In Which there are Whales

One more post from my trip to Vancouver last weekend, which upon reflection definitely had a whaley theme to it. What can I say, I have a soft spot for cetaceans.

On Sunday I went whale watching with the aptly named Prince of Whales company. We almost didn't see any, but the boat went further than usual on its route after reports that a pod had been spotted. And sure enough, there was a pod of 20 - 30 orcas from the endangered Southern Resident Killer Whale community! My only regret is that we didn't have longer to watch them.

At the time our on-board naturalists thought this was L-pod, but after checking some of the photos they took (which were much better than mine), I think that K-pod may have been hanging out here, too. How can you tell one orca from another? Orcas have distinctive grey splotches on their backs just behind their dorsal fins, called saddle patches. Because the fin and back are exposed when they surface, scientists have been able to catalogue who's who in each pod, and each orca has a letter and number designation. Based on the naturalist's photos, we saw K21 (a male born in 1986) and L47 (a female born in 1974). I might have caught K16 and K12 in some of my photos. The Southern Residents were featured in the movie Free Willy (although Keiko himself was from the area around Iceland), and Luna, a famous orphaned orca who made friends with people, was from L pod.

Tuesday I had the chance to visit the wonderful Vancouver Aquarium again. I like a lot of things about this aquarium, such as its focus on the organisms found around Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, and Haida Gwaii. There's a big emphasis on active research: during the dolphin 'show' (and I use the term show very loosely here, as it is not the dramatized muscial adventure you will see at Sea World but more of a casual talk about the animals) there was a demonstration of how scientists at the aquarium are investigating why cetaceans become entangled in fishing gear. There's no shying away from evolution, either.

Highlights this time included baby wolf eels, comb jellies, and of course the dolphins.

And here is a sea pen! They look kind of like Ediacaran fossils!

All in all, it's a great place and I highly recommend it to anyone visiting Vancouver. And that wraps up my trip to the Canadian Paleontology Conference, and now I begin my planning for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Las Vegas...

...oh, what the heck:

Nanaimo Group Field Trip

I've just returned from the Canadian Paleontology Conference, which was held at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. I participated in the field trip to Vancouver Island, where we explored Nanaimo Group outcrops. Gwawinapterus was collected from Nanaimo Group rocks on Hornby Island, and although we didn't get out to Hornby, we did check out several other formations and localities. Here's a few highlights from the trip!

After taking one of the ferries from Vancouver to Nanaimo, we stopped at Departure Bay. During the day we'd be working our way up through the Nanaimo Group and therefore into deeper water environments. The Haslam Formation outcrops here and represents a shallow marine environment.

We saw some really great inoceramid clams at Departure Bay.

Next stop was Englishman River Falls Provincial Park, a beautiful spot. Didn't find many fossils, but I enjoyed the waterfall very much!

We also enjoyed the lushness of the temperate rainforest.

We next headed out to Trent River, a popular place for amateur collectors. Here the Pender Formation crops out, as well as the Comox and Haslam Formations. Abundant nodules contain ammonites, bivalves, and other invertebrates. Elasmosaurs, mosasaurs, and turtles have also been found near this locality! (See more about the Puntledge River elasmosaur at the Courtenay Museum.) These outcrops represent deeper water facies including turbidites.

Pete tries his hand at cracking open a nodule.

We finished the day off with a stop at the Qualicum Beach Museum, which features a nice display of fossils collected in the area as well as casts of specimens from all over the world. A cast of the Gwawinapterus holotype is also on display here!

Fossils and Visual Design

It is not a particularly inspired title for today's post. This semester I am taking a course on introductory visual design through the U of A's faculty of extension - I figure that scientists need some graphical literacy in addition to numerical literacy and regular ol' literacy literacy. But I'm cheating a little: I'm having fun with fossils and science in my art class. Here's a few things I've made over the last few weeks:

Learning about the value scale with ammolited ammonites!

A series of quickie paintings to study negative and positive space AND the analogous colour scale.

And my favourite so far, a piece inspired while learning about line. This wasn't strictly homework, but I had done a similar one of a pear (our homework was to draw four different versions of said pair) and wanted to do something slightly more awesome. I think Styracosaurus lends itself quite nicely to funky lines!

Victoria in Victoria

In addition to visiting the Royal BC Museum last week, I also spent a bit of time wandering around Victoria. It is a very pleasant city and it was nice to wander near the ocean again, even if only for a day.

Hey! That person has the same name as me or something.




This is the Fairmont Empress Hotel, something of a landmark in Victoria. Also note the presence of a palm tree in Canada.






