Canada

After three days of successful fieldwork on the chilly Grand Rapids Uplands, we return – toting a fresh batch of fossils – to The Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg. This is the home turf of my colleague, Graham Young, and almost a second home for me.

Ah, the romance of fieldwork. There’s nothing quite like waiting for the morning sun to rise high enough to illuminate a cold, wet outcrop, so that one can spend the next 8 or 9 hours kneeling in mud and splitting razor-sharp rock slabs. But we have hot coffee in the thermos, dry gloves in the pack, and — hopefully — there are some new fossils to be found!

Submitted by Liz Muir, volunteer with the Friends of Canadian Collections (FCC).

Almost 200 years ago, war broke out between the United States and Canada, which was still part of the British Empire at the time. That conflict became know as the War of 1812.

July 27

The weather forecast was pretty much on the money, and a dismal dawn yields to thunder-squalls rolling across the tundra. But, after breakfast and a second cup of coffee, the rain eases and we are a shade more optimistic about our flight out later this morning. Time for one last walkabout of our temporary home.

July 26

July 25

July 24

Away to the airport this morning to see Ed off to Winnipeg - there goes our ace bear protection and GPS expert! At least we had a chance to do the firearms familiarization before his departure, so all are up to speed on handling various pyrotechnic deterrents. I’ll ride shotgun in Ed’s absence, with Matt as backup, and incoming member Sean adds another pair of sharp eyes to the fossil team.

July 23

Clear skies at last! Down to the coast to catch good morning lighting and a fortuitously low tide, so we can see in detail how fossil-bearing Upper Ordovician carbonate deposits (445 million years old) at our main locality “lap” against the elevated flanks of a much more ancient rock mass. This highly resistant Proterozoic (about 2500 million-year-old) quartzite body is the remnant of a small island that formed part of an archipelago in shallow Ordovician subtropical seas.

July 22