Chasing Ghosts in Brandon

Imagine yourself in the basement of the science building at Brandon University, on a Saturday morning in the summer. The place seems to be abandoned, with the hum of the lights and ventilation the only sounds you hear. Opening a door, you walk into a quiet, darkened laboratory. A curtain closes off one end of the room, and something behind that curtain emits an eerie blue-green glow.

Tiptoeing closer, you observe that there is a man behind the curtain, huddled over a pair of computer screens. Beside the computer, a scientific instrument is producing a blinding bluish light. Who is this mad scientist, and what are the nefarious schemes that bring him here at this strange time?

Actually, the man is me, and I am looking at fossils. I travelled to Brandon to use the fine microscope in their Environmental Science Laboratory, by kind invitation from Dr. David Greenwood. At the Museum we have good microphotography equipment, but I had reached its limits trying to sort out the fine structure of some of our unusual fossils. When I visited Brandon a few months ago, David suggested that I might want to try their scope system, which was set up with the aid of a large grant from the Government of Canada.

So a couple of weeks ago, I hauled a variety of fossils out to Brandon, and spent a few days on the binocular scope seeing what it could tell me. It is a lovely Olympus setup, with full digital image capture and focusing, and a variety of illumination options. It took me quite a while to figure out how to get good photos of our material, but once I had it sorted I was very happy with what it could do.

My research colleagues and I are trying to sort out the fine structure of some of the unusual fossils we have collected in the Grand Rapids Uplands and the Churchill area, things like horseshoe crabs, eurypterids, and jellyfish. I felt a bit rushed trying to look at the many specimens of these, but in several instances I was struck by the sudden realization that I was seeing features that I had never been able to make out before.

This sense was particularly striking when I was able to image specimens under ultraviolet. Although none showed the bright fluorescence I had hoped for, some of the images were very different from those under standard lighting. With their odd greenish glow, I sometimes felt as though I was seeing the ghosts of the long-departed creatures.

The amethyst exhibit in the foyer was installed today, on schedule. There were a few teething pains, mostly related to lighting, but when you have done many exhibits you know that you will never be finished without some sort of issue.

The last 5% of the installation work always takes 50% of the time. As a public space, the foyer has a lot of ambient light, which means that there is an immense amount of reflection on a plexiglass case lid. When we put the lid on, we realized that we would not be able to read some of the text. So the lid came off, the backing panel was offset a bit to the side, some flat black board was placed inside the back of the lid, and the lights were moved around and adjusted a couple of times more.

Voilà, the exhibit is done, and we are very pleased with the result. MANY thanks to David, Hanna, Janis, Cindi, Adèle, Bob, Bert, Paul, Sean, and everyone else for their efforts.  Even a simple exhibit such as this one requires the work of many people!

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

For the past several years, I have been working with the Mineral Society of Manitoba to develop a mineral exhibit at the Museum. This partnership has been a wonderfully positive one; among other achievements the Society has donated to us a gorgeous selenite (gypsum) cluster from the Winnipeg Floodway, which I hope to show you on this page at some point.

So it was not a total surprise when in the fall of 2009, I received a call from my geologist colleague John Biczok (who is also president of the Mineral Society), telling me that they had found another superb specimen for us.  The gist of his call was that,

“We have the biggest amethyst cluster I have ever seen, and it is in the back of a truck. Greg Hasler has just pulled it out of the Thunder Bay amethyst mines and it has mud all over it. Where can we deliver it at the Museum, so that we can clean it up?”

This spectacular crystal cluster was collected in September, 2009, from the Blue Point Amethyst Mine, by Lyndon Swanson, Greg Hasler, and others. It is the largest specimen Mr. Swanson has seen in ten years owning this mine! (photos: Gerry Benger, Manitoba Geological Survey).

Further discussion revealed that this was a piece that covered an entire shipping pallet, and might weigh something toward half a tonne! Now you have to appreciate that, at the Museum, we don’t have immense space available to lay things out, let alone places where we can readily pressure wash the mud from a half-tonne boulder. This specimen was arriving in Winnipeg, and it needed to be taken off the truck and put somewhere secure. Of course it was not only huge, but it was potentially beautiful and we didn’t want to see it damaged.

I was at a loss for a few minutes, wondering (for instance) if my family would mind having a giant muddy boulder temporarily stored in our garage. I surmised that they might. But then I thought of my friends at the Manitoba Geological Survey, with whom we have collaborated on several projects. A couple of calls later, and we had permission to have the amethyst delivered to the Survey’s core facility in the western part of the city. Not only would the Survey let the Mineral Society unload and wash the specimen in their yard, but they would then use their forklift to move the cleaned amethyst to a safe place inside the building.

