Many Winnipeg structures feature surfaces clad in Tyndall Stone, a fossil-rich dolomitic limestone of Late Ordovician age (about 450 million years old). Tyndall Stone covers public buildings such as the Manitoba Legislative Building and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and commercial buildings in the downtown core, but it can also be seen in thousands of homes in Winnipeg: in walls, steps, and fireplaces. 

Thus, it is hardly surprising that the Museum and the adjacent Centennial Concert Hall both use Tyndall Stone inside and out. Of course Tyndall Stone fossils are represented in our Earth History Gallery, but if you think about it, it is odd that there are so many more “museum-grade specimens” exposed to the weather on the outside of the building. On the inside, as these photos show, we sometimes cover up beautiful fossils with the detritus of everyday existence: signs, fountains, alarms, and thermostats. In part, this is because the fossils are so abundant that it is hard to avoid them when placing objects, but it may also be that they are so commonplace here that people ignore them and take them for granted. 

Maybe someday we will add interpretative signage to some of the better and more accessible fossils on and in the Museum, but that would be a big project to undertake. In the meantime, here is a sampling of a few of the good ones.

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

In my last blog post, introducing our plesiosaur exhibit,  I promised to follow up with some of the story of how the collectors found, extracted, and prepared the fossils. When I was assembling the exhibit I interviewed Kevin Conlin and Wayne Buckley, since they tell these stories so much better than I ever could. Here are the interviews, which are also on the panels within the exhibit.

How do you find the fossils?

When I first got into collecting I didn’t know much about rock types. After taking some geology in school and university I began to recognize and distinguish rocks that would house fossils – the types of sediments or fossils in the area really dictate how you find fossils. I look for the odd shapes, textures, any variations in the surface of matrix or sediment which could indicate something other than just mud, sand or sedimentary rock. It could be anything from a pin prick to the size of a 200-pound boulder!

What do you do to prepare the fossils?

Depending on the fossil and its fragility, I use a special glue. For cleaning and preparing fossils, miniature jackhammers and a miniature sandblasting unit are used to remove sediment. It all depends on the fragility. Some fossils come naturally cleaned by the elements. Others still encased in rock can take hundreds of hours of preparation.

What do you have to do to pull out a fossil you have found? What sorts of tools do you use?

I suppose the most important tool is a shovel; we do a lot of digging! Then we get the picks and crowbars to lever out big chunks of shale. As we get further into the rock it becomes quite hard, and I use a small jackhammer. Once the fossil is exposed, we need to prepare a trench around it, then cover it with a burlap and plaster cast. We’ve used various techniques to get fossils out of the bush. Early on it was mainly inner tubes with a piece of plywood – we would drag and float it out. Later I made a skid that would float and we could haul that behind an Argo (an amphibious vehicle).

Among all the fossils you have found so far, which one is your favourite?

That’s easy. That plesiosaur that I just donated [to the Museum] is certainly my favourite.

What do you think is the most pleasurable part of fossil collecting?

Well, I guess there are really two things that come to mind. First of all, there’s the thrill of making a discovery. That, however, is fairly rare. Probably just as important is that I enjoy being out in the bush. I really enjoy the relaxation that comes with eating my lunch on a vantage point, listening to the silence and watching the birds and other animals.

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

The Old Plesiosaur and the Sea Exhibit, Open November 14, 2014 – April 6, 2015

The exhibit itself is partly tied to a donation to the Museum. This spring, Wayne Buckley very generously donated a plesiosaur, the skeleton of a huge swimming reptile that he had collected, prepared, and studied over a period of several years (hence the name of this exhibit). We are planning a major new gallery exhibit that will feature this fossil, but we wanted to share it with the Museum’s visitors as soon as possible, and this temporary exhibit seemed like a wonderful opportunity to also display some of Wayne and Kevin’s other fossils.

The photos below simply show parts of the exhibit, and some of the behind-the-scenes work that was required to put the specimens there. I will try to follow up in a week or so with some of the very interesting story of Wayne and Kevin’s fossil collecting.