I stopped by the Pacific Undersea Gardens, which seems to have bad reviews on a lot of tourist sites, but that I rather liked. You go down a cool tunnel and view fish in what is essentially a fenced-off portion of the harbour. It's all sealife that can be found in the area, so they aren't necessarily as showy as tropical fish, but it was very interesting. There were lingcod, spiny rock cod, a silvery school of salmon, anemones, bright purple starfish, and kelp. The neatest part of the experience is the live theatre, where every hour a scuba diver enters part of the tank at one end of the boat and shows off crabs and starfish, feeds the fish, and plays with the amazing wolf eel (named Eli) and giant pacific octopus (named Armstrong).


Here's some video I took of the dive show! I was very excited to see the octopus. This was the first time I've seen a live octopus that I wasn't about to eat.

25 Million Years, BC.

I found myself in Victoria, British Columbia for the day, and spent some time wandering around the Royal BC Museum. Although many people don’t associate Vancouver Island with abundant fossils, there are many palaeontological treasures to be had...here’s a few highlights:

This unusual bleb of rock is actually a tooth from a very strange type of animal called a desmostylian, and this species is called Cornwallius. There’s nothing really like desmostylians today. They’re related to proboscideans (elephants) and sirenians (manatees), but look more like hippos crossed with sea lions. They lacked flippers but lived an aquatic lifestyle. Here’s Wikipedia’s interpretation of what they looked like:


In short, they are highly unusual animals that certainly do not get enough play in the land of palaeo promotion. (Also, I may have a new favourite genus name – a related animal called Vanderhoofius. So awesome!) Cornwallius is a desmostylian from the Sooke Formation of Vancouver Island. Some Cornwallius specimens from Vancouver Island have even made their way into the Smithsonian...

Elsewhere in the museum is a nice temporary exhibit showcasing the ‘behind the scenes’ aspect of museums, with lots of interesting specimens on display from each of the Natural History departments.

Something I had been wondering about for some time was whether or not pearls could fossilize, and if so, why we weren’t finding them in the fossil record. I now have an answer – they CAN, and we DO. How neat is that?




And finally...mammoth! With real ice!

Chinese Food Adventures

My food adventures did not end when I left Korea – I have had many opportunities to try new things while in Beijing in Liaoning province, and have added several new meats to my ‘animals consumed' list, including donkey, pigeon, and crocodile. Here are a few of the more memorable dishes that Scott and I tried.

Thousand year egg is an egg that is buried in clay and lime and left to sit for several weeks. The yolk turns a dark greenish-brown, and the white becomes a brown jelly. It looks awful, but it mostly just tastes like egg, surprisingly.


All the guidebooks say you have to try Peking duck while in Beijing, so we did. It’s really tasty! Slices of crispy duck are brought out on a little duck platter (and sometimes the head is thrown in, just for fun as well), and you wrap up duck, leeks, cucumber and sauce in a little flatbread. Quite nice!


At a little street market off of Wangfujing Street, we saw lots of interesting things for sale, including skewered scorpions and starfish. The scorpions on these skewers were still alive and wiggling away...

We were not brave enough to try these.

Another real treat was this delicious spiced garfish!

Happy Suwon

Before we headed to the Korean Folk Village we had a bit of a stroll around the streets near the Suwon train station. There is a great pedestrian street with lots of interesting shops and restaurants.



I loved the jumble of signs! Although it was quiet in the morning, by the time we returned for dinner it was bustling with lots and lots of people.



The sign says “bee-eh kae-been” – beer cabin. Moose! Feels like home?

For dinner we ate at a Japanese-Korean fusion restaurant and had some very tasty chicken and seafood dishes. As appetizers, however, we got a bowl of interesting looking pine-cone-like things...silkworm larvae! Presumably this is a byproduct of the silk-getting (silking? Seriously, what do you call it?) process. They were cooked, and not squishy but not exactly crunchy. It took me a long time to decide to eat it. They tasted like Zojig’s canned crickets smell. I will probably not partake of the cooked silkworm larvae again.

Korean Folk Village, part 2: in which there are flora and fauna

A traditional folk painting in Korea includes a tiger, a magpie, and a pine tree, and is called a jakhodo. The pine tree is a symbol of the first month of the year, the tiger has power to chase away evil spirits, and magpies were good omens that brought good news. I like these very much!

One of the very best things we saw at the Korean Folk Village was the process for getting silk from silkworms! I never had a very good idea of this process, and it was really neat to see how it was done in the old days. The silkworm caterpillars are allowed to create their cocoons, and then the pupae are put into boiling water. A few strands are caught from 5-10 pupae, and then wound up onto a rotating wheel. It was really fascinating but also kind of gross, because the pupae bob around in the water in a very disturbing way.

We were also quite delighted by these amazing red, black and white beetles. They could really jump! Any bug people out there have any idea what kind of beetle we saw? (His head is towards the top of the picture.)