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!’

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’

Collecting fossils in the Grand Rapids Uplands, August, 2010

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.

In the paleontology lab, trays of fossils await examination under the microscope.

I had thought about this for a long time, ever since hearing and reading about how Euan Clarkson discovered the conodont animal in a collection in Scotland. Conodonts have been known for over a century as small, fossilized tooth-like structures that are abundant in many rocks from the Paleozoic Era, but until the early 1980s it was not known what they really represented. Euan found the answer when he was looking through drawers full of specimens that had been collected long before from a site near Edinburgh known as the Granton Shrimp Bed. Based on this discovery, he and his colleagues were able to demonstrate that conodonts were eel-shaped fish-like creatures.

Continue reading ‘Voyage of Discovery’

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’