And there it sat for the winter, occasionally visited by people from the Mineral Society and Museum, and admired and photographed by Survey staff and visiting geologists. It was truly a wonderful, spectacular piece. The Museum partnered with the Mineral Society to purchase the amethyst for our collections, with a view to putting it on exhibit in the Earth History Gallery. In the early summer last year Janis Klapecki and I carefully bundled the beautiful crystals in layer upon layer of foam padding, and it was shipped over to the Museum back rooms, where it has sat for almost another year.

Now, finally, we will have our first opportunity to share it with visitors, through a temporary exhibit in the New Acquisitions Case in the Museum foyer. This will open to the public on May 10; I am really looking forward to their reaction!

When I started to work at The Manitoba Museum in 1993, I discovered this intriguing correspondence in the “deep files,” inherited from the old Manitoba Museum:

Altamont, Man.
September, 1963

Dear Sir:

Today I was digging a hole along the edge of a slough. After digging through four feet of peat, I came upon this tooth. Two inches below the tooth was a thin layer of white sand.

Could you tell me what kind of animal this tooth is from?

Thank you for the information.

[signature]

There is a sketch of a squarish tooth in pencil on the letter, and a note that it was a “very dark brown specimen.” It looks like a bison tooth to me, and apparently the Museum staff wrote back to that effect. They must have also expressed an interest in visiting the site, as indicated by the second letter:

Altamont, Man.
September, 1963

Dear Sir:

I received your letter concerning the tooth.

The hole which I found the tooth in was dug to bury a fairly large pig. The hole was about 4 1/2 feet deep, the tooth was about 4 feet from the surface. … I found the tooth along the side of the hole, I dug around the tooth but there was no sign of any other tooth or bone of any kind. After a good look for others, we buried the pig in the hole and filled it in.

You are welcome to come to investigate any time, if you still wish to under these circumstances.

Sincerely,

[signature]

There is no note in the file on whether Museum staff visited the site. One suspects that they were not able to find the time to do so.

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

The Jaws and Teeth Exhibit, 2007

Since one function of the blog is to focus on our collections, it seems like a good place to occasionally revisit past exhibits, especially those showing items that are normally stored away in the back rooms.

I was particularly pleased by the Jaws and Teeth exhibit, which was curated by Randy Mooi and me a few years ago. We combined zoological and paleontological specimens to demonstrate vertebrate anatomy and evolution, with a particular focus on adaptations for eating.

We loved doing this exhibit. To us, it was an opportunity to explore some of the best aspects of the traditional Natural History museum. And the public seemed to thoroughly enjoy it; we would always see family groups in the exhibit, animatedly discussing the various skulls and comparing their similarities. It really showed us that traditional exhibits can still fulfil an important function in the modern museum!

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

Last week, I discovered several very exciting fossils. Some of these are unusual, so unusual that they will certainly end up as the subject of future scientific publications. One of them is only the second known specimen, worldwide, of a particular group for the entire Ordovician Period!

But how, you must wonder, did I manage to make these discoveries? Was I out in the -20 degree weather, scraping the snow from the edge of a quarry in the Manitoba Interlake so that I could get at the rock beneath? Was I taking time away from the Museum, collecting fossils beside some calm tropical sea?

No, it was not as romantic as either of those possibilities. I was in one of the best places to find unusual fossils: looking through the microscope in my little research office. You may have heard of those situations when a large museum discovers an unknown dinosaur in its back rooms, stored away in field jackets from some long-past collecting expedition. But what you might not appreciate is that many of the most important fossil discoveries are made in museum collections, not in the field.

It is much the same here. We might sometimes already have an inkling that we have found something unusual, such as a very ancient horseshoe crab. But it is only when we really study things carefully under a microscope that we are able to make sense of them, to discover what they actually are. And there are times that the finds are, like Euan’s, simply serendipitous. When I first started to work at the Museum, I had to sort through some uncatalogued fossils. One of these looked somewhat like a jellyfish, with the note attached stating that it had been found in a schoolyard in River Heights, Winnipeg.

Years later, when I really started to study fossil jellyfish, I pulled out that specimen and realized that it wasn’t just a jellyfish. It was actually one of the best-preserved fossil jellies in existence, and I used a photo of it in a paper we wrote reviewing these sorts of fossils. Since it was found in a schoolyard, however, we don’t actually know its bedrock source. I have my hunches about where it came from originally, but we are still hunting for that jellyfish goldmine! So maybe I will make a discovery in the field, too, but if so it will be because we first found a fossil in the Museum’s collection.

Meanwhile, on these winter days, I will be hunched over my microscope whenever time permits. There are so many slabs of rock to be pored over, fossils waiting to be discovered, and time moves on faster and faster …