Ed suffering through spring snow and winds, during fieldwork on the Grand Rapids Uplands.

Ed Dobrzanski is a “fixture” at the Museum.  He had been a volunteer here before I started back in in 1993, and he has volunteered continuously for the past 20 years. Ed has done tremendous work as an amateur paleontologist, collecting, preparing, studying, identifying, and cataloguing fossils. He has contributed to paleontological field and laboratory work in a great variety of ways. For his all-round efforts, many of us are delighted that Ed has just been named as the recipient of the Katherine Palmer Award, a North America-wide award for amateur paleontologists, presented annually by the Paleontological Research Institution.

An inveterate collector with interests in a great variety of objects, Ed had a long career as a government meteorologist. When staff reductions resulted in an opportunity for early retirement, Ed took advantage of this to turn his volunteer work into a daily avocation. In his time here, Ed has contributed tremendous knowledge to the organization of fossil collections as varied as brachiopods (lamp shells), fishes, and bivalves. He has also donated many specimens to the Museum (and to other institutions such as the Royal Ontario Museum), has contributed to exhibit development and public programs, and assists with all sorts of tasks in other departments of the Museum!

Florence Zawislak (L) and Ed discuss a cartful of specimens.

My colleagues and I are fortunate to have Ed as a collaborator on many research projects. He is skilled with the essential field and laboratory tools: whether using a hammer, GPS, shotgun, survey equipment, microscope, rock saw, or lapidary grinder, Ed has considerable expertise. He takes wonderfully precise notes, understands maps thoroughly, and maintains a compendious knowledge of obscure fossil localities. Ed has been a key member of my field teams, and has also collaborated in the field with many other scientists such as Bob Elias (University of Manitoba), Dave Rudkin (ROM), Jisuo Jin (University of Western Ontario) and Jan Audun Rasmussen (Natural History Museum of Denmark). His efforts have resulted in the co-authorship of several papers, a guidebook, and many conference abstracts.

Ed Dobrzanski is a tremendous asset to the science of paleontology in Manitoba and beyond; it is wonderful to see this recognized!

Ed assisted visiting Danish researcher Dr. Jan Audun Rasmussen, who carried out field research in southern Manitoba.

Debbie Thompson in her natural element

When we got back from Churchill a couple of weeks ago, Debbie Thompson handed me a piece that she felt inspired to write. This was her first visit to the Hudson Bay coast, and as an artist her perspective is quite different from mine.

It’s always depressing leaving a place that fills a void in my soul. There is a solitude here that tugs on my spirit, yearning for acknowledgment

There is a sensual beauty in the eroded and smooth curves of these ancient rocks. There is a harsh beauty reflected in the black spruce. There is a sad beauty in derelict buildings of the past. Forgotten to decay, or to be torn down to reveal a scar. And there is a radiant beauty in the voices of the people here, ringing with a subtle, ancient lightness.

Churchill quartzite and Hudson Bay

Continue reading ‘Guest Column: Churchill’

Crossing a tidal flat in the early evening

This past week, I again appreciated the relationship between fieldwork and weather. In previous visits to Churchill, we usually had breaks in the outdoor work because of the region’s varied and often unpleasant weather. This year, I had anticipated that we would meet similar conditions, and that I would be able to fit some blog posts into the time at the research station waiting for rain/sleet/snow to clear.

But of course this was not to be, courtesy of unpredictable weather conditions. This time, we were met by the longest run of fine weather I have ever seen on the Hudson Bay coast. We could occasionally complain that it was unusually hot (i.e., a pleasant mid 20s Celsius), and the flies WERE horrible whenever the wind died down, but really we had nothing to complain about.

Continue reading ‘So Much Sun, So Little Time!’

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 plexiglas 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!

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)

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?”

The amethyst was pressure washed at the mine, after extraction from the ground. The Thunder Bay area is home to the most productive amethyst mines in North America. (photo: Cindy Hasler)

Continue reading ‘A.M.E.T.H.Y.S.T.’

The following is modified from a piece I wrote for the Museum’s newsletter Features, with the addition of several images that would not fit into the print version.

A selection of the bones found at the Ruby Street site (photo: Hans Thater)

Have you ever seen a cartoon that shows the earth cut through vertically, with layer after layer of bones of extinct creatures hidden beneath the city?

Walking through the streets of Winnipeg, I have sometimes imagined the sediment and rock beneath. First the soil, then the old river deposits, beneath them the lakebed clays of Lake Agassiz, and then layer after layer of ancient limestone extending downward toward the Precambrian Shield.

Although we know all of those things are present, we rarely get to see them unless something is brought to the surface by some lucky coincidence. Each of those lucky coincidences can help us to understand the past that is preserved beneath our feet.

Crew working on the sewer excavation under Ruby Street

In November, 1969, workers were excavating a sewer in the Wolseley area of Winnipeg, near Ruby Street and Palmerston Avenue. At the bottom of a 10.7 metre (35 foot) deep trench, a stiff blue clay was found. Above the clay were sand and gravel containing bison bones, along with clams and pieces of wood.

Tipped off by an anonymous phone call, Dr. George Lammers, the Museum’s first Curator of Geology and Paleontology (and my predecessor in this job), visited the site and collected the fossils. Since then, these unusual pieces have resided in the Museum’s collection, where they have provided much information about Winnipeg’s distant past.

Continue reading ‘Beneath the Streets of Wolseley …’

Specimens for the Cambrian exhibit are laid out on a lab table together with a draft design of exhibit copy (those hands belong to conservator Lisa May).

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.

As exhibits are planned, specimens are photographed as they will be oriented on mounts. Then the conservators and technical staff get to work to produce the beautiful permanent supports. These are some of the Precambrian rocks and fossils that will be placed in the timeline exhibit.

Continue reading ‘Exhibit Layouts’

Outside the Museum door, Debbie Thompson (R) and I are contemplating how to fit gear into a Jeep as we prepare for 2010 fieldwork in the Grand Rapids Uplands. (photo © David Rudkin, Royal Ontario Museum)

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.

The field gear jams one side of an Otter floatplane, on the way to our camp at McBeth Point, Lake Winnipeg (August, 2006).

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. Continue reading ‘Gear’

A polished surface of small finger-like stromatolites, mounds made by Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) and other microorganisms. This specimen is 1.9 billion years old, from the Gunflint Formation, Lybster Township, northwest Ontario (The Manitoba Museum, B-129; all scales are in millimetres).

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.

A detail of part of the specimen shown above. The layers were produced as the microbes bound limey sediment on the seafloor (TMM B-129).

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.

Clotted and layered microbial textures in a specimen from the Gunflint Formation at Schreiber Channel, northwest Ontario (TMM B-130). This is the same site from which Tyler and Barghoorn described microscopic examples of early bacteria.

Continue reading ‘On My Scanner’