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

Travels in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, August, 2014

Manitoba is an immense place, very slightly larger than France. If you look at the map, you will see that roads here are concentrated in the southernmost part of the province. The farther north you go, the fewer areas you will find that are easy to visit. Those of us who work in field-based sciences occasionally get to some of the more out-of-the way places, but most of us have still seen only a small fraction of what this province has to offer. The Manitoba landscapes that are familiar to us are either the parts that we have seen (such as the prairies and the big lakes), or those that are regularly depicted in photographs and tourist brochures (such as a few places in the boreal forest and the rocky shoreline around Churchill).

This fact was really brought home to me during the last week of August, as I was invited to participate in some northern fieldwork organized by my colleagues at the Manitoba Geological Survey. I have seen a good few parts of southern and central Manitoba, but in the northern third of the province I really only know the Churchill area. Nevertheless, I thought I had a good feel for what the areas away from Churchill might be like. Our plan for this trip was to visit some of the geological sites in the Churchill area, but also to take advantage of funding support for helicopter time, which would allow us to visit a few places far up the Churchill River, 100 kilometres from any road and far from the Hudson Bay Railway.

The helicopter travel turned out to be an eye-opening experience. The up-river sites had received some study from scientists working with the Geological Survey of Canada, who visited this area 50 to 60 years ago, so I knew something of what I would see in terms of the rocks and fossils: the bedrock exposures are very good, and many of the fossils are superb (though they are not generally as abundant as I had anticipated).

More than a decade ago we had overflown a few of these up-river sites when we had a bit of helicopter time in Churchill, so I should have really known what it would be like there, but seeing them from the ground was quite different. The Churchill River landscape has a tremendous sweep and grandeur. The river is very wide and flows swiftly, sometimes in an almost straight line, more often with gentle bends. Some downstream areas have bars of gravel and cobbles, but farther upstream there are several sets of treacherous-looking rapids. The valley walls steepen as you travel upstream, from the flat lowlands south of Churchill to a substantial height of land 100 kilometres upstream where the valley walls are cliffs of Ordovician bedrock, resting on the Precambrian granitic rock that makes up the river bed.

Portage Chute, Bad Cache Rapids, Surprise Creek, Caution Creek, Chasm Creek . . . the place names alone should be enough to tell you that you aren’t on the prairies any more. Honestly, if I had been somehow sedated and delivered into the ravine of Chasm Creek without any awareness of how I arrived there, I would have thought that it had to be somewhere in the Yukon or perhaps the Northwest Territories.

The valley of the Churchill River is a literally awesome place, breathtaking in its grandeur, its scale, and in the variety of landforms and organisms. It is absolutely a northern place, a place that Manitobans should be aware of, a place to celebrate!

Veneration, of course, means respect or reverence. An iconic exhibit must be one that will be admired, honoured, or thought highly of by many of the people who visit the Museum. The creation of an iconic exhibit is, therefore, a rather demanding prospect for the Museum’s exhibit team, since it must be more exciting than many of the other exhibits at the Museum, and more memorable than most of the exhibits they will have seen in other museums!

For an exhibit to be iconic, I think it really needs to have “legs.” It has to have the potential to last not just for years, but for decades, and to be effective throughout that time. It has to be the sort of exhibit that can excite the children when it opens, but that will also be memorable to those same people when they revisit the museum years later as adults, and to excite their children. That sounds like a high order indeed, but how can we consider something to be “revered” unless it is long-lived?

I was contemplating this question a few weeks ago, as I visited the collections building of the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John. The New Brunswick Museum is very different from The Manitoba Museum; one of the biggest differences is that their collections are not stored at the same place where the public view the exhibits. In Winnipeg we have our collections in various spaces within the same large museum building, but in Saint John the exhibits are in a rented space at Market Square near the middle of town, while the collections occupy much of the building that used to be the public museum, located more than two kilometres away on Douglas Avenue (near the Reversing Falls).

Since the current New Brunswick Museum’s exhibits were largely created new since 1990 (though of course some specimens and artefacts were relocated there from the old museum), the exhibit halls lack the sorts of long-lived exhibits that are so important at The Manitoba Museum. Some of our major exhibits such as the Nonsuch, the polar bear, and the Urban Gallery have all seen little change in forty years or more. The New Brunswick Museum may lack that sort of long-lived exhibit in its current galleries, but as I studied collections located in the former galleries, I was struck by how vividly I could recall the “ghosts” of some exhibits I had visited there as a child. Old New Brunswick Museum exhibits such the Hillsborough mastodon, the giant sturgeon, and the shipbuilding gallery all had a great impact on me, and were probably influential in my choice of a museum career.

