The holotype of Isotelus rex, MM I-2950

The Manitoba Museum is home to many unusual and unique specimens. Among the most remarkable is the world’s largest complete trilobite, the holotype specimen of the species Isotelus rex. Over the years we have occasionally received requests from other museums for replicas of this striking fossil.

More than a decade ago, before the specimen ever went on exhibit, we had a mould prepared by an outside contractor who also made a number of resin replicas. These were on the shelf and ready to be painted if an order arrived. But eventually those replicas ran out, and when a new order came in from a museum in Japan last year, it was discovered that the original mould was too old and worn to be used again. A new mould was needed, which meant that we would have to remove the specimen from its exhibit in the Earth History Gallery.

The I. rex type specimen, on exhibit with a trackway and other trilobite material.

So we pulled out the case, carefully slid out the fossil (this is tricky, because it weighs about as much as I do!), and wheeled it away to the artists’ studio to be worked on by Debbie Thompson and Betsy Thorsteinson. While the specimen was “on leave” from the exhibit, it was temporarily replaced by one of the existing replicas.

The following photos are Betsy’s documentation of the complex and fascinating replication process. Our artists are tremendously skilled, as indicated by the high quality of work in so many of our galleries, and by the attention to detail in the preparation of these perfect trilobite replicas.

First, the fossil specimen was coated with layers of latex to precisely replicate its surface. This was strengthened with cheesecloth.

A plaster jacket was built up over the latex, and braced with wood.

Once this had dried, the mould was pulled from the fossil. Debbie painted a layer of mould separator onto the latex prior to casting.

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.

The Megatherium (foreground) and glyptodont (background), viewed from the Earth History mezzanine.

Ever since the Museum’s Earth History Gallery opened in the early 1970s, visitors have been struck by the appearance of a giant skeleton near the end of the gallery. Many children (and perhaps more than a few adults) have thought that it is a dinosaur, but it is in fact a mammal from the much more recent past, a replica of the giant ground sloth Megatherium americanum.

Megatherium was a huge ground-dwelling creature, distantly related to the modern tree sloths. Ground sloths were a very successful group, with fossils known from many parts of South and North America (including western Canada), but sadly they disappeared in the Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions, along with other wondrous creatures such as the woolly mammoth and short-faced bear.

There are many different ground sloths known, but Megatherium was the largest, described as “weighing up to eight tons, about as much as an African bull elephant.” It walked on all fours (with a gait similar to that of a giant anteater), but could rise on its hind legs, supported by the huge tail, to browse on the trees that apparently formed the main part of its diet. Our sloth is shown in this sort of pose, though it lacks a tree at present. Although ground sloths lived across both  American continents, Megatherium itself is known only from South America.

Our plaster cast of a Megatherium skeleton is, of course, much newer than the Pleistocene. But it is very old in human terms, so remarkably old that it could be considered as an artifact of a long-past scientific age. It is far older than our current Museum building, much older than the first Manitoba Museum that was located in the Winnipeg Auditorium, older than the Manitoba Legislative Building; in fact it is nearly the same age as the Province of Manitoba! The Megatherium and its close colleague the armoured glyptodont have been companions for a century or more, and both arrived at our Museum by a circuitous path.

Continue reading ‘The Sloth’s Tale’

Around the Museum this morning, people are excited that Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez visited over the weekend, enjoying a private dinner aboard the Nonsuch.  I am pleased that they liked the Museum, and that they were particulary interested in Ancient Seas. But there is another piece of external attention that I am just as pleased about, even if it is unlikely to ever attract a story on Entertainment Tonight.  In fact, I would have to say that I am “chuffed.”

A couple of weeks back, my colleague Bob Elias and I were contacted by the editors of the paleontological journal Lethaia, who were wondering if we might have photos suitable for their cover. It was time for a change from the ammonoid that had graced the cover for several years, and since there were going to be papers about fossil corals and reefs in a coming issue, they were looking for a suitable image of a Paleozoic coral.

So Bob and I scouted around to see what we had. I had some very good photos of Manitoba specimens, but they were all colour slides shot in pre-digital times and I knew from experience that it is hard to get a really first-rate image from a scanned slide. So I delved into the collection, pulling out some of those same specimens and placing them onto the flatbed scanner. With the scanner the pixel count is virtually infinite, and after a bit of editing I was able to get images that seemed to work. Bob and I selected a variety of photos from what we had, and sent them off to the editors.

Last week we received a message with this cover mock-up:

There, snuggled into the standard Lethaia cover, is one of the Ordovician tabulate corals from Garson, Manitoba. This is a coral generally identified as Calapoecia sp. cf. C. anticostiensis Billings; the image is of a colony that had been vertically cut and fine polished. The rock unit in which it occurs is the Upper Ordovician (Katian) Selkirk Member of the Red River Formation. This unit, more commonly known as Tyndall Stone, is quarried at Garson and used as a beautiful building stone all over Canada. The coral specimen actually came from rubble heaps at the stone quarry; what could possibly be more representative of this region?

This vertically cut and polished colony of Calapoecia records growth of the coral animals on the ancient tropical seafloor. The horizontal band of sediment to the right of the middle represents an interval in which the animals in part of the colony had died off. This was followed by regeneration as new polyps grew to colonize the "dead" surface (The Manitoba Museum, I-3413).

Maybe this won’t attract hundreds new visitors to the Museum, but it is still nice to have since it will make our existence known to people in very distant places. It is good to see our collections out there; they are so often useful in ways that we have not even thought of!

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!’

Boarding the plane from the runway in Winnipeg, are (L-R) Dave Rudkin, Matt Demski, and Ed Dobrzanski.

We arrived in Churchill last night after a long hiatus; I hadn’t been here in six years. I hadn’t really thought that I missed the place, since I get to think about it so often, but when I hit the ground I was again shocked by how strikingly beautiful it all is.

In the sunset, the long-wrecked Ithica appears to be under way!

Continue reading ‘Back in Churchill’

In a couple of weeks we will be doing fieldwork near Churchill, collecting fossils on the shore of Hudson Bay. We will be flying up, and therefore have a limited checked baggage allowance. Paleontological fieldwork is not a lightweight pursuit, so the mound of gear shown above was shipped off this morning, taking the slow surface route by truck and train (Churchill has no road link to the rest of Canada).

We tried to limit what we are taking, but these crates and boxes together weigh about 260 pounds (more than 100 kg). They hold hammers, chisels, pry bars, bags, packing materials, gumboots, pails, brushes … all the heavy or bulky paraphernalia associated with successful fieldwork. And if that fieldwork is successful, they will be returning to the Museum much heavier still, loaded with samples!

As we were packing up, I started to think about the history of some of the items we are taking. We were cleaning cloth field bags, some of which have tags showing that they date back to provincial survey fieldwork in the 1950s and 60s. That blue crate in the photo has been to Churchill many times in the past 15 years (including the trip when we found the giant trilobite), and was itself inherited from an earlier generation of Museum scientists. Some of the tools are also becoming rather “aged.”

At some point, should some of our everyday scientific items be assessed, to determine if they will become artifacts in a different Museum collection?

An Ordovician fossil seaweed from Airport Cove, Churchill, photographed with uV radiation and a green filter

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? Continue reading ‘Chasing Ghosts in Brandon’

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.