Since The Manitoba Museum is already a place that houses many iconic exhibits, it is incumbent on us to try to keep these as we go forward in the development of new “icons.” Fortunately, from my observation of gallery planning, we are very respectful of the institution’s past, and though we have lost a few exhibits over the years, we have also taken extraordinary steps to ensure that others have been saved and refurbished. As we go forward, and as this institution is itself gradually becoming a historic site (this is hard for us to perceive, but it IS happening!), we will need to ensure that the best and most important of our old exhibits are preserved, with perhaps an occasional updating or “burnishing” to maintain their iconic status. People will always want to come to see the Nonsuch!

For our new exhibits to become icons, we need to always be considering the elements that give them the “wow” factor, that will take away the visitor’s breath, either on first sight or after slight contemplation. The most obvious iconic attributes will be in the exhibited objects themselves, which may be large, or splendidly beautiful, or unique. Again, the Nonsuch is an obvious example, but we have many others: the ground sloth (Megatherium), the giant trilobite, the elk diorama, and many of the artifacts in the Hudson’s Bay Company Gallery. In addition to the specimens and artifacts, though, there are many other factors. Cases are designed to optimize viewing by all visitors, and nowadays the Museum pays immense attention to factors such as lighting, colour schemes, graphics, and text readability.

Of course, there are also the technological elements, which are constantly grappled with by all modern museums. These can frustrate museum staff and they can sometimes torpedo an otherwise solid exhibit, but when they work they can elevate an exhibit to iconic status. I hope that will be the case for our Ancient Seas exhibit, opened a few years ago and a solid favourite of some of our younger visitors. I was very pleased a few weeks back when my friend Cortney posted a photograph of her daughter Teagan, with the statement, “enraptured by the Ancient Seas exhibit, every time.”

Those of us working at the Museum need to endeavour to find a way to share all of our treasures, but at the same time we should have no room for exhibits that are “worthy but dull.” We have to strive to “enrapture” all of our visitors! This is a big and exciting challenge as the Museum continues to develop and evolve.

Michael Cuggy (L) and Dave Rudkin discussing specimen notes.

Research visits tend to occur in cycles or waves; researchers from out of town, in particular, seem to plan extended study visits for the summer months. This may be partly because many of them work at universities and other teaching institutions, and the summer is the interval in which they get a break from day-to-day teaching responsibilities. In the case of The Manitoba Museum, it might also have something to do with the climate, as some people from outside the prairies have the (mistaken?) impression that Winnipeg’s weather is something less than tropical from November through April.

Right now we are into that summer stage, and this week I have the pleasure of receiving research visitors in the lab. My friends and colleagues Dave Rudkin (Royal Ontario Museum) and Michael Cuggy (University of Saskatchewan) are here to spend some serious time with the fossil eurypterids (“sea scorpions”) that we have collected from Ordovician age rocks in Manitoba over the past dozen years or more (these rocks are about 445 million years old).

In this particular case, Dave and Michael are collaborating with me on the project, which is particularly nice as I receive visitors and also get to contribute to the research myself. Eurypterids are a very tricky group to study, since they were arthropods (joint-legged animals) that had external skeletons made up of many different components. In the specimens we are considering, the components have come apart in different ways and/or been squashed at different angles as they were buried in mud and fossilized. As a result, the patterns they make are extremely complex and difficult to decipher. One specimen may look like a jumble of legs and segments, while another may have the body twisted so that, at first, it may be difficult to tell where the head is.

We have many eurypterid specimens in our storage cabinets, so Dave and Michael are pulling out each one, examining it closely, consulting the notes that they made previously, and in many cases taking photographs to supplement the ones we already have on hand. Ed Dobrzanski and I are making sure that Dave and Michael have all the tools and space they need, and I periodically supply them with opinions, observations, data, and coffee and cookies.

It seems to be working well so far. Still miles to go before we see where we are with the project at the end of the day Friday, but I’m sure the research will be exciting and interesting, at the times when it isn’t exasperating and frustrating!